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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
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+Part One
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+The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part One
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+July, 1995  [Etext #295]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
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+The Project Gutenberg Anthology Series
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+The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
+A Ten-Part Collection
+Part One
+
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+
+
+                The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
+                        A Ten-Volume Collection
+                               Volume One
+
+
+
+                        Contents of Volume One
+
+                               Stories
+              KERFOL.........................March     1916
+              MRS. MANSTEY'S VIEW............July      1891
+              THE BOLTED DOOR................March     1909
+              THE DILETTANTE.................December  1903
+              THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND.....August    1904
+
+
+                               Verse
+              THE PARTING DAY................February  1880
+              AEROPAGUS......................March     1880
+              A FAILURE......................April     1880
+              PATIENCE.......................April     1880
+              WANTS..........................May       1880
+              THE LAST GIUSTIANINI...........October   1889
+              EURYALUS.......................December  1889
+              HAPPINESS......................December  1889
+
+
+                             Bibliography
+
+              EDITH WHARTON BIBLIOGRAPHY:
+              SHORT STORIES AND POEMS........Judy Boss
+
+
+
+
+KERFOL
+as first published in
+Scribner's Magazine, March 1916
+
+
+I
+
+
+"You ought to buy it," said my host; "it's just the place for a
+solitary-minded devil like you.  And it would be rather worth
+while to own the most romantic house in Brittany.  The present
+people are dead broke, and it's going for a song--you ought to
+buy it."
+
+It was not with the least idea of living up to the character my
+friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my
+unsociable exterior I have always had secret yearnings for
+domesticity) that I took his hint one autumn afternoon and went
+to Kerfol.  My friend was motoring over to Quimper on business:
+he dropped me on the way, at a cross-road on a heath, and said:
+"First turn to the right and second to the left.  Then straight
+ahead till you see an avenue.  If you meet any peasants, don't
+ask your way.  They don't understand French, and they would
+pretend they did and mix you up.  I'll be back for you here by
+sunset--and don't forget the tombs in the chapel."
+
+I followed Lanrivain's directions with the hesitation occasioned
+by the usual difficulty of remembering whether he had said the
+first turn to the right and second to the left, or the contrary.
+If I had met a peasant I should certainly have asked, and
+probably been sent astray; but I had the desert landscape to
+myself, and so stumbled on the right turn and walked on across
+the heath till I came to an avenue.  It was so unlike any other
+avenue I have ever seen that I instantly knew it must be THE
+avenue.  The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great
+height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long
+tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly.  I know most
+trees by name, but I haven't to this day been able to decide what
+those trees were.  They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity
+of poplars, the ashen colour of olives under a rainy sky; and
+they stretched ahead of me for half a mile or more without a
+break in their arch.  If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakeably
+led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol.  My heart beat a
+little as I began to walk down it.
+
+Presently the trees ended and I came to a fortified gate in a
+long wall.  Between me and the wall was an open space of grass,
+with other grey avenues radiating from it.  Behind the wall were
+tall slate roofs mossed with silver, a chapel belfry, the top of
+a keep.  A moat filled with wild shrubs and brambles surrounded
+the place; the drawbridge had been replaced by a stone arch, and
+the portcullis by an iron gate.  I stood for a long time on the
+hither side of the moat, gazing about me, and letting the
+influence of the place sink in.  I said to myself: "If I wait
+long enough, the guardian will turn up and show me the tombs--"
+and I rather hoped he wouldn't turn up too soon.
+
+I sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette.  As soon as I had done
+it, it struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with
+that great blind house looking down at me, and all the empty
+avenues converging on me.  It may have been the depth of the
+silence that made me so conscious of my gesture.  The squeak of
+my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost
+fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the grass.  But
+there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness,
+of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke
+into the face of such a past.
+
+I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany,
+and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day
+before--but one couldn't as much as glance at that pile without
+feeling in it a long accumulation of history.  What kind of
+history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only the sheer
+weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a kind of
+majesty to all old houses.  But the aspect of Kerfol suggested
+something more--a perspective of stern and cruel memories
+stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of
+darkness.
+
+Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken
+with the present.  As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and
+gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument.
+"Tombs in the chapel?  The whole place is a tomb!" I reflected.
+I hoped more and more that the guardian would not come.  The
+details of the place, however striking, would seem trivial
+compared with its collective impressiveness; and I wanted only to
+sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence.
+
+"It's the very place for you!" Lanrivain had said; and I was
+overcome by the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any
+living being that Kerfol was the place for him.  "Is it possible
+that any one could NOT see--?" I wondered.  I did not finish the
+thought: what I meant was undefinable.  I stood up and wandered
+toward the gate.  I was beginning to want to know more; not to
+SEE more--I was by now so sure it was not a question of seeing--
+but to feel more: feel all the place had to communicate.  "But to
+get in one will have to rout out the keeper," I thought
+reluctantly, and hesitated.  Finally I crossed the bridge and
+tried the iron gate.  It yielded, and I walked under the tunnel
+formed by the thickness of the chemin de ronde.  At the farther
+end, a wooden barricade had been laid across the entrance, and
+beyond it I saw a court enclosed in noble architecture.  The main
+building faced me; and I now discovered that one half was a mere
+ruined front, with gaping windows through which the wild growths
+of the moat and the trees of the park were visible.  The rest of
+the house was still in its robust beauty.  One end abutted on the
+round tower, the other on the small traceried chapel, and in an
+angle of the building stood a graceful well-head adorned with
+mossy urns.  A few roses grew against the walls, and on an upper
+window-sill I remember noticing a pot of fuchsias.
+
+My sense of the pressure of the invisible began to yield to my
+architectural interest.  The building was so fine that I felt a
+desire to explore it for its own sake.  I looked about the court,
+wondering in which corner the guardian lodged.  Then I pushed
+open the barrier and went in.  As I did so, a little dog barred
+my way.  He was such a remarkably beautiful little dog that for a
+moment he made me forget the splendid place he was defending.  I
+was not sure of his breed at the time, but have since learned
+that it was Chinese, and that he was of a rare variety called the
+"Sleeve-dog."  He was very small and golden brown, with large
+brown eyes and a ruffled throat: he looked rather like a large
+tawny chrysanthemum.  I said to myself: "These little beasts
+always snap and scream, and somebody will be out in a minute."
+
+The little animal stood before me, forbidding, almost menacing:
+there was anger in his large brown eyes.  But he made no sound,
+he came no nearer.  Instead, as I advanced, he gradually fell
+back, and I noticed that another dog, a vague rough brindled
+thing, had limped up.  "There'll be a hubbub now," I thought; for
+at the same moment a third dog, a long-haired white mongrel,
+slipped out of a doorway and joined the others.  All three stood
+looking at me with grave eyes; but not a sound came from them.
+As I advanced they continued to fall back on muffled paws, still
+watching me.  "At a given point, they'll all charge at my ankles:
+it's one of the dodges that dogs who live together put up on
+one," I thought.  I was not much alarmed, for they were neither
+large nor formidable.  But they let me wander about the court as
+I pleased, following me at a little distance--always the same
+distance--and always keeping their eyes on me.  Presently I
+looked across at the ruined facade, and saw that in one of its
+window-frames another dog stood: a large white pointer with one
+brown ear.  He was an old grave dog, much more experienced than
+the others; and he seemed to be observing me with a deeper
+intentness.
+
+"I'll hear from HIM," I said to myself; but he stood in the empty
+window-frame, against the trees of the park, and continued to
+watch me without moving.  I looked back at him for a time, to see
+if the sense that he was being watched would not rouse him.  Half
+the width of the court lay between us, and we stared at each
+other silently across it.  But he did not stir, and at last I
+turned away.  Behind me I found the rest of the pack, with a
+newcomer added: a small black greyhound with pale agate-coloured
+eyes.  He was shivering a little, and his expression was more
+timid than that of the others.  I noticed that he kept a little
+behind them.  And still there was not a sound.
+
+I stood there for fully five minutes, the circle about me--
+waiting, as they seemed to be waiting.  At last I went up to the
+little golden-brown dog and stooped to pat him.  As I did so, I
+heard myself laugh.  The little dog did not start, or growl, or
+take his eyes from me--he simply slipped back about a yard, and
+then paused and continued to look at me.  "Oh, hang it!" I
+exclaimed aloud, and walked across the court toward the well.
+
+As I advanced, the dogs separated and slid away into different
+corners of the court.  I examined the urns on the well, tried a
+locked door or two, and up and down the dumb facade; then I faced
+about toward the chapel.  When I turned I perceived that all the
+dogs had disappeared except the old pointer, who still watched me
+from the empty window-frame.  It was rather a relief to be rid of
+that cloud of witnesses; and I began to look about me for a way
+to the back of the house.  "Perhaps there'll be somebody in the
+garden," I thought.  I found a way across the moat, scrambled
+over a wall smothered in brambles, and got into the garden.  A
+few lean hydrangeas and geraniums pined in the flower-beds, and
+the ancient house looked down on them indifferently.  Its garden
+side was plainer and severer than the other: the long granite
+front, with its few windows and steep roof, looked like a
+fortress-prison.  I walked around the farther wing, went up some
+disjointed steps, and entered the deep twilight of a narrow and
+incredibly old box-walk.  The walk was just wide enough for one
+person to slip through, and its branches met overhead.  It was
+like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to
+the shadowy greyness of the avenues.  I walked on and on, the
+branches hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry
+rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy top of the chemin
+de ronde.  I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking down into
+the court, which was just below me.  Not a human being was in
+sight; and neither were the dogs.  I found a flight of steps in
+the thickness of the wall and went down them; and when I emerged
+again into the court, there stood the circle of dogs, the golden-
+brown one a little ahead of the others, the black greyhound
+shivering in the rear.
+
+"Oh, hang it--you uncomfortable beasts, you!" I exclaimed, my
+voice startling me with a sudden echo.  The dogs stood
+motionless, watching me.  I knew by this time that they would not
+try to prevent my approaching the house, and the knowledge left
+me free to examine them.  I had a feeling that they must be
+horribly cowed to be so silent and inert.  Yet they did not look
+hungry or ill-treated.  Their coats were smooth and they were not
+thin, except the shivering greyhound.  It was more as if they had
+lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked
+at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually
+benumbed their busy inquisitive natures.  And this strange
+passivity, this almost human lassitude, seemed to me sadder than
+the misery of starved and beaten animals.  I should have liked to
+rouse them for a minute, to coax them into a game or a scamper;
+but the longer I looked into their fixed and weary eyes the more
+preposterous the idea became.  With the windows of that house
+looking down on us, how could I have imagined such a thing?  The
+dogs knew better: THEY knew what the house would tolerate and
+what it would not.  I even fancied that they knew what was
+passing through my mind, and pitied me for my frivolity.  But
+even that feeling probably reached them through a thick fog of
+listlessness.  I had an idea that their distance from me was as
+nothing to my remoteness from them.  In the last analysis, the
+impression they produced was that of having in common one memory
+so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth
+either a growl or a wag.
+
+"I say," I broke out abruptly, addressing myself to the dumb
+circle, "do you know what you look like, the whole lot of you?
+You look as if you'd seen a ghost--that's how you look!  I wonder
+if there IS a ghost here, and nobody but you left for it to
+appear to?"  The dogs continued to gaze at me without moving. . .
+
+
+It was dark when I saw Lanrivain's motor lamps at the cross-
+roads--and I wasn't exactly sorry to see them.  I had the sense
+of having escaped from the loneliest place in the whole world,
+and of not liking loneliness--to that degree--as much as I had
+imagined I should.  My friend had brought his solicitor back from
+Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat and affable
+stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol. . .
+
+But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted
+in the study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Well--are you going to buy Kerfol?" she asked, tilting up her
+gay chin from her embroidery.
+
+"I haven't decided yet.  The fact is, I couldn't get into the
+house," I said, as if I had simply postponed my decision, and
+meant to go back for another look.
+
+"You couldn't get in?  Why, what happened?  The family are mad to
+sell the place, and the old guardian has orders--"
+
+"Very likely.  But the old guardian wasn't there."
+
+"What a pity!  He must have gone to market.  But his daughter--?"
+
+"There was nobody about.  At least I saw no one."
+
+"How extraordinary!  Literally nobody?"
+
+"Nobody but a lot of dogs--a whole pack of them--who seemed to
+have the place to themselves."
+
+Madame de Lanrivain let the embroidery slip to her knee and
+folded her hands on it.  For several minutes she looked at me
+thoughtfully.
+
+"A pack of dogs--you SAW them?"
+
+"Saw them?  I saw nothing else!"
+
+"How many?"  She dropped her voice a little.  "I've always
+wondered--"
+
+I looked at her with surprise: I had supposed the place to be
+familiar to her.  "Have you never been to Kerfol?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, yes: often.  But never on that day."
+
+"What day?"
+
+"I'd quite forgotten--and so had Herve, I'm sure.  If we'd
+remembered, we never should have sent you today--but then, after
+all, one doesn't half believe that sort of thing, does one?"
+
+"What sort of thing?" I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to
+the level of hers.  Inwardly I was thinking: "I KNEW there was
+something. . ."
+
+Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring
+smile.  "Didn't Herve tell you the story of Kerfol?  An ancestor
+of his was mixed up in it.  You know every Breton house has its
+ghost-story; and some of them are rather unpleasant."
+
+"Yes--but those dogs?" I insisted.
+
+"Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol.  At least, the
+peasants say there's one day in the year when a lot of dogs
+appear there; and that day the keeper and his daughter go off to
+Morlaix and get drunk.  The women in Brittany drink dreadfully."
+She stooped to match a silk; then she lifted her charming
+inquisitive Parisian face: "Did you REALLY see a lot of dogs?
+There isn't one at Kerfol," she said.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the
+back of an upper shelf of his library.
+
+"Yes--here it is.  What does it call itself?  A History of the
+Assizes of the Duchy of Brittany.  Quimper, 1702.  The book was
+written about a hundred years later than the Kerfol affair; but I
+believe the account is transcribed pretty literally from the
+judicial records.  Anyhow, it's queer reading.  And there's a
+Herve de Lanrivain mixed up in it--not exactly MY style, as
+you'll see.  But then he's only a collateral.  Here, take the
+book up to bed with you.  I don't exactly remember the details;
+but after you've read it I'll bet anything you'll leave your
+light burning all night!"
+
+I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it
+was chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my
+reading.  The account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of
+the lord of Kerfol, was long and closely printed.  It was, as my
+friend had said, probably an almost literal transcription of what
+took place in the court-room; and the trial lasted nearly a
+month.  Besides, the type of the book was detestable. . .
+
+At first I thought of translating the old record literally.  But
+it is full of wearisome repetitions, and the main lines of the
+story are forever straying off into side issues.  So I have tried
+to disentangle it, and give it here in a simpler form.  At times,
+however, I have reverted to the text because no other words could
+have conveyed so exactly the sense of what I felt at Kerfol; and
+nowhere have I added anything of my own.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was in the year 16-- that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain
+of Kerfol, went to the pardon of Locronan to perform his
+religious duties.  He was a rich and powerful noble, then in his
+sixty-second year, but hale and sturdy, a great horseman and
+hunter and a pious man.  So all his neighbours attested.  In
+appearance he seems to have been short and broad, with a swarthy
+face, legs slightly bowed from the saddle, a hanging nose and
+broad hands with black hairs on them.  He had married young and
+lost his wife and son soon after, and since then had lived alone
+at Kerfol.  Twice a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a
+handsome house by the river, and spent a week or ten days there;
+and occasionally he rode to Rennes on business.  Witnesses were
+found to declare that during these absences he led a life
+different from the one he was known to lead at Kerfol, where he
+busied himself with his estate, attended mass daily, and found
+his only amusement in hunting the wild boar and water-fowl.  But
+these rumours are not particularly relevant, and it is certain
+that among people of his own class in the neighbourhood he passed
+for a stern and even austere man, observant of his religious
+obligations, and keeping strictly to himself.  There was no talk
+of any familiarity with the women on his estate, though at that
+time the nobility were very free with their peasants.  Some
+people said he had never looked at a woman since his wife's
+death; but such things are hard to prove, and the evidence on
+this point was not worth much.
+
+Well, in his sixty-second year, Yves de Cornault went to the
+pardon at Locronan, and saw there a young lady of Douarnenez, who
+had ridden over pillion behind her father to do her duty to the
+saint.  Her name was Anne de Barrigan, and she came of good old
+Breton stock, but much less great and powerful than that of Yves
+de Cornault; and her father had squandered his fortune at cards,
+and lived almost like a peasant in his little granite manor on
+the moors. . .  I have said I would add nothing of my own to this
+bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt myself
+here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate of
+Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also
+dismounting there.  I take my description from a rather rare
+thing: a faded drawing in red crayon, sober and truthful enough
+to be by a late pupil of the Clouets, which hangs in Lanrivain's
+study, and is said to be a portrait of Anne de Barrigan.  It is
+unsigned and has no mark of identity but the initials A. B., and
+the date 16--, the year after her marriage.  It represents a
+young woman with a small oval face, almost pointed, yet wide
+enough for a full mouth with a tender depression at the corners.
+The nose is small, and the eyebrows are set rather high, far
+apart, and as lightly pencilled as the eyebrows in a Chinese
+painting.  The forehead is high and serious, and the hair, which
+one feels to be fine and thick and fair, drawn off it and lying
+close like a cap.  The eyes are neither large nor small, hazel
+probably, with a look at once shy and steady.  A pair of
+beautiful long hands are crossed below the lady's breast. . .
+
+The chaplain of Kerfol, and other witnesses, averred that when
+the Baron came back from Locronan he jumped from his horse,
+ordered another to be instantly saddled, called to a young page
+come with him, and rode away that same evening to the south.  His
+steward followed the next morning with coffers laden on a pair of
+pack mules.  The following week Yves de Cornault rode back to
+Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants, and told them he was to
+be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of Douarnenez.  And
+on All Saints' Day the marriage took place.
+
+As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to
+show that they passed happily for the couple.  No one was found
+to say that Yves de Cornault had been unkind to his wife, and it
+was plain to all that he was content with his bargain.  Indeed,
+it was admitted by the chaplain and other witnesses for the
+prosecution that the young lady had a softening influence on her
+husband, and that he became less exacting with his tenants, less
+harsh to peasants and dependents, and less subject to the fits of
+gloomy silence which had darkened his widow-hood.  As to his
+wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her
+behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her
+husband was away on business at Rennes or Morlaix--whither she
+was never taken--she was not allowed so much as to walk in the
+park unaccompanied.  But no one asserted that she was unhappy,
+though one servant-woman said she had surprised her crying, and
+had heard her say that she was a woman accursed to have no child,
+and nothing in life to call her own.  But that was a natural
+enough feeling in a wife attached to her husband; and certainly
+it must have been a great grief to Yves de Cornault that she gave
+him no son.  Yet he never made her feel her childlessness as a
+reproach--she herself admits this in her evidence--but seemed to
+try to make her forget it by showering gifts and favours on her.
+Rich though he was, he had never been open-handed; but nothing
+was too fine for his wife, in the way of silks or gems or linen,
+or whatever else she fancied.  Every wandering merchant was
+welcome at Kerfol, and when the master was called away he never
+came back without bringing his wife a handsome present--something
+curious and particular--from Morlaix or Rennes or Quimper.  One
+of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination, an interesting
+list of one year's gifts, which I copy.  From Morlaix, a carved
+ivory junk, with Chinamen at the oars, that a strange sailor had
+brought back as a votive offering for Notre Dame de la Clarte,
+above Ploumanac'h; from Quimper, an embroidered gown, worked by
+the nuns of the Assumption; from Rennes, a silver rose that
+opened and showed an amber Virgin with a crown of garnets; from
+Morlaix, again, a length of Damascus velvet shot with gold,
+bought of a Jew from Syria; and for Michaelmas that same year,
+from Rennes, a necklet or bracelet of round stones--emeralds and
+pearls and rubies--strung like beads on a gold wire.  This was
+the present that pleased the lady best, the woman said.  Later
+on, as it happened, it was produced at the trial, and appears to
+have struck the Judges and the public as a curious and valuable
+jewel.
+
+The very same winter, the Baron absented himself again, this time
+as far as Bordeaux, and on his return he brought his wife
+something even odder and prettier than the bracelet.  It was a
+winter evening when he rode up to Kerfol and, walking into the
+hall, found her sitting listlessly by the fire, her chin on her
+hand, looking into the fire.  He carried a velvet box in his hand
+and, setting it down on the hearth, lifted the lid and let out a
+little golden-brown dog.
+
+Anne de Cornault exclaimed with pleasure as the little creature
+bounded toward her.  "Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!"
+she cried as she picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her
+shoulders and looked at her with eyes "like a Christian's."
+After that she would never have it out of her sight, and petted
+and talked to it as if it had been a child--as indeed it was the
+nearest thing to a child she was to know.  Yves de Cornault was
+much pleased with his purchase.  The dog had been brought to him
+by a sailor from an East India merchantman, and the sailor had
+bought it of a pilgrim in a bazaar at Jaffa, who had stolen it
+from a nobleman's wife in China: a perfectly permissible thing to
+do, since the pilgrim was a Christian and the nobleman a heathen
+doomed to hellfire.  Yves de Cornault had paid a long price for
+the dog, for they were beginning to be in demand at the French
+court, and the sailor knew he had got hold of a good thing; but
+Anne's pleasure was so great that, to see her laugh and play with
+the little animal, her husband would doubtless have given twice
+the sum.
+
+
+So far, all the evidence is at one, and the narrative plain
+sailing; but now the steering becomes difficult.  I will try to
+keep as nearly as possible to Anne's own statements; though
+toward the end, poor thing . . .
+
+Well, to go back.  The very year after the little brown dog was
+brought to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault, one winter night, was found
+dead at the head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from
+his wife's rooms to a door opening on the court.  It was his wife
+who found him and gave the alarm, so distracted, poor wretch,
+with fear and horror--for his blood was all over her--that at
+first the roused household could not make out what she was
+saying, and thought she had gone suddenly mad.  But there, sure
+enough, at the top of the stairs lay her husband, stone dead, and
+head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down to the
+steps below him.  He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed
+about the face and throat, as if with a dull weapon; and one of
+his legs had a deep tear in it which had cut an artery, and
+probably caused his death.  But how did he come there, and who
+had murdered him?
+
+His wife declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and
+hearing his cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs;
+but this was immediately questioned.  In the first place, it was
+proved that from her room she could not have heard the struggle
+on the stairs, owing to the thickness of the walls and the length
+of the intervening passage; then it was evident that she had not
+been in bed and asleep, since she was dressed when she roused the
+house, and her bed had not been slept in.  Moreover, the door at
+the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and the key in the lock; and
+it was noticed by the chaplain (an observant man) that the dress
+she wore was stained with blood about the knees, and that there
+were traces of small blood-stained hands low down on the
+staircase walls, so that it was conjectured that she had really
+been at the postern-door when her husband fell and, feeling her
+way up to him in the darkness on her hands and knees, had been
+stained by his blood dripping down on her.  Of course it was
+argued on the other side that the blood-marks on her dress might
+have been caused by her kneeling down by her husband when she
+rushed out of her room; but there was the open door below, and
+the fact that the fingermarks in the staircase all pointed
+upward.
+
+The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in
+spite of its improbability; but on the third day word was brought
+to her that Herve de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the
+neighbourhood, had been arrested for complicity in the crime.
+Two or three witnesses thereupon came forward to say that it was
+known throughout the country that Lanrivain had formerly been on
+good terms with the lady of Cornault; but that he had been absent
+from Brittany for over a year, and people had ceased to associate
+their names.  The witnesses who made this statement were not of a
+very reputable sort.  One was an old herb-gatherer suspected of
+witch-craft, another a drunken clerk from a neighbouring parish,
+the third a half-witted shepherd who could be made to say
+anything; and it was clear that the prosecution was not satisfied
+with its case, and would have liked to find more definite proof
+of Lanrivain's complicity than the statement of the herb-
+gatherer, who swore to having seen him climbing the wall of the
+park on the night of the murder.  One way of patching out
+incomplete proofs in those days was to put some sort of pressure,
+moral or physical, on the accused person.  It is not clear what
+pressure was put on Anne de Cornault; but on the third day, when
+she was brought into court, she "appeared weak and wandering,"
+and after being encouraged to collect herself and speak the
+truth, on her honour and the wounds of her Blessed Redeemer, she
+confessed that she had in fact gone down the stairs to speak with
+Herve de Lanrivain (who denied everything), and had been
+surprised there by the sound of her husband's fall.  That was
+better; and the prosecution rubbed its hands with satisfaction.
+The satisfaction increased when various dependents living at
+Kerfol were induced to say--with apparent sincerity--that during
+the year or two preceding his death their master had once more
+grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits of
+brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before
+his second marriage.  This seemed to show that things had not
+been going well at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say
+that there had been any signs of open disagreement between
+husband and wife.
+
+Anne de Cornault, when questioned as to her reason for going down
+at night to open the door to Herve de Lanrivain, made an answer
+which must have sent a smile around the court.  She said it was
+because she was lonely and wanted to talk with the young man.
+Was this the only reason? she was asked; and replied: "Yes, by
+the Cross over your Lordships' heads."  "But why at midnight?"
+the court asked.  "Because I could see him in no other way."  I
+can see the exchange of glances across the ermine collars under
+the Crucifix.
+
+Anne de Cornault, further questioned, said that her married life
+had been extremely lonely: "desolate" was the word she used.  It
+was true that her husband seldom spoke harshly to her; but there
+were days when he did not speak at all.  It was true that he had
+never struck or threatened her; but he kept her like a prisoner
+at Kerfol, and when he rode away to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes
+he set so close a watch on her that she could not pick a flower
+in the garden without having a waiting-woman at her heels.  "I am
+no Queen, to need such honours," she once said to him; and he had
+answered that a man who has a treasure does not leave the key in
+the lock when he goes out.  "Then take me with you," she urged;
+but to this he said that towns were pernicious places, and young
+wives better off at their own firesides.
+
+"But what did you want to say to Herve de Lanrivain?" the court
+asked; and she answered: "To ask him to take me away."
+
+"Ah--you confess that you went down to him with adulterous
+thoughts?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then why did you want him to take you away?"
+
+"Because I was afraid for my life."
+
+"Of whom were you afraid?"
+
+"Of my husband."
+
+"Why were you afraid of your husband?"
+
+"Because he had strangled my little dog."
+
+Another smile must have passed around the court-room: in days
+when any nobleman had a right to hang his peasants--and most of
+them exercised it--pinching a pet animal's wind-pipe was nothing
+to make a fuss about.
+
+At this point one of the Judges, who appears to have had a
+certain sympathy for the accused, suggested that she should be
+allowed to explain herself in her own way; and she thereupon made
+the following statement.
+
+The first years of her marriage had been lonely; but her husband
+had not been unkind to her.  If she had had a child she would not
+have been unhappy; but the days were long, and it rained too
+much.
+
+It was true that her husband, whenever he went away and left her,
+brought her a handsome present on his return; but this did not
+make up for the loneliness.  At least nothing had, till he
+brought her the little brown dog from the East: after that she
+was much less unhappy.  Her husband seemed pleased that she was
+so fond of the dog; he gave her leave to put her jewelled
+bracelet around its neck, and to keep it always with her.
+
+One day she had fallen asleep in her room, with the dog at her
+feet, as his habit was.  Her feet were bare and resting on his
+back.  Suddenly she was waked by her husband: he stood beside
+her, smiling not unkindly.
+
+"You look like my great-grandmother, Juliane de Cornault, lying
+in the chapel with her feet on a little dog," he said.
+
+The analogy sent a chill through her, but she laughed and
+answered: "Well, when I am dead you must put me beside her,
+carved in marble, with my dog at my feet."
+
+"Oho--we'll wait and see," he said, laughing also, but with his
+black brows close together.  "The dog is the emblem of fidelity."
+
+"And do you doubt my right to lie with mine at my feet?"
+
+"When I'm in doubt I find out," he answered.  "I am an old man,"
+he added, "and people say I make you lead a lonely life.  But I
+swear you shall have your monument if you earn it."
+
+"And I swear to be faithful," she returned, "if only for the sake
+of having my little dog at my feet."
+
+Not long afterward he went on business to the Quimper Assizes;
+and while he was away his aunt, the widow of a great nobleman of
+the duchy, came to spend a night at Kerfol on her way to the
+pardon of Ste. Barbe.  She was a woman of great piety and
+consequence, and much respected by Yves de Cornault, and when she
+proposed to Anne to go with her to Ste. Barbe no one could
+object, and even the chaplain declared himself in favour of the
+pilgrimage.  So Anne set out for Ste. Barbe, and there for the
+first time she talked with Herve de Lanrivain.  He had come once
+or twice to Kerfol with his father, but she had never before
+exchanged a dozen words with him.  They did not talk for more
+than five minutes now: it was under the chestnuts, as the
+procession was coming out of the chapel.  He said: "I pity you,"
+and she was surprised, for she had not supposed that any one
+thought her an object of pity.  He added: "Call for me when you
+need me," and she smiled a little, but was glad afterward, and
+thought often of the meeting.
+
+She confessed to having seen him three times afterward: not more.
+How or where she would not say--one had the impression that she
+feared to implicate some one.  Their meetings had been rare and
+brief; and at the last he had told her that he was starting the
+next day for a foreign country, on a mission which was not
+without peril and might keep him for many months absent.  He
+asked her for a remembrance, and she had none to give him but the
+collar about the little dog's neck.  She was sorry afterward that
+she had given it, but he was so unhappy at going that she had not
+had the courage to refuse.
+
+Her husband was away at the time.  When he returned a few days
+later he picked up the little dog to pet it, and noticed that its
+collar was missing.  His wife told him that the dog had lost it
+in the undergrowth of the park, and that she and her maids had
+hunted a whole day for it.  It was true, she explained to the
+court, that she had made the maids search for the necklet--they
+all believed the dog had lost it in the park. . .
+
+Her husband made no comment, and that evening at supper he was in
+his usual mood, between good and bad: you could never tell which.
+He talked a good deal, describing what he had seen and done at
+Rennes; but now and then he stopped and looked hard at her; and
+when she went to bed she found her little dog strangled on her
+pillow.  The little thing was dead, but still warm; she stooped
+to lift it, and her distress turned to horror when she discovered
+that it had been strangled by twisting twice round its throat the
+necklet she had given to Lanrivain.
+
+The next morning at dawn she buried the dog in the garden, and
+hid the necklet in her breast.  She said nothing to her husband,
+then or later, and he said nothing to her; but that day he had a
+peasant hanged for stealing a faggot in the park, and the next
+day he nearly beat to death a young horse he was breaking.
+
+Winter set in, and the short days passed, and the long nights,
+one by one; and she heard nothing of Herve de Lanrivain.  It
+might be that her husband had killed him; or merely that he had
+been robbed of the necklet.  Day after day by the hearth among
+the spinning maids, night after night alone on her bed, she
+wondered and trembled.  Sometimes at table her husband looked
+across at her and smiled; and then she felt sure that Lanrivain
+was dead.  She dared not try to get news of him, for she was sure
+her husband would find out if she did: she had an idea that he
+could find out anything.  Even when a witch-woman who was a noted
+seer, and could show you the whole world in her crystal, came to
+the castle for a night's shelter, and the maids flocked to her,
+Anne held back.  The winter was long and black and rainy.  One
+day, in Yves de Cornault's absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol
+with a troop of performing dogs.  Anne bought the smallest and
+cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one
+brown eye.  It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies,
+and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them.  That
+evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found
+the dog strangled on her pillow.
+
+After that she said to herself that she would never have another
+dog; but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found
+whining at the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the
+maids to speak of him to her husband.  She hid him in a room that
+no one went to, smuggled food to him from her own plate, made him
+a warm bed to lie on and petted him like a child.
+
+Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the
+greyhound strangled on her pillow.  She wept in secret, but said
+nothing, and resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger
+she would never bring him into the castle; but one day she found
+a young sheep-dog, a brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying
+with a broken leg in the snow of the park.  Yves de Cornault was
+at Rennes, and she brought the dog in, warmed and fed it, tied up
+its leg and hid it in the castle till her husband's return.  The
+day before, she gave it to a peasant woman who lived a long way
+off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say nothing; but
+that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door, and
+when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped
+up on her with little sobbing barks.  She hid him in her bed, and
+the next morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant
+woman when she heard her husband ride into the court.  She shut
+the dog in a chest and went down to receive him.  An hour or two
+later, when she returned to her room, the puppy lay strangled on
+her pillow. . .
+
+After that she dared not make a pet of any other dog; and her
+loneliness became almost unendurable.  Sometimes, when she
+crossed the court of the castle, and thought no one was looking,
+she stopped to pat the old pointer at the gate.  But one day as
+she was caressing him her husband came out of the chapel; and the
+next day the old dog was gone. . .
+
+This curious narrative was not told in one sitting of the court,
+or received without impatience and incredulous comment.  It was
+plain that the Judges were surprised by its puerility, and that
+it did not help the accused in the eyes of the public.  It was an
+odd tale, certainly; but what did it prove?  That Yves de
+Cornault disliked dogs, and that his wife, to gratify her own
+fancy, persistently ignored this dislike.  As for pleading this
+trivial disagreement as an excuse for her relations--whatever
+their nature--with her supposed accomplice, the argument was so
+absurd that her own lawyer manifestly regretted having let her
+make use of it, and tried several times to cut short her story.
+But she went on to the end, with a kind of hypnotized insistence,
+as though the scenes she evoked were so real to her that she had
+forgotten where she was and imagined herself to be re-living
+them.
+
+At length the Judge who had previously shown a certain kindness
+to her said (leaning forward a little, one may suppose, from his
+row of dozing colleagues): "Then you would have us believe that
+you murdered your husband because he would not let you keep a pet
+dog?"
+
+"I did not murder my husband."
+
+"Who did, then?  Herve de Lanrivain?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Who then?  Can you tell us?"
+
+"Yes, I can tell you.  The dogs--"  At that point she was carried
+out of the court in a swoon.
+
+                    .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .
+
+It was evident that her lawyer tried to get her to abandon this
+line of defense.  Possibly her explanation, whatever it was, had
+seemed convincing when she poured it out to him in the heat of
+their first private colloquy; but now that it was exposed to the
+cold daylight of judicial scrutiny, and the banter of the town,
+he was thoroughly ashamed of it, and would have sacrificed her
+without a scruple to save his professional reputation.  But the
+obstinate Judge--who perhaps, after all, was more inquisitive
+than kindly--evidently wanted to hear the story out, and she was
+ordered, the next day, to continue her deposition.
+
+She said that after the disappearance of the old watch-dog
+nothing particular happened for a month or two.  Her husband was
+much as usual: she did not remember any special incident.  But
+one evening a pedlar woman came to the castle and was selling
+trinkets to the maids.  She had no heart for trinkets, but she
+stood looking on while the women made their choice.  And then,
+she did not know how, but the pedlar coaxed her into buying for
+herself an odd pear-shaped pomander with a strong scent in it--
+she had once seen something of the kind on a gypsy woman.  She
+had no desire for the pomander, and did not know why she had
+bought it.  The pedlar said that whoever wore it had the power to
+read the future; but she did not really believe that, or care
+much either.  However, she bought the thing and took it up to her
+room, where she sat turning it about in her hand.  Then the
+strange scent attracted her and she began to wonder what kind of
+spice was in the box.  She opened it and found a grey bean rolled
+in a strip of paper; and on the paper she saw a sign she knew,
+and a message from Herve de Lanrivain, saying that he was at home
+again and would be at the door in the court that night after the
+moon had set. . .
+
+She burned the paper and then sat down to think.  It was
+nightfall, and her husband was at home. . .  She had no way of
+warning Lanrivain, and there was nothing to do but to wait. . .
+
+At this point I fancy the drowsy courtroom beginning to wake up.
+Even to the oldest hand on the bench there must have been a
+certain aesthetic relish in picturing the feelings of a woman on
+receiving such a message at night-fall from a man living twenty
+miles away, to whom she had no means of sending a warning. . .
+
+She was not a clever woman, I imagine; and as the first result of
+her cogitation she appears to have made the mistake of being,
+that evening, too kind to her husband.  She could not ply him
+with wine, according to the traditional expedient, for though he
+drank heavily at times he had a strong head; and when he drank
+beyond its strength it was because he chose to, and not because a
+woman coaxed him.  Not his wife, at any rate--she was an old
+story by now.  As I read the case, I fancy there was no feeling
+for her left in him but the hatred occasioned by his supposed
+dishonour.
+
+At any rate, she tried to call up her old graces; but early in
+the evening he complained of pains and fever, and left the hall
+to go up to his room.  His servant carried him a cup of hot wine,
+and brought back word that he was sleeping and not to be
+disturbed; and an hour later, when Anne lifted the tapestry and
+listened at his door, she heard his loud regular breathing.  She
+thought it might be a feint, and stayed a long time barefooted in
+the cold passage, her ear to the crack; but the breathing went on
+too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a man in a
+sound sleep.  She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in
+the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park.
+The sky was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the
+night was pitch black.  She knew the time had come, and stole
+along the passage, past her husband's door--where she stopped
+again to listen to his breathing--to the top of the stairs.
+There she paused a moment, and assured herself that no one was
+following her; then she began to go down the stairs in the
+darkness.  They were so steep and winding that she had to go very
+slowly, for fear of stumbling.  Her one thought was to get the
+door unbolted, tell Lanrivain to make his escape, and hasten back
+to her room.  She had tried the bolt earlier in the evening, and
+managed to put a little grease on it; but nevertheless, when she
+drew it, it gave a squeak . . . not loud, but it made her heart
+stop; and the next minute, overhead, she heard a noise. . .
+
+"What noise?" the prosecution interposed.
+
+"My husband's voice calling out my name and cursing me."
+
+"What did you hear after that?"
+
+"A terrible scream and a fall."
+
+"Where was Herve de Lanrivain at this time?"
+
+"He was standing outside in the court.  I just made him out in
+the darkness.  I told him for God's sake to go, and then I pushed
+the door shut."
+
+"What did you do next?"
+
+"I stood at the foot of the stairs and listened."
+
+"What did you hear?"
+
+"I heard dogs snarling and panting."  (Visible discouragement of
+the bench, boredom of the public, and exasperation of the lawyer
+for the defense.  Dogs again--!  But the inquisitive Judge
+insisted.)
+
+"What dogs?"
+
+She bent her head and spoke so low that she had to be told to
+repeat her answer: "I don't know."
+
+"How do you mean--you don't know?"
+
+"I don't know what dogs. . ."
+
+The Judge again intervened: "Try to tell us exactly what
+happened.  How long did you remain at the foot of the stairs?"
+
+"Only a few minutes."
+
+"And what was going on meanwhile overhead?"
+
+"The dogs kept on snarling and panting.  Once or twice he cried
+out.  I think he moaned once.  Then he was quiet."
+
+"Then what happened?"
+
+"Then I heard a sound like the noise of a pack when the wolf is
+thrown to them--gulping and lapping."
+
+(There was a groan of disgust and repulsion through the court,
+and another attempted intervention by the distracted lawyer.  But
+the inquisitive Judge was still inquisitive.)
+
+"And all the while you did not go up?"
+
+"Yes--I went up then--to drive them off."
+
+"The dogs?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well--?"
+
+"When I got there it was quite dark.  I found my husband's flint
+and steel and struck a spark.  I saw him lying there.  He was
+dead."
+
+"And the dogs?"
+
+"The dogs were gone."
+
+"Gone--where to?"
+
+"I don't know.  There was no way out--and there were no dogs at
+Kerfol."
+
+She straightened herself to her full height, threw her arms above
+her head, and fell down on the stone floor with a long scream.
+There was a moment of confusion in the court-room.  Some one on
+the bench was heard to say: "This is clearly a case for the
+ecclesiastical authorities"--and the prisoner's lawyer doubtless
+jumped at the suggestion.
+
+After this, the trial loses itself in a maze of cross-questioning
+and squabbling.  Every witness who was called corroborated Anne
+de Cornault's statement that there were no dogs at Kerfol: had
+been none for several months.  The master of the house had taken
+a dislike to dogs, there was no denying it.  But, on the other
+hand, at the inquest, there had been long and bitter discussion
+as to the nature of the dead man's wounds.  One of the surgeons
+called in had spoken of marks that looked like bites.  The
+suggestion of witchcraft was revived, and the opposing lawyers
+hurled tomes of necromancy at each other.
+
+At last Anne de Cornault was brought back into court--at the
+instance of the same Judge--and asked if she knew where the dogs
+she spoke of could have come from.  On the body of her Redeemer
+she swore that she did not.  Then the Judge put his final
+question: "If the dogs you think you heard had been known to you,
+do you think you would have recognized them by their barking?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did you recognize them?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What dogs do you take them to have been?"
+
+"My dead dogs," she said in a whisper. . .  She was taken out of
+court, not to reappear there again.  There was some kind of
+ecclesiastical investigation, and the end of the business was
+that the Judges disagreed with each other, and with the
+ecclesiastical committee, and that Anne de Cornault was finally
+handed over to the keeping of her husband's family, who shut her
+up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died many
+years later, a harmless madwoman.
+
+So ends her story.  As for that of Herve de Lanrivain, I had only
+to apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details.
+The evidence against the young man being insufficient, and his
+family influence in the duchy considerable, he was set free, and
+left soon afterward for Paris.  He was probably in no mood for a
+worldly life, and he appears to have come almost immediately
+under the influence of the famous M. Arnauld d'Andilly and the
+gentlemen of Port Royal.  A year or two later he was received
+into their Order, and without achieving any particular
+distinction he followed its good and evil fortunes till his death
+some twenty years later.  Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him
+by a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive
+mouth and a narrow brow.  Poor Herve de Lanrivain: it was a grey
+ending.  Yet as I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the
+dark dress of the Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his
+fate.  After all, in the course of his life two great things had
+happened to him: he had loved romantically, and he must have
+talked with Pascal. . .
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+MRS. MANSTEY'S VIEW
+as first published in
+Scribner's Magazine, July, 1891
+
+
+
+The view from Mrs. Manstey's window was not a striking one, but
+to her at least it was full of interest and beauty.  Mrs. Manstey
+occupied the back room on the third floor of a New York boarding-
+house, in a street where the ash-barrels lingered late on the
+sidewalk and the gaps in the pavement would have staggered a
+Quintus Curtius.  She was the widow of a clerk in a large
+wholesale house, and his death had left her alone, for her only
+daughter had married in California, and could not afford the long
+journey to New York to see her mother.  Mrs. Manstey, perhaps,
+might have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been
+so many years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each
+other's society, and their intercourse had long been limited to
+the exchange of a few perfunctory letters, written with
+indifference by the daughter, and with difficulty by Mrs.
+Manstey, whose right hand was growing stiff with gout.  Even had
+she felt a stronger desire for her daughter's companionship, Mrs.
+Manstey's increasing infirmity, which caused her to dread the
+three flights of stairs between her room and the street, would
+have given her pause on the eve of undertaking so long a journey;
+and without perhaps, formulating these reasons she had long since
+accepted as a matter of course her solitary life in New York.
+
+She was, indeed, not quite lonely, for a few friends still toiled
+up now and then to her room; but their visits grew rare as the
+years went by.  Mrs. Manstey had never been a sociable woman, and
+during her husband's lifetime his companionship had been all-
+sufficient to her.  For many years she had cherished a desire to
+live in the country, to have a hen-house and a garden; but this
+longing had faded with age, leaving only in the breast of the
+uncommunicative old woman a vague tenderness for plants and
+animals.  It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her cling
+so fervently to her view from her window, a view in which the
+most optimistic eye would at first have failed to discover
+anything admirable.
+
+Mrs. Manstey, from her coign of vantage (a slightly projecting
+bow-window where she nursed an ivy and a succession of
+unwholesome-looking bulbs), looked out first upon the yard of her
+own dwelling, of which, however, she could get but a restricted
+glimpse.  Still, her gaze took in the topmost boughs of the
+ailanthus below her window, and she knew how early each year the
+clump of dicentra strung its bending stalk with hearts of pink.
+
+But of greater interest were the yards beyond.  Being for the
+most part attached to boarding-houses they were in a state of
+chronic untidiness and fluttering, on certain days of the week,
+with miscellaneous garments and frayed table-cloths.  In spite of
+this Mrs. Manstey found much to admire in the long vista which
+she commanded.  Some of the yards were, indeed, but stony wastes,
+with grass in the cracks of the pavement and no shade in spring
+save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the clothes-
+lines.  These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others,
+the green ones, she loved.  She had grown used to their disorder;
+the broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer
+annoyed her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the
+pleasanter side of the prospect before her.
+
+In the very next enclosure did not a magnolia open its hard white
+flowers against the watery blue of April?  And was there not, a
+little way down the line, a fence foamed over every May be lilac
+waves of wistaria?  Farther still, a horse-chestnut lifted its
+candelabra of buff and pink blossoms above broad fans of foliage;
+while in the opposite yard June was sweet with the breath of a
+neglected syringa, which persisted in growing in spite of the
+countless obstacles opposed to its welfare.
+
+But if nature occupied the front rank in Mrs. Manstey's view,
+there was much of a more personal character to interest her in
+the aspect of the houses and their inmates.  She deeply
+disapproved of the mustard-colored curtains which had lately been
+hung in the doctor's window opposite; but she glowed with
+pleasure when the house farther down had its old bricks washed
+with a coat of paint.  The occupants of the houses did not often
+show themselves at the back windows, but the servants were always
+in sight.  Noisy slatterns, Mrs. Manstey pronounced the greater
+number; she knew their ways and hated them.  But to the quiet
+cook in the newly painted house, whose mistress bullied her, and
+who secretly fed the stray cats at nightfall, Mrs. Manstey's
+warmest sympathies were given.  On one occasion her feelings were
+racked by the neglect of a housemaid, who for two days forgot to
+feed the parrot committed to her care.  On the third day, Mrs.
+Manstey, in spite of her gouty hand, had just penned a letter,
+beginning: "Madam, it is now three days since your parrot has
+been fed," when the forgetful maid appeared at the window with a
+cup of seed in her hand.
+
+But in Mrs. Manstey's more meditative moods it was the narrowing
+perspective of far-off yards which pleased her best.  She loved,
+at twilight, when the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in
+the fluid yellow of the west, to lose herself in vague memories
+of a trip to Europe, made years ago, and now reduced in her
+mind's eye to a pale phantasmagoria of indistinct steeples and
+dreamy skies.  Perhaps at heart Mrs. Manstey was an artist; at
+all events she was sensible of many changes of color unnoticed by
+the average eye, and dear to her as the green of early spring was
+the black lattice of branches against a cold sulphur sky at the
+close of a snowy day.  She enjoyed, also, the sunny thaws of
+March, when patches of earth showed through the snow, like ink-
+spots spreading on a sheet of white blotting-paper; and, better
+still, the haze of boughs, leafless but swollen, which replaced
+the clear-cut tracery of winter.  She even watched with a certain
+interest the trail of smoke from a far-off factory chimney, and
+missed a detail in the landscape when the factory was closed and
+the smoke disappeared.
+
+Mrs. Manstey, in the long hours which she spent at her window,
+was not idle.  She read a little, and knitted numberless
+stockings; but the view surrounded and shaped her life as the sea
+does a lonely island.  When her rare callers came it was
+difficult for her to detach herself from the contemplation of the
+opposite window-washing, or the scrutiny of certain green points
+in a neighboring flower-bed which might, or might not, turn into
+hyacinths, while she feigned an interest in her visitor's
+anecdotes about some unknown grandchild.  Mrs. Manstey's real
+friends were the denizens of the yards, the hyacinths, the
+magnolia, the green parrot, the maid who fed the cats, the doctor
+who studied late behind his mustard-colored curtains; and the
+confidant of her tenderer musings was the church-spire floating
+in the sunset.
+
+One April day, as she sat in her usual place, with knitting cast
+aside and eyes fixed on the blue sky mottled with round clouds, a
+knock at the door announced the entrance of her landlady.  Mrs.
+Manstey did not care for her landlady, but she submitted to her
+visits with ladylike resignation.  To-day, however, it seemed
+harder than usual to turn from the blue sky and the blossoming
+magnolia to Mrs. Sampson's unsuggestive face, and Mrs. Manstey
+was conscious of a distinct effort as she did so.
+
+"The magnolia is out earlier than usual this year, Mrs. Sampson,"
+she remarked, yielding to a rare impulse, for she seldom alluded
+to the absorbing interest of her life.  In the first place it was
+a topic not likely to appeal to her visitors and, besides, she
+lacked the power of expression and could not have given utterance
+to her feelings had she wished to.
+
+"The what, Mrs. Manstey?" inquired the landlady, glancing about
+the room as if to find there the explanation of Mrs. Manstey's
+statement.
+
+"The magnolia in the next yard--in Mrs. Black's yard," Mrs.
+Manstey repeated.
+
+"Is it, indeed?  I didn't know there was a magnolia there," said
+Mrs. Sampson, carelessly.  Mrs. Manstey looked at her; she did
+not know that there was a magnolia in the next yard!
+
+"By the way," Mrs. Sampson continued, "speaking of Mrs. Black
+reminds me that the work on the extension is to begin next week."
+
+"The what?" it was Mrs. Manstey's turn to ask.
+
+"The extension," said Mrs. Sampson, nodding her head in the
+direction of the ignored magnolia.  "You knew, of course, that
+Mrs. Black was going to build an extension to her house?  Yes,
+ma'am.  I hear it is to run right back to the end of the yard.
+How she can afford to build an extension in these hard times I
+don't see; but she always was crazy about building.  She used to
+keep a boarding-house in Seventeenth Street, and she nearly
+ruined herself then by sticking out bow-windows and what not; I
+should have thought that would have cured her of building, but I
+guess it's a disease, like drink.  Anyhow, the work is to begin
+on Monday."
+
+Mrs. Manstey had grown pale.  She always spoke slowly, so the
+landlady did not heed the long pause which followed.  At last
+Mrs. Manstey said: "Do you know how high the extension will be?"
+
+"That's the most absurd part of it.  The extension is to be built
+right up to the roof of the main building; now, did you ever?"
+
+"Mrs. Manstey paused again.  "Won't it be a great annoyance to
+you, Mrs. Sampson?" she asked.
+
+"I should say it would.  But there's no help for it; if people
+have got a mind to build extensions there's no law to prevent
+'em, that I'm aware of."  Mrs. Manstey, knowing this, was silent.
+"There is no help for it," Mrs. Sampson repeated, "but if I AM a
+church member, I wouldn't be so sorry if it ruined Eliza Black.
+Well, good-day, Mrs. Manstey; I'm glad to find you so
+comfortable."
+
+So comfortable--so comfortable!  Left to herself the old woman
+turned once more to the window.  How lovely the view was that
+day!  The blue sky with its round clouds shed a brightness over
+everything; the ailanthus had put on a tinge of yellow-green, the
+hyacinths were budding, the magnolia flowers looked more than
+ever like rosettes carved in alabaster.  Soon the wistaria would
+bloom, then the horse-chestnut; but not for her.  Between her
+eyes and them a barrier of brick and mortar would swiftly rise;
+presently even the spire would disappear, and all her radiant
+world be blotted out.  Mrs. Manstey sent away untouched the
+dinner-tray brought to her that evening.  She lingered in the
+window until the windy sunset died in bat-colored dusk; then,
+going to bed, she lay sleepless all night.
+
+Early the next day she was up and at the window.  It was raining,
+but even through the slanting gray gauze the scene had its charm--
+and then the rain was so good for the trees.  She had noticed
+the day before that the ailanthus was growing dusty.
+
+"Of course I might move," said Mrs. Manstey aloud, and turning
+from the window she looked about her room.  She might move, of
+course; so might she be flayed alive; but she was not likely to
+survive either operation.  The room, though far less important to
+her happiness than the view, was as much a part of her existence.
+She had lived in it seventeen years.  She knew every stain on the
+wall-paper, every rent in the carpet; the light fell in a certain
+way on her engravings, her books had grown shabby on their
+shelves, her bulbs and ivy were used to their window and knew
+which way to lean to the sun.  "We are all too old to move," she
+said.
+
+That afternoon it cleared.  Wet and radiant the blue reappeared
+through torn rags of cloud; the ailanthus sparkled; the earth in
+the flower-borders looked rich and warm.  It was Thursday, and on
+Monday the building of the extension was to begin.
+
+On Sunday afternoon a card was brought to Mrs. Black, as she was
+engaged in gathering up the fragments of the boarders' dinner in
+the basement.  The card, black-edged, bore Mrs. Manstey's name.
+
+"One of Mrs. Sampson's boarders; wants to move, I suppose.  Well,
+I can give her a room next year in the extension.  Dinah," said
+Mrs. Black, "tell the lady I'll be upstairs in a minute."
+
+Mrs. Black found Mrs. Manstey standing in the long parlor
+garnished with statuettes and antimacassars; in that house she
+could not sit down.
+
+Stooping hurriedly to open the register, which let out a cloud of
+dust, Mrs. Black advanced on her visitor.
+
+"I'm happy to meet you, Mrs. Manstey; take a seat, please," the
+landlady remarked in her prosperous voice, the voice of a woman
+who can afford to build extensions.  There was no help for it;
+Mrs. Manstey sat down.
+
+"Is there anything I can do for you, ma'am?" Mrs. Black
+continued.  "My house is full at present, but I am going to build
+an extension, and--"
+
+"It is about the extension that I wish to speak," said Mrs.
+Manstey, suddenly.  "I am a poor woman, Mrs. Black, and I have
+never been a happy one.  I shall have to talk about myself first
+to--to make you understand."
+
+Mrs. Black, astonished but imperturbable, bowed at this
+parenthesis.
+
+"I never had what I wanted," Mrs. Manstey continued.  "It was
+always one disappointment after another.  For years I wanted to
+live in the country.  I dreamed and dreamed about it; but we
+never could manage it.  There was no sunny window in our house,
+and so all my plants died.  My daughter married years ago and
+went away--besides, she never cared for the same things.  Then my
+husband died and I was left alone.  That was seventeen years ago.
+I went to live at Mrs. Sampson's, and I have been there ever
+since.  I have grown a little infirm, as you see, and I don't get
+out often; only on fine days, if I am feeling very well.  So you
+can understand my sitting a great deal in my window--the back
+window on the third floor--"
+
+"Well, Mrs. Manstey," said Mrs. Black, liberally, "I could give
+you a back room, I dare say; one of the new rooms in the ex--"
+
+"But I don't want to move; I can't move," said Mrs. Manstey,
+almost with a scream.  "And I came to tell you that if you build
+that extension I shall have no view from my window--no view!  Do
+you understand?"
+
+Mrs. Black thought herself face to face with a lunatic, and she
+had always heard that lunatics must be humored.
+
+"Dear me, dear me," she remarked, pushing her chair back a little
+way, "that is too bad, isn't it?  Why, I never thought of that.
+To be sure, the extension WILL interfere with your view, Mrs.
+Manstey."
+
+"You do understand?" Mrs. Manstey gasped.
+
+"Of course I do.  And I'm real sorry about it, too.  But there,
+don't you worry, Mrs. Manstey.  I guess we can fix that all
+right."
+
+Mrs. Manstey rose from her seat, and Mrs. Black slipped toward
+the door.
+
+"What do you mean by fixing it?  Do you mean that I can induce
+you to change your mind about the extension?  Oh, Mrs. Black,
+listen to me.  I have two thousand dollars in the bank and I
+could manage, I know I could manage, to give you a thousand if--"
+Mrs. Manstey paused; the tears were rolling down her cheeks.
+
+"There, there, Mrs. Manstey, don't you worry," repeated Mrs.
+Black, soothingly.  "I am sure we can settle it.  I am sorry that
+I can't stay and talk about it any longer, but this is such a
+busy time of day, with supper to get--"
+
+Her hand was on the door-knob, but with sudden vigor Mrs. Manstey
+seized her wrist.
+
+"You are not giving me a definite answer.  Do you mean to say
+that you accept my proposition?"
+
+"Why, I'll think it over, Mrs. Manstey, certainly I will.  I
+wouldn't annoy you for the world--"
+
+"But the work is to begin to-morrow, I am told," Mrs. Manstey
+persisted.
+
+Mrs. Black hesitated.  "It shan't begin, I promise you that; I'll
+send word to the builder this very night."  Mrs. Manstey
+tightened her hold.
+
+"You are not deceiving me, are you?" she said.
+
+"No--no," stammered Mrs. Black.  "How can you think such a thing
+of me, Mrs. Manstey?"
+
+Slowly Mrs. Manstey's clutch relaxed, and she passed through the
+open door.  "One thousand dollars," she repeated, pausing in the
+hall; then she let herself out of the house and hobbled down the
+steps, supporting herself on the cast-iron railing.
+
+"My goodness," exclaimed Mrs. Black, shutting and bolting the
+hall-door, "I never knew the old woman was crazy!  And she looks
+so quiet and ladylike, too."
+
+Mrs. Manstey slept well that night, but early the next morning
+she was awakened by a sound of hammering.  She got to her window
+with what haste she might and, looking out saw that Mrs. Black's
+yard was full of workmen.  Some were carrying loads of brick from
+the kitchen to the yard, others beginning to demolish the old-
+fashioned wooden balcony which adorned each story of Mrs. Black's
+house.  Mrs. Manstey saw that she had been deceived.  At first
+she thought of confiding her trouble to Mrs. Sampson, but a
+settled discouragement soon took possession of her and she went
+back to bed, not caring to see what was going on.
+
+Toward afternoon, however, feeling that she must know the worst,
+she rose and dressed herself.  It was a laborious task, for her
+hands were stiffer than usual, and the hooks and buttons seemed
+to evade her.
+
+When she seated herself in the window, she saw that the workmen
+had removed the upper part of the balcony, and that the bricks
+had multiplied since morning.  One of the men, a coarse fellow
+with a bloated face, picked a magnolia blossom and, after
+smelling it, threw it to the ground; the next man, carrying a
+load of bricks, trod on the flower in passing.
+
+"Look out, Jim," called one of the men to another who was smoking
+a pipe, "if you throw matches around near those barrels of paper
+you'll have the old tinder-box burning down before you know it."
+And Mrs. Manstey, leaning forward, perceived that there were
+several barrels of paper and rubbish under the wooden balcony.
+
+At length the work ceased and twilight fell.  The sunset was
+perfect and a roseate light, transfiguring the distant spire,
+lingered late in the west.  When it grew dark Mrs. Manstey drew
+down the shades and proceeded, in her usual methodical manner, to
+light her lamp.  She always filled and lit it with her own hands,
+keeping a kettle of kerosene on a zinc-covered shelf in a closet.
+As the lamp-light filled the room it assumed its usual peaceful
+aspect.  The books and pictures and plants seemed, like their
+mistress, to settle themselves down for another quiet evening,
+and Mrs. Manstey, as was her wont, drew up her armchair to the
+table and began to knit.
+
+That night she could not sleep.  The weather had changed and a
+wild wind was abroad, blotting the stars with close-driven
+clouds.  Mrs. Manstey rose once or twice and looked out of the
+window; but of the view nothing was discernible save a tardy
+light or two in the opposite windows.  These lights at last went
+out, and Mrs. Manstey, who had watched for their extinction,
+began to dress herself.  She was in evident haste, for she merely
+flung a thin dressing-gown over her night-dress and wrapped her
+head in a scarf; then she opened her closet and cautiously took
+out the kettle of kerosene.  Having slipped a bundle of wooden
+matches into her pocket she proceeded, with increasing
+precautions, to unlock her door, and a few moments later she was
+feeling her way down the dark staircase, led by a glimmer of gas
+from the lower hall.  At length she reached the bottom of the
+stairs and began the more difficult descent into the utter
+darkness of the basement.  Here, however, she could move more
+freely, as there was less danger of being overheard; and without
+much delay she contrived to unlock the iron door leading into the
+yard.  A gust of cold wind smote her as she stepped out and
+groped shiveringly under the clothes-lines.
+
+That morning at three o'clock an alarm of fire brought the
+engines to Mrs. Black's door, and also brought Mrs. Sampson's
+startled boarders to their windows.  The wooden balcony at the
+back of Mrs. Black's house was ablaze, and among those who
+watched the progress of the flames was Mrs. Manstey, leaning in
+her thin dressing-gown from the open window.
+
+The fire, however, was soon put out, and the frightened occupants
+of the house, who had fled in scant attire, reassembled at dawn
+to find that little mischief had been done beyond the cracking of
+window panes and smoking of ceilings.  In fact, the chief
+sufferer by the fire was Mrs. Manstey, who was found in the
+morning gasping with pneumonia, a not unnatural result, as
+everyone remarked, of her having hung out of an open window at
+her age in a dressing-gown.  It was easy to see that she was very
+ill, but no one had guessed how grave the doctor's verdict would
+be, and the faces gathered that evening about Mrs. Sampson's
+table were awestruck and disturbed.  Not that any of the boarders
+knew Mrs. Manstey well; she "kept to herself," as they said, and
+seemed to fancy herself too good for them; but then it is always
+disagreeable to have anyone dying in the house and, as one lady
+observed to another: "It might just as well have been you or me,
+my dear."
+
+But it was only Mrs. Manstey; and she was dying, as she had
+lived, lonely if not alone.  The doctor had sent a trained nurse,
+and Mrs. Sampson, with muffled step, came in from time to time;
+but both, to Mrs. Manstey, seemed remote and unsubstantial as the
+figures in a dream.  All day she said nothing; but when she was
+asked for her daughter's address she shook her head.  At times
+the nurse noticed that she seemed to be listening attentively for
+some sound which did not come; then again she dozed.
+
+The next morning at daylight she was very low.  The nurse called
+Mrs. Sampson and as the two bent over the old woman they saw her
+lips move.
+
+"Lift me up--out of bed," she whispered.
+
+They raised her in their arms, and with her stiff hand she
+pointed to the window.
+
+"Oh, the window--she wants to sit in the window.  She used to sit
+there all day," Mrs. Sampson explained.  "It can do her no harm,
+I suppose?"
+
+"Nothing matters now," said the nurse.
+
+They carried Mrs. Manstey to the window and placed her in her
+chair.  The dawn was abroad, a jubilant spring dawn; the spire
+had already caught a golden ray, though the magnolia and horse-
+chestnut still slumbered in shadow.  In Mrs. Black's yard all was
+quiet.  The charred timbers of the balcony lay where they had
+fallen.  It was evident that since the fire the builders had not
+returned to their work.  The magnolia had unfolded a few more
+sculptural flowers; the view was undisturbed.
+
+It was hard for Mrs. Manstey to breathe; each moment it grew more
+difficult.  She tried to make them open the window, but they
+would not understand.  If she could have tasted the air, sweet
+with the penetrating ailanthus savor, it would have eased her;
+but the view at least was there--the spire was golden now, the
+heavens had warmed from pearl to blue, day was alight from east
+to west, even the magnolia had caught the sun.
+
+Mrs. Manstey's head fell back and smiling she died.
+
+That day the building of the extension was resumed.
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+THE BOLTED DOOR
+as first published in
+Scribner's Magazine, March 1909
+
+
+
+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 little
+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 windings.  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.
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+THE DILETTANTE
+as first published in
+Harper's Monthly, December 1903
+
+
+It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found
+himself advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the
+club, turned as usual into Mrs. Vervain's street.
+
+The "as usual" was his own qualification of the act; a convenient
+way of bridging the interval--in days and other sequences--that
+lay between this visit and the last.  It was characteristic of
+him that he instinctively excluded his call two days earlier,
+with Ruth Gaynor, from the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain:
+the special conditions attending it had made it no more like a
+visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved dinner invitation is like
+a personal letter.  Yet it was to talk over his call with Miss
+Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that episode;
+and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the
+talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her
+corner, he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to take
+a last look at a work of art that was passing out of his
+possession.
+
+On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the
+unexpected than Mrs. Vervain.  She excelled in the rare art of
+taking things for granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride
+in the thought that she owed her excellence to his training.
+Early in his career Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset
+of his acquaintance with a lady, of telling her that he loved her
+and exacting the same avowal in return.  The latter part of that
+episode had been like the long walk back from a picnic, when one
+has to carry all the crockery one has finished using: it was the
+last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered with
+the debris of a feast.  He thus incidentally learned that the
+privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a
+charming woman can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls
+of sentiment he had developed a science of evasion in which the
+woman of the moment became a mere implement of the game.  He owed
+a great deal of delicate enjoyment to the cultivation of this
+art.  The perils from which it had been his refuge became naively
+harmless: was it possible that he who now took his easy way along
+the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw heights of
+emotion?  Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the
+satisfaction of feeling that he had entered earlier than most
+into that chiar'oscuro of sensation where every half-tone has its
+value.
+
+As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable
+to Mrs. Vervain.  He had taught a good many women not to betray
+their feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to
+work in.  She had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her;
+capable of making the most awkward inferences, of plunging
+through thin ice, of recklessly undressing her emotions; but she
+had acquired, under the discipline of his reticences and
+evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and perhaps more
+remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune he
+played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.
+
+It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but
+the result justified the effort.  At the crucial moment she had
+been perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret
+that he had announced his engagement by letter.  It was an
+evasion that confessed a difficulty; a deviation implying an
+obstacle, where, by common consent, it was agreed to see none; it
+betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence in the completeness of
+his method.  It had been his pride never to put himself in a
+position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back door;
+but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened for
+him of their own accord.  All this, and much more, he read in the
+finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor.
+He had never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-
+eagerness, no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art
+the grace of a natural quality) there were none of those damnable
+implications whereby a woman, in welcoming her friend's
+betrothed, may keep him on pins and needles while she laps the
+lady in complacency.  So masterly a performance, indeed, hardly
+needed the offset of Miss Gaynor's door-step words--"To be so
+kind to me, how she must have liked you!"--though he caught
+himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit
+them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was
+unfailingly certain to enjoy a good thing.  It was perhaps the
+one drawback to his new situation that it might develop good
+things which it would be impossible to hand on to Margaret
+Vervain.
+
+The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend's
+powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
+distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning
+down her street instead of going on to the club.  He would show
+her that he knew how to value her; he would ask her to achieve
+with him a feat infinitely rarer and more delicate than the one
+he had appeared to avoid.  Incidentally, he would also dispose of
+the interval of time before dinner: ever since he had seen Miss
+Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her return journey to Buffalo, he
+had been wondering how he should put in the rest of the
+afternoon.  It was absurd, how he missed the girl. . . .  Yes,
+that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all, at the
+bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain!  It was absurd, if
+you like--but it was delightfully rejuvenating.  He could recall
+the time when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt
+that this return to the primitive emotions might be as
+restorative as a holiday in the Canadian woods.  And it was
+precisely by the girl's candor, her directness, her lack of
+complications, that he was taken.  The sense that she might say
+something rash at any moment was positively exhilarating: if she
+had thrown her arms about him at the station he would not have
+given a thought to his crumpled dignity.  It surprised Thursdale
+to find what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and
+though his sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness
+to any conscious purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that
+his sentimental economies had left him such a large surplus to
+draw upon.
+
+Mrs. Vervain was at home--as usual.  When one visits the cemetery
+one expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck
+Thursdale as another proof of his friend's good taste that she
+had been in no undue haste to change her habits.  The whole house
+appeared to count on his coming; the footman took his hat and
+overcoat as naturally as though there had been no lapse in his
+visits; and the drawing-room at once enveloped him in that
+atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs. Vervain imparted to
+her very furniture.
+
+It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances,
+Mrs. Vervain should herself sound the first false note.
+
+"You?" she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her
+hand.
+
+It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest
+art.  The difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdale's
+balance.
+
+"Why not?" he said, restoring the book.  "Isn't it my hour?"  And
+as she made no answer, he added gently, "Unless it's some one
+else's?"
+
+She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair.  "Mine,
+merely," she said.
+
+"I hope that doesn't mean that you're unwilling to share it?"
+
+"With you?  By no means.  You're welcome to my last crust."
+
+He looked at her reproachfully.  "Do you call this the last?"
+
+She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth.  "It's
+a way of giving it more flavor!"
+
+He returned the smile.  "A visit to you doesn't need such
+condiments."
+
+She took this with just the right measure of retrospective
+amusement.
+
+"Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste," she
+confessed.
+
+Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him
+into the imprudence of saying, "Why should you want it to be
+different from what was always so perfectly right?"
+
+She hesitated.  "Doesn't the fact that it's the last constitute a
+difference?"
+
+"The last--my last visit to you?"
+
+"Oh, metaphorically, I mean--there's a break in the continuity."
+
+Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts
+already!
+
+"I don't recognize it," he said.  "Unless you make me--" he
+added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid
+attention.
+
+She turned to him with grave eyes.  "You recognize no difference
+whatever?"
+
+"None--except an added link in the chain."
+
+"An added link?"
+
+"In having one more thing to like you for--your letting Miss
+Gaynor see why I had already so many."  He flattered himself that
+this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.
+
+Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose.  "Was it that you
+came for?" she asked, almost gaily.
+
+"If it is necessary to have a reason--that was one."
+
+"To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?"
+
+"To tell you how she talks about you."
+
+"That will be very interesting--especially if you have seen her
+since her second visit to me."
+
+"Her second visit?"  Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start
+and moved to another.  "She came to see you again?"
+
+"This morning, yes--by appointment."
+
+He continued to look at her blankly.  "You sent for her?"
+
+"I didn't have to--she wrote and asked me last night.  But no
+doubt you have seen her since."
+
+Thursdale sat silent.  He was trying to separate his words from
+his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably.  "I saw
+her off just now at the station."
+
+"And she didn't tell you that she had been here again?"
+
+"There was hardly time, I suppose--there were people about--" he
+floundered.
+
+"Ah, she'll write, then."
+
+He regained his composure.  "Of course she'll write: very often,
+I hope.  You know I'm absurdly in love," he cried audaciously.
+
+She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against
+the chimney-piece.  He had leaned there so often that the
+attitude touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat.
+"Oh, my poor Thursdale!" she murmured.
+
+"I suppose it's rather ridiculous," he owned; and as she remained
+silent, he added, with a sudden break--"Or have you another
+reason for pitying me?"
+
+Her answer was another question.  "Have you been back to your
+rooms since you left her?"
+
+"Since I left her at the station?  I came straight here."
+
+"Ah, yes--you COULD: there was no reason--"  Her words passed
+into a silent musing.
+
+Thursdale moved nervously nearer.  "You said you had something to
+tell me?"
+
+"Perhaps I had better let her do so.  There may be a letter at
+your rooms."
+
+"A letter?  What do you mean?  A letter from HER?  What has
+happened?"
+
+His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance.
+"Nothing has happened--perhaps that is just the worst of it.  You
+always HATED, you know," she added incoherently, "to have things
+happen: you never would let them."
+
+"And now--?"
+
+"Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had
+guessed.  To know if anything had happened."
+
+"Had happened?"  He gazed at her slowly.  "Between you and me?"
+he said with a rush of light.
+
+The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed
+between them that the color rose to her face; but she held his
+startled gaze.
+
+"You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to
+be.  Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?"
+
+His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to
+him.
+
+Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: "I supposed it might have struck
+you that there were times when we presented that appearance."
+
+He made an impatient gesture.  "A man's past is his own!"
+
+"Perhaps--it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared
+it.  But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss
+Gaynor is naturally inexperienced."
+
+"Of course--but--supposing her act a natural one--" he floundered
+lamentably among his innuendoes--"I still don't see--how there
+was anything--"
+
+"Anything to take hold of?  There wasn't--"
+
+"Well, then--?" escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she
+did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh:
+"She can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship
+between us!"
+
+"But she does," said Mrs. Vervain.
+
+Thursdale stood perplexed.  He had seen, on the previous day, no
+trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still
+hear the candid ring of the girl's praise of Mrs. Vervain.  If
+she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust
+under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to
+bring her doubts to her rival for solution.  The situation seemed
+one through which one could no longer move in a penumbra, and he
+let in a burst of light with the direct query: "Won't you explain
+what you mean?"
+
+Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong
+his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had
+taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet
+his challenge.  It was the first time he had ever asked her to
+explain anything; and she had lived so long in dread of offering
+elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable to
+produce one on the spot.
+
+At last she said slowly: "She came to find out if you were really
+free."
+
+Thursdale colored again.  "Free?" he stammered, with a sense of
+physical disgust at contact with such crassness.
+
+"Yes--if I had quite done with you."  She smiled in recovered
+security.  "It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion
+for definitions."
+
+"Yes--well?" he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.
+
+"Well--and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she
+wanted me to define MY status--to know exactly where I had stood
+all along."
+
+Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the
+clue.  "And even when you had told her that--"
+
+"Even when I had told her that I had HAD no status--that I had
+never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant," said Mrs. Vervain,
+slowly--"even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems."
+
+He uttered an uneasy exclamation.  "She didn't believe you, you
+mean?"
+
+"I mean that she DID believe me: too thoroughly."
+
+"Well, then--in God's name, what did she want?"
+
+"Something more--those were the words she used."
+
+"Something more?  Between--between you and me?  Is it a
+conundrum?"  He laughed awkwardly.
+
+"Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer
+forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes."
+
+"So it seems!" he commented.  "But since, in this case, there
+wasn't any--" he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in
+her gaze.
+
+"That's just it.  The unpardonable offence has been--in our not
+offending."
+
+He flung himself down despairingly.  "I give it up!--What did you
+tell her?" he burst out with sudden crudeness.
+
+"The exact truth.  If I had only known," she broke off with a
+beseeching tenderness, "won't you believe that I would still have
+lied for you?"
+
+"Lied for me?  Why on earth should you have lied for either of
+us?"
+
+"To save you--to hide you from her to the last!  As I've hidden
+you from myself all these years!"  She stood up with a sudden
+tragic import in her movement.  "You believe me capable of that,
+don't you?  If I had only guessed--but I have never known a girl
+like her; she had the truth out of me with a spring."
+
+"The truth that you and I had never--"
+
+"Had never--never in all these years!  Oh, she knew why--she
+measured us both in a flash.  She didn't suspect me of having
+haggled with you--her words pelted me like hail.  'He just took
+what he wanted--sifted and sorted you to suit his taste.  Burnt
+out the gold and left a heap of cinders.  And you let him--you
+let yourself be cut in bits'--she mixed her metaphors a little--
+'be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while all the while every
+drop of blood in you belonged to him!  But he's Shylock--and you
+have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut out of you.'
+But she despises me the most, you know--far the most--" Mrs.
+Vervain ended.
+
+The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room:
+they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon
+intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor
+might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere.  It
+was as though a grand opera-singer had strained the acoustics of
+a private music-room.
+
+Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess.  Half the room was
+between them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now
+that the veils of reticence and ambiguity had fallen.
+
+His first words were characteristic.  "She DOES despise me,
+then?" he exclaimed.
+
+"She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the
+heart."
+
+He was excessively pale.  "Please tell me exactly what she said
+of me."
+
+"She did not speak much of you: she is proud.  But I gather that
+while she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never
+been opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling.  At any
+rate, she expressed an unwillingness to be taken with
+reservations--she thinks you would have loved her better if you
+had loved some one else first.  The point of view is original--
+she insists on a man with a past!"
+
+"Oh, a past--if she's serious--I could rake up a past!" he said
+with a laugh.
+
+"So I suggested: but she has her eyes on his particular portion
+of it.  She insists on making it a test case.  She wanted to know
+what you had done to me; and before I could guess her drift I
+blundered into telling her."
+
+Thursdale drew a difficult breath.  "I never supposed--your
+revenge is complete," he said slowly.
+
+He heard a little gasp in her throat.  "My revenge?  When I sent
+for you to warn you--to save you from being surprised as I was
+surprised?"
+
+"You're very good--but it's rather late to talk of saving me."
+He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.
+
+"How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull," was her
+answer.  "Don't you see that it's not too late for me to help
+you?"  And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely:
+"Take the rest--in imagination!  Let it at least be of that much
+use to you.  Tell her I lied to her--she's too ready to believe
+it!  And so, after all, in a sense, I sha'n't have been wasted."
+
+His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder.  She gave
+the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient
+were too simple to need oblique approaches.  It was extraordinary
+how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most
+complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.
+
+It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but
+something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light.
+He went up to his friend and took her hand.
+
+"You would do it--you would do it!"
+
+She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.
+
+"Good-by," he said, kissing it.
+
+"Good-by?  You are going--?"
+
+"To get my letter."
+
+"Your letter?  The letter won't matter, if you will only do what
+I ask."
+
+He returned her gaze.  "I might, I suppose, without being out of
+character.  Only, don't you see that if your plan helped me it
+could only harm her?"
+
+"Harm HER?"
+
+"To sacrifice you wouldn't make me different.  I shall go on
+being what I have always been--sifting and sorting, as she calls
+it.  Do you want my punishment to fall on HER?"
+
+She looked at him long and deeply.  "Ah, if I had to choose
+between you--!"
+
+"You would let her take her chance?  But I can't, you see.
+I must take my punishment alone."
+
+She drew her hand away, sighing.  "Oh, there will be no
+punishment for either of you."
+
+"For either of us?  There will be the reading of her letter for me."
+
+She shook her head with a slight laugh.  "There will be no
+letter."
+
+Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his
+look.  "No letter?  You don't mean--"
+
+"I mean that she's been with you since I saw her--she's seen you
+and heard your voice.  If there IS a letter, she has recalled it--
+from the first station, by telegraph."
+
+He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile.  "But
+in the mean while I shall have read it," he said.
+
+The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful
+emptiness of the room.
+
+
+The End
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND
+as first published in
+Atlantic Monthly, August 1904
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Above all," the letter ended, "don't leave Siena without seeing
+Doctor Lombard's Leonardo.  Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a
+mystic or a madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout
+student of the Italian Renaissance.  He has lived for years in
+Italy, exploring its remotest corners, and has lately picked up
+an undoubted Leonardo, which came to light in a farmhouse near
+Bergamo.  It is believed to be one of the missing pictures
+mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according to the most
+competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched example of
+the best period.
+
+"Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures;
+but we struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas
+in Siena three years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed
+line you may get a peep at the Leonardo.  Probably not more than
+a peep, though, for I hear he refuses to have it reproduced.  I
+want badly to use it in my monograph on the Windsor drawings, so
+please see what you can do for me, and if you can't persuade him
+to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at least jot down
+a detailed description of the picture and get from him all the
+facts you can.  I hear that the French and Italian governments
+have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he
+refuses to sell at any price, though he certainly can't afford
+such luxuries; in fact, I don't see where he got enough money to
+buy the picture.  He lives in the Via Papa Giulio."
+
+Wyant sat at the table d'hote of his hotel, re-reading his
+friend's letter over a late luncheon.  He had been five days in
+Siena without having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not
+from any indifference to the opportunity presented, but because
+it was his first visit to the strange red city and he was still
+under the spell of its more conspicuous wonders--the brick
+palaces flinging out their wrought-iron torch-holders with a
+gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great council-chamber
+emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope Julius on
+the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the dusk
+of mouldering chapels--and it was only when his first hunger was
+appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was
+still untasted.
+
+He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room,
+with a nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man
+with lustrous eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of
+the table, perusing the Fanfulla di Domenica.  This gentleman,
+his daily vis-a-vis, returned the nod with a Latin eloquence of
+gesture, and Wyant passed on to the ante-chamber, where he paused
+to light a cigarette.  He was just restoring the case to his
+pocket when he heard a hurried step behind him, and the lustrous-
+eyed young man advanced through the glass doors of the dining-
+room.
+
+"Pardon me, sir," he said in measured English, and with an
+intonation of exquisite politeness; "you have let this letter
+fall."
+
+Wyant, recognizing his friend's note of introduction to Doctor
+Lombard, took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn
+away when he perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained
+fixed on him with a gaze of melancholy interrogation.
+
+"Again pardon me," the young man at length ventured, "but are you
+by chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?"
+
+"No," returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust
+of foreign advances.  Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with
+a guarded politeness: "Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the
+number of his house.  I see it is not given here."
+
+The young man brightened perceptibly.  "The number of the house
+is thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you--it is well known
+in Siena.  It is called," he continued after a moment, "the House
+of the Dead Hand."
+
+Wyant stared.  "What a queer name!" he said.
+
+"The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many
+hundred years has been above the door."
+
+Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other
+added: "If you would have the kindness to ring twice."
+
+"To ring twice?"
+
+"At the doctor's."  The young man smiled.  "It is the custom."
+
+It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the
+mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-
+colored hills.  For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza,
+watching the shadows race across the naked landscape and the
+thunder blacken in the west; then he decided to set out for the
+House of the Dead Hand.  The map in his guidebook showed him that
+the Via Papa Giulio was one of the streets which radiate from the
+Piazza, and thither he bent his course, pausing at every other
+step to fill his eye with some fresh image of weather-beaten
+beauty.  The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the sunshine and
+hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting cornices
+of Doctor Lombard's street, and Wyant walked for some distance in
+the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on a
+doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand.  He stood for a
+moment staring up at the strange emblem.  The hand was a woman's--
+a dead drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless,
+as though it had been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil
+mystery within the house, and had sunk struggling into death.
+
+A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that
+the English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing
+through a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted
+stairway with a plaster AEsculapius mouldering in a niche on the
+landing.  Facing the AEsculapius was another door, and as Wyant
+put his hand on the bell-rope he remembered his unknown friend's
+injunction, and rang twice.
+
+His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and
+small close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself,
+his card, and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a
+high, cold ante-chamber floored with brick.  He heard her wooden
+pattens click down an interminable corridor, and after some delay
+she returned and told him to follow her.
+
+They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but
+loftily vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph
+of Scipio or Alexander--martial figures following Wyant with the
+filmed melancholy gaze of shades in limbo.  At the end of this
+apartment he was admitted to a smaller room, with the same
+atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing more obvious signs of
+occupancy.  The walls were covered with tapestry which had faded
+to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that the young
+man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn wood.
+Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt
+feet, and at a table in the window three persons were seated: an
+elderly lady who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl
+bent above a strip of needle-work, and an old man.
+
+As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious
+of staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed
+figure, dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a
+wonderful head, lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-
+loving despot of the Renaissance: a head combining the venerable
+hair and large prominent eyes of the humanist with the greedy
+profile of the adventurer.  Wyant, in musing on the Italian
+portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had often fancied that
+only in that period of fierce individualism could types so
+paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who
+committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more
+strangely stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor
+Lombard.
+
+"I am glad to see you," he said to Wyant, extending a hand which
+seemed a mere framework held together by knotted veins.  "We lead
+a quiet life here and receive few visitors, but any friend of
+Professor Clyde's is welcome."  Then, with a gesture which
+included the two women, he added dryly: "My wife and daughter
+often talk of Professor Clyde."
+
+"Oh yes--he used to make me such nice toast; they don't
+understand toast in Italy," said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive
+voice.
+
+It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard's manner and
+appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so
+inconsciently and ineradicably English that even the silhouette
+of her cap seemed a protest against Continental laxities.  She
+was a stout fair woman, with pale cheeks netted with red lines.
+A brooch with a miniature portrait sustained a bogwood watch-
+chain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a heap of knitting and
+an old copy of The Queen.
+
+The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of
+her mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes.  Her
+small head was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair,
+and she might have had a kind of transient prettiness but for the
+sullen droop of her round mouth.  It was hard to say whether her
+expression implied ill-temper or apathy; but Wyant was struck by
+the contrast between the fierce vitality of the doctor's age and
+the inanimateness of his daughter's youth.
+
+Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young
+man tried to open the conversation by addressing to Mrs. Lombard
+some random remark on the beauties of Siena.  The lady murmured a
+resigned assent, and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: "My
+dear sir, my wife considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is
+favorably impressed by the cheapness of the marketing; but she
+deplores the total absence of muffins and cannel coal, and cannot
+resign herself to the Italian method of dusting furniture."
+
+"But they don't, you know--they don't dust it!" Mrs. Lombard
+protested, without showing any resentment of her husband's
+manner.
+
+"Precisely--they don't dust it.  Since we have lived in Siena we
+have not once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of
+the Mangia.  Can you conceive of such housekeeping?  My wife has
+never yet dared to write it home to her aunts at Bonchurch."
+
+Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her
+views, and her husband, with a malicious smile at Wyant's
+embarrassment, planted himself suddenly before the young man.
+
+"And now," said he, "do you want to see my Leonardo?"
+
+"DO I?" cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.
+
+The doctor chuckled.  "Ah," he said, with a kind of crooning
+deliberation, "that's the way they all behave--that's what they
+all come for."  He turned to his daughter with another variation
+of mockery in his smile.  "Don't fancy it's for your beaux yeux,
+my dear; or for the mature charms of Mrs. Lombard," he added,
+glaring suddenly at his wife, who had taken up her knitting and
+was softly murmuring over the number of her stitches.
+
+Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he
+continued, addressing himself to Wyant: "They all come--they all
+come; but many are called and few are chosen."  His voice sank to
+solemnity.  "While I live," he said, "no unworthy eye shall
+desecrate that picture.  But I will not do my friend Clyde the
+injustice to suppose that he would send an unworthy
+representative.  He tells me he wishes a description of the
+picture for his book; and you shall describe it to him--if you
+can."
+
+Wyant hesitated, not knowing whether it was a propitious moment
+to put in his appeal for a photograph.
+
+"Well, sir," he said, "you know Clyde wants me to take away all I
+can of it."
+
+Doctor Lombard eyed him sardonically.  "You're welcome to take
+away all you can carry," he replied; adding, as he turned to his
+daughter: "That is, if he has your permission, Sybilla."
+
+The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a
+key from a secret drawer in one of the cabinets, while the doctor
+continued in the same note of grim jocularity: "For you must know
+that the picture is not mine--it is my daughter's."
+
+He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which
+Wyant turned on the young girl's impassive figure.
+
+"Sybilla," he pursued, "is a votary of the arts; she has
+inherited her fond father's passion for the unattainable.
+Luckily, however, she also recently inherited a tidy legacy from
+her grandmother; and having seen the Leonardo, on which its
+discoverer had placed a price far beyond my reach, she took a
+step which deserves to go down to history: she invested her whole
+inheritance in the purchase of the picture, thus enabling me to
+spend my closing years in communion with one of the world's
+masterpieces.  My dear sir, could Antigone do more?"
+
+The object of this strange eulogy had meanwhile drawn aside one
+of the tapestry hangings, and fitted her key into a concealed
+door.
+
+"Come," said Doctor Lombard, "let us go before the light fails
+us."
+
+Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.
+
+"No, no," said his host, "my wife will not come with us.  You
+might not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no
+feeling for art--Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of
+our early Victorian school."
+
+"Frith's Railway Station, you know," said Mrs. Lombard, smiling.
+"I like an animated picture."
+
+Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry
+to let her father and Wyant pass out; then she followed them down
+a narrow stone passage with another door at its end.  This door
+was iron-barred, and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated
+patent lock.  The girl fitted another key into the lock, and
+Doctor Lombard led the way into a small room.  The dark panelling
+of this apartment was irradiated by streams of yellow light
+slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in the central
+brightness hung a picture concealed by a curtain of faded velvet.
+
+"A little too bright, Sybilla," said Doctor Lombard.  His face
+had grown solemn, and his mouth twitched nervously as his
+daughter drew a linen drapery across the upper part of the
+window.
+
+"That will do--that will do."  He turned impressively to Wyant.
+"Do you see the pomegranate bud in this rug?  Place yourself
+there--keep your left foot on it, please.  And now, Sybilla, draw
+the cord."
+
+Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind
+the velvet curtain.
+
+"Ah," said the doctor, "one moment: I should like you, while
+looking at the picture, to have in mind a few lines of verse.
+Sybilla--"
+
+Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a
+promptness which proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss
+Lombard began to recite, in a full round voice like her mother's,
+St. Bernard's invocation to the Virgin, in the thirty-third canto
+of the Paradise.
+
+"Thank you, my dear," said her father, drawing a deep breath as
+she ended.  "That unapproachable combination of vowel sounds
+prepares one better than anything I know for the contemplation of
+the picture."
+
+As he spoke the folds of velvet slowly parted, and the Leonardo
+appeared in its frame of tarnished gold:
+
+From the nature of Miss Lombard's recitation Wyant had expected a
+sacred subject, and his surprise was therefore great as the
+composition was gradually revealed by the widening division of
+the curtain.
+
+In the background a steel-colored river wound through a pale
+calcareous landscape; while to the left, on a lonely peak, a
+crucified Christ hung livid against indigo clouds.  The central
+figure of the foreground, however, was that of a woman seated in
+an antique chair of marble with bas-reliefs of dancing maenads.
+Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled with minute wild-flowers,
+and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled that of Dosso
+Dossi's Circe.  She wore a red robe, flowing in closely fluted
+lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak.  Above her high
+forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil;
+one hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an
+inverted human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown
+and sidelong as the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of
+wine from a high-poised flagon.  At the lady's feet lay the
+symbols of art and luxury: a flute and a roll of music, a platter
+heaped with grapes and roses, the torso of a Greek statuette, and
+a bowl overflowing with coins and jewels; behind her, on the
+chalky hilltop, hung the crucified Christ.  A scroll in a corner
+of the foreground bore the legend: Lux Mundi.
+
+Wyant, emerging from the first plunge of wonder, turned
+inquiringly toward his companions.  Neither had moved.  Miss
+Lombard stood with her hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her
+mouth drooping; the doctor, his strange Thoth-like profile turned
+toward his guest, was still lost in rapt contemplation of his
+treasure.
+
+Wyant addressed the young girl.
+
+"You are fortunate," he said, "to be the possessor of anything so
+perfect."
+
+"It is considered very beautiful," she said coldly.
+
+"Beautiful--BEAUTIFUL!" the doctor burst out.  "Ah, the poor,
+worn out, over-worked word!  There are no adjectives in the
+language fresh enough to describe such pristine brilliancy; all
+their brightness has been worn off by misuse.  Think of the
+things that have been called beautiful, and then look at THAT!"
+
+"It is worthy of a new vocabulary," Wyant agreed.
+
+"Yes," Doctor Lombard continued, "my daughter is indeed
+fortunate.  She has chosen what Catholics call the higher life--
+the counsel of perfection.  What other private person enjoys the
+same opportunity of understanding the master?  Who else lives
+under the same roof with an untouched masterpiece of Leonardo's?
+Think of the happiness of being always under the influence of
+such a creation; of living INTO it; of partaking of it in daily
+and hourly communion!  This room is a chapel; the sight of that
+picture is a sacrament.  What an atmosphere for a young life to
+unfold itself in!  My daughter is singularly blessed.  Sybilla,
+point out some of the details to Mr. Wyant; I see that he will
+appreciate them."
+
+The girl turned her dense blue eyes toward Wyant; then, glancing
+away from him, she pointed to the canvas.
+
+"Notice the modeling of the left hand," she began in a monotonous
+voice; "it recalls the hand of the Mona Lisa.  The head of the
+naked genius will remind you of that of the St. John of the
+Louvre, but it is more purely pagan and is turned a little less
+to the right.  The embroidery on the cloak is symbolic: you will
+see that the roots of this plant have burst through the vase.
+This recalls the famous definition of Hamlet's character in
+Wilhelm Meister.  Here are the mystic rose, the flame, and the
+serpent, emblem of eternity.  Some of the other symbols we have
+not yet been able to decipher."
+
+Wyant watched her curiously; she seemed to be reciting a lesson.
+
+"And the picture itself?" he said.  "How do you explain that?
+Lux Mundi--what a curious device to connect with such a subject!
+What can it mean?"
+
+Miss Lombard dropped her eyes: the answer was evidently not
+included in her lesson.
+
+"What, indeed?" the doctor interposed.  "What does life mean?  As
+one may define it in a hundred different ways, so one may find a
+hundred different meanings in this picture.  Its symbolism is as
+many-faceted as a well-cut diamond.  Who, for instance, is that
+divine lady?  Is it she who is the true Lux Mundi--the light
+reflected from jewels and young eyes, from polished marble and
+clear waters and statues of bronze?  Or is that the Light of the
+World, extinguished on yonder stormy hill, and is this lady the
+Pride of Life, feasting blindly on the wine of iniquity, with her
+back turned to the light which has shone for her in vain?
+Something of both these meanings may be traced in the picture;
+but to me it symbolizes rather the central truth of existence:
+that all that is raised in incorruption is sown in corruption;
+art, beauty, love, religion; that all our wine is drunk out of
+skulls, and poured for us by the mysterious genius of a remote
+and cruel past."
+
+The doctor's face blazed: his bent figure seemed to straighten
+itself and become taller.
+
+"Ah," he cried, growing more dithyrambic, "how lightly you ask
+what it means!  How confidently you expect an answer!  Yet here
+am I who have given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who
+have violated its tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the
+course of every muscle, bone, and artery; who have sucked its
+very soul from the pages of poets and humanists; who have wept
+and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled and doubted with
+AEneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed to its
+source the least inspiration of the masters, and groped in
+neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding
+tendrils of the arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell
+you that I stand abashed and ignorant before the mystery of this
+picture.  It means nothing--it means all things.  It may
+represent the period which saw its creation; it may represent all
+ages past and to come.  There are volumes of meaning in the
+tiniest emblem on the lady's cloak; the blossoms of its border
+are rooted in the deepest soil of myth and tradition.  Don't ask
+what it means, young man, but bow your head in thankfulness for
+having seen it!"
+
+Miss Lombard laid her hand on his arm.
+
+"Don't excite yourself, father," she said in the detached tone of
+a professional nurse.
+
+He answered with a despairing gesture.  "Ah, it's easy for you to
+talk.  You have years and years to spend with it; I am an old
+man, and every moment counts!"
+
+"It's bad for you," she repeated with gentle obstinacy.
+
+The doctor's sacred fury had in fact burnt itself out.  He
+dropped into a seat with dull eyes and slackening lips, and his
+daughter drew the curtain across the picture.
+
+Wyant turned away reluctantly.  He felt that his opportunity was
+slipping from him, yet he dared not refer to Clyde's wish for a
+photograph.  He now understood the meaning of the laugh with
+which Doctor Lombard had given him leave to carry away all the
+details he could remember.  The picture was so dazzling, so
+unexpected, so crossed with elusive and contradictory
+suggestions, that the most alert observer, when placed suddenly
+before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of
+confused wonder.  Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a
+work would be!  In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of
+the master's thought, the key to his enigmatic philosophy.
+
+The doctor had risen and was walking slowly toward the door.  His
+daughter unlocked it, and Wyant followed them back in silence to
+the room in which they had left Mrs. Lombard.  That lady was no
+longer there, and he could think of no excuse for lingering.
+
+He thanked the doctor, and turned to Miss Lombard, who stood in
+the middle of the room as though awaiting farther orders.
+
+"It is very good of you," he said, "to allow one even a glimpse
+of such a treasure."
+
+She looked at him with her odd directness.  "You will come
+again?" she said quickly; and turning to her father she added:
+"You know what Professor Clyde asked.  This gentleman cannot give
+him any account of the picture without seeing it again."
+
+Doctor Lombard glanced at her vaguely; he was still like a person
+in a trance.
+
+"Eh?" he said, rousing himself with an effort.
+
+"I said, father, that Mr. Wyant must see the picture again if he
+is to tell Professor Clyde about it," Miss Lombard repeated with
+extraordinary precision of tone.
+
+Wyant was silent.  He had the puzzled sense that his wishes were
+being divined and gratified for reasons with which he was in no
+way connected.
+
+"Well, well," the doctor muttered, "I don't say no--I don't say
+no.  I know what Clyde wants--I don't refuse to help him."  He
+turned to Wyant.  "You may come again--you may make notes," he
+added with a sudden effort.  "Jot down what occurs to you.  I'm
+willing to concede that."
+
+Wyant again caught the girl's eye, but its emphatic message
+perplexed him.
+
+"You're very good," he said tentatively, "but the fact is the
+picture is so mysterious--so full of complicated detail--that I'm
+afraid no notes I could make would serve Clyde's purpose as well
+as--as a photograph, say.  If you would allow me--"
+
+Miss Lombard's brow darkened, and her father raised his head
+furiously.
+
+"A photograph?  A photograph, did you say?  Good God, man, not
+ten people have been allowed to set foot in that room!  A
+PHOTOGRAPH?"
+
+Wyant saw his mistake, but saw also that he had gone too far to
+retreat.
+
+"I know, sir, from what Clyde has told me, that you object to
+having any reproduction of the picture published; but he hoped
+you might let me take a photograph for his personal use--not to
+be reproduced in his book, but simply to give him something to
+work by.  I should take the photograph myself, and the negative
+would of course be yours.  If you wished it, only one impression
+would be struck off, and that one Clyde could return to you when
+he had done with it."
+
+Doctor Lombard interrupted him with a snarl.  "When he had done
+with it?  Just so: I thank thee for that word!  When it had been
+re-photographed, drawn, traced, autotyped, passed about from hand
+to hand, defiled by every ignorant eye in England, vulgarized by
+the blundering praise of every art-scribbler in Europe!  Bah!
+I'd as soon give you the picture itself: why don't you ask for
+that?"
+
+"Well, sir," said Wyant calmly, "if you will trust me with it,
+I'll engage to take it safely to England and back, and to let no
+eye but Clyde's see it while it is out of your keeping."
+
+The doctor received this remarkable proposal in silence; then he
+burst into a laugh.
+
+"Upon my soul!" he said with sardonic good humor.
+
+It was Miss Lombard's turn to look perplexedly at Wyant.  His
+last words and her father's unexpected reply had evidently
+carried her beyond her depth.
+
+"Well, sir, am I to take the picture?" Wyant smilingly pursued.
+
+"No, young man; nor a photograph of it.  Nor a sketch, either;
+mind that,--nothing that can be reproduced.  Sybilla," he cried
+with sudden passion, "swear to me that the picture shall never be
+reproduced!  No photograph, no sketch--now or afterward.  Do you
+hear me?"
+
+"Yes, father," said the girl quietly.
+
+"The vandals," he muttered, "the desecrators of beauty; if I
+thought it would ever get into their hands I'd burn it first, by
+God!"  He turned to Wyant, speaking more quietly.  "I said you
+might come back--I never retract what I say.  But you must give
+me your word that no one but Clyde shall see the notes you make."
+
+Wyant was growing warm.
+
+"If you won't trust me with a photograph I wonder you trust me
+not to show my notes!" he exclaimed.
+
+The doctor looked at him with a malicious smile.
+
+"Humph!" he said; "would they be of much use to anybody?"
+
+Wyant saw that he was losing ground and controlled his
+impatience.
+
+"To Clyde, I hope, at any rate," he answered, holding out his
+hand.  The doctor shook it without a trace of resentment, and
+Wyant added: "When shall I come, sir?"
+
+"To-morrow--to-morrow morning," cried Miss Lombard, speaking
+suddenly.
+
+She looked fixedly at her father, and he shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"The picture is hers," he said to Wyant.
+
+In the ante-chamber the young man was met by the woman who had
+admitted him.  She handed him his hat and stick, and turned to
+unbar the door.  As the bolt slipped back he felt a touch on his
+arm.
+
+"You have a letter?" she said in a low tone.
+
+"A letter?"  He stared.  "What letter?"
+
+She shrugged her shoulders, and drew back to let him pass.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+As Wyant emerged from the house he paused once more to glance up
+at its scarred brick facade.  The marble hand drooped tragically
+above the entrance: in the waning light it seemed to have relaxed
+into the passiveness of despair, and Wyant stood musing on its
+hidden meaning.  But the Dead Hand was not the only mysterious
+thing about Doctor Lombard's house.  What were the relations
+between Miss Lombard and her father?  Above all, between Miss
+Lombard and her picture?  She did not look like a person capable
+of a disinterested passion for the arts; and there had been
+moments when it struck Wyant that she hated the picture.
+
+The sky at the end of the street was flooded with turbulent
+yellow light, and the young man turned his steps toward the
+church of San Domenico, in the hope of catching the lingering
+brightness on Sodoma's St. Catherine.
+
+The great bare aisles were almost dark when he entered, and he
+had to grope his way to the chapel steps.  Under the momentary
+evocation of the sunset, the saint's figure emerged pale and
+swooning from the dusk, and the warm light gave a sensual tinge
+to her ecstasy.  The flesh seemed to glow and heave, the eyelids
+to tremble; Wyant stood fascinated by the accidental
+collaboration of light and color.
+
+Suddenly he noticed that something white had fluttered to the
+ground at his feet.  He stooped and picked up a small thin sheet
+of note-paper, folded and sealed like an old-fashioned letter,
+and bearing the superscription:--
+
+
+To the Count Ottaviano Celsi.
+
+
+Wyant stared at this mysterious document.  Where had it come
+from?  He was distinctly conscious of having seen it fall through
+the air, close to his feet.  He glanced up at the dark ceiling of
+the chapel; then he turned and looked about the church.  There
+was only one figure in it, that of a man who knelt near the high
+altar.
+
+Suddenly Wyant recalled the question of Doctor Lombard's maid-
+servant.  Was this the letter she had asked for?  Had he been
+unconsciously carrying it about with him all the afternoon?  Who
+was Count Ottaviano Celsi, and how came Wyant to have been chosen
+to act as that nobleman's ambulant letter-box?
+
+Wyant laid his hat and stick on the chapel steps and began to
+explore his pockets, in the irrational hope of finding there some
+clue to the mystery; but they held nothing which he had not
+himself put there, and he was reduced to wondering how the
+letter, supposing some unknown hand to have bestowed it on him,
+had happened to fall out while he stood motionless before the
+picture.
+
+At this point he was disturbed by a step on the floor of the
+aisle, and turning, he saw his lustrous-eyed neighbor of the
+table d'hote.
+
+The young man bowed and waved an apologetic hand.
+
+"I do not intrude?" he inquired suavely.
+
+Without waiting for a reply, he mounted the steps of the chapel,
+glancing about him with the affable air of an afternoon caller.
+
+"I see," he remarked with a smile, "that you know the hour at
+which our saint should be visited."
+
+Wyant agreed that the hour was indeed felicitous.
+
+The stranger stood beamingly before the picture.
+
+"What grace!  What poetry!" he murmured, apostrophizing the St.
+Catherine, but letting his glance slip rapidly about the chapel
+as he spoke.
+
+Wyant, detecting the manoeuvre, murmured a brief assent.
+
+"But it is cold here--mortally cold; you do not find it so?"  The
+intruder put on his hat.  "It is permitted at this hour--when the
+church is empty.  And you, my dear sir--do you not feel the
+dampness?  You are an artist, are you not?  And to artists it is
+permitted to cover the head when they are engaged in the study of
+the paintings."
+
+He darted suddenly toward the steps and bent over Wyant's hat.
+
+"Permit me--cover yourself!" he said a moment later, holding out
+the hat with an ingratiating gesture.
+
+A light flashed on Wyant.
+
+"Perhaps," he said, looking straight at the young man, "you will
+tell me your name.  My own is Wyant."
+
+The stranger, surprised, but not disconcerted, drew forth a
+coroneted card, which he offered with a low bow.  On the card was
+engraved:--
+
+
+Il Conte Ottaviano Celsi.
+
+
+"I am much obliged to you," said Wyant; "and I may as well tell
+you that the letter which you apparently expected to find in the
+lining of my hat is not there, but in my pocket."
+
+He drew it out and handed it to its owner, who had grown very
+pale.
+
+"And now," Wyant continued, "you will perhaps be good enough to
+tell me what all this means."
+
+There was no mistaking the effect produced on Count Ottaviano by
+this request.  His lips moved, but he achieved only an
+ineffectual smile.
+
+"I suppose you know," Wyant went on, his anger rising at the
+sight of the other's discomfiture, "that you have taken an
+unwarrantable liberty.  I don't yet understand what part I have
+been made to play, but it's evident that you have made use of me
+to serve some purpose of your own, and I propose to know the
+reason why."
+
+Count Ottaviano advanced with an imploring gesture.
+
+"Sir," he pleaded, "you permit me to speak?"
+
+"I expect you to," cried Wyant.  "But not here," he added,
+hearing the clank of the verger's keys.  "It is growing dark, and
+we shall be turned out in a few minutes."
+
+He walked across the church, and Count Ottaviano followed him out
+into the deserted square.
+
+"Now," said Wyant, pausing on the steps.
+
+The Count, who had regained some measure of self-possession,
+began to speak in a high key, with an accompaniment of
+conciliatory gesture.
+
+"My dear sir--my dear Mr. Wyant--you find me in an abominable
+position--that, as a man of honor, I immediately confess.  I have
+taken advantage of you--yes!  I have counted on your amiability,
+your chivalry--too far, perhaps?  I confess it!  But what could I
+do?  It was to oblige a lady"--he laid a hand on his heart--"a
+lady whom I would die to serve!"  He went on with increasing
+volubility, his deliberate English swept away by a torrent of
+Italian, through which Wyant, with some difficulty, struggled to
+a comprehension of the case.
+
+Count Ottaviano, according to his own statement, had come to
+Siena some months previously, on business connected with his
+mother's property; the paternal estate being near Orvieto, of
+which ancient city his father was syndic.  Soon after his arrival
+in Siena the young Count had met the incomparable daughter of
+Doctor Lombard, and falling deeply in love with her, had
+prevailed on his parents to ask her hand in marriage.  Doctor
+Lombard had not opposed his suit, but when the question of
+settlements arose it became known that Miss Lombard, who was
+possessed of a small property in her own right, had a short time
+before invested the whole amount in the purchase of the Bergamo
+Leonardo.  Thereupon Count Ottaviano's parents had politely
+suggested that she should sell the picture and thus recover her
+independence; and this proposal being met by a curt refusal from
+Doctor Lombard, they had withdrawn their consent to their son's
+marriage.  The young lady's attitude had hitherto been one of
+passive submission; she was horribly afraid of her father, and
+would never venture openly to oppose him; but she had made known
+to Ottaviano her intention of not giving him up, of waiting
+patiently till events should take a more favorable turn.  She
+seemed hardly aware, the Count said with a sigh, that the means
+of escape lay in her own hands; that she was of age, and had a
+right to sell the picture, and to marry without asking her
+father's consent.  Meanwhile her suitor spared no pains to keep
+himself before her, to remind her that he, too, was waiting and
+would never give her up.
+
+Doctor Lombard, who suspected the young man of trying to persuade
+Sybilla to sell the picture, had forbidden the lovers to meet or
+to correspond; they were thus driven to clandestine
+communication, and had several times, the Count ingenuously
+avowed, made use of the doctor's visitors as a means of
+exchanging letters.
+
+"And you told the visitors to ring twice?" Wyant interposed.
+
+The young man extended his hands in a deprecating gesture.  Could
+Mr. Wyant blame him?  He was young, he was ardent, he was
+enamored!  The young lady had done him the supreme honor of
+avowing her attachment, of pledging her unalterable fidelity;
+should he suffer his devotion to be outdone?  But his purpose in
+writing to her, he admitted, was not merely to reiterate his
+fidelity; he was trying by every means in his power to induce her
+to sell the picture.  He had organized a plan of action; every
+detail was complete; if she would but have the courage to carry
+out his instructions he would answer for the result.  His idea
+was that she should secretly retire to a convent of which his
+aunt was the Mother Superior, and from that stronghold should
+transact the sale of the Leonardo.  He had a purchaser ready, who
+was willing to pay a large sum; a sum, Count Ottaviano whispered,
+considerably in excess of the young lady's original inheritance;
+once the picture sold, it could, if necessary, be removed by
+force from Doctor Lombard's house, and his daughter, being safely
+in the convent, would be spared the painful scenes incidental to
+the removal.  Finally, if Doctor Lombard were vindictive enough
+to refuse his consent to her marriage, she had only to make a
+sommation respectueuse, and at the end of the prescribed delay no
+power on earth could prevent her becoming the wife of Count
+Ottaviano.
+
+Wyant's anger had fallen at the recital of this simple romance.
+It was absurd to be angry with a young man who confided his
+secrets to the first stranger he met in the streets, and placed
+his hand on his heart whenever he mentioned the name of his
+betrothed.  The easiest way out of the business was to take it as
+a joke.  Wyant had played the wall to this new Pyramus and
+Thisbe, and was philosophic enough to laugh at the part he had
+unwittingly performed.
+
+He held out his hand with a smile to Count Ottaviano.
+
+"I won't deprive you any longer," he said, "of the pleasure of
+reading your letter."
+
+"Oh, sir, a thousand thanks!  And when you return to the casa
+Lombard, you will take a message from me--the letter she expected
+this afternoon?"
+
+"The letter she expected?"  Wyant paused.  "No, thank you.  I
+thought you understood that where I come from we don't do that
+kind of thing--knowingly."
+
+"But, sir, to serve a young lady!"
+
+"I'm sorry for the young lady, if what you tell me is true"--the
+Count's expressive hands resented the doubt--"but remember that
+if I am under obligations to any one in this matter, it is to her
+father, who has admitted me to his house and has allowed me to
+see his picture."
+
+"HIS picture?  Hers!"
+
+"Well, the house is his, at all events."
+
+"Unhappily--since to her it is a dungeon!"
+
+"Why doesn't she leave it, then?" exclaimed Wyant impatiently.
+
+The Count clasped his hands.  "Ah, how you say that--with what
+force, with what virility!  If you would but say it to HER in
+that tone--you, her countryman!  She has no one to advise her;
+the mother is an idiot; the father is terrible; she is in his
+power; it is my belief that he would kill her if she resisted
+him.  Mr. Wyant, I tremble for her life while she remains in that
+house!"
+
+"Oh, come," said Wyant lightly, "they seem to understand each
+other well enough.  But in any case, you must see that I can't
+interfere--at least you would if you were an Englishman," he
+added with an escape of contempt.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Wyant's affiliations in Siena being restricted to an acquaintance
+with his land-lady, he was forced to apply to her for the
+verification of Count Ottaviano's story.
+
+The young nobleman had, it appeared, given a perfectly correct
+account of his situation.  His father, Count Celsi-Mongirone, was
+a man of distinguished family and some wealth.  He was syndic of
+Orvieto, and lived either in that town or on his neighboring
+estate of Mongirone.  His wife owned a large property near Siena,
+and Count Ottaviano, who was the second son, came there from time
+to time to look into its management.  The eldest son was in the
+army, the youngest in the Church; and an aunt of Count
+Ottaviano's was Mother Superior of the Visitandine convent in
+Siena.  At one time it had been said that Count Ottaviano, who
+was a most amiable and accomplished young man, was to marry the
+daughter of the strange Englishman, Doctor Lombard, but
+difficulties having arisen as to the adjustment of the young
+lady's dower, Count Celsi-Mongirone had very properly broken off
+the match.  It was sad for the young man, however, who was said
+to be deeply in love, and to find frequent excuses for coming to
+Siena to inspect his mother's estate.
+
+Viewed in the light of Count Ottaviano's personality the story
+had a tinge of opera bouffe; but the next morning, as Wyant
+mounted the stairs of the House of the Dead Hand, the situation
+insensibly assumed another aspect.  It was impossible to take
+Doctor Lombard lightly; and there was a suggestion of fatality in
+the appearance of his gaunt dwelling.  Who could tell amid what
+tragic records of domestic tyranny and fluttering broken purposes
+the little drama of Miss Lombard's fate was being played out?
+Might not the accumulated influences of such a house modify the
+lives within it in a manner unguessed by the inmates of a
+suburban villa with sanitary plumbing and a telephone?
+
+One person, at least, remained unperturbed by such fanciful
+problems; and that was Mrs. Lombard, who, at Wyant's entrance,
+raised a placidly wrinkled brow from her knitting.  The morning
+was mild, and her chair had been wheeled into a bar of sunshine
+near the window, so that she made a cheerful spot of prose in the
+poetic gloom of her surroundings.
+
+"What a nice morning!" she said; "it must be delightful weather
+at Bonchurch."
+
+Her dull blue glance wandered across the narrow street with its
+threatening house fronts, and fluttered back baffled, like a bird
+with clipped wings.  It was evident, poor lady, that she had
+never seen beyond the opposite houses.
+
+Wyant was not sorry to find her alone.  Seeing that she was
+surprised at his reappearance he said at once: "I have come back
+to study Miss Lombard's picture."
+
+"Oh, the picture--"  Mrs. Lombard's face expressed a gentle
+disappointment, which might have been boredom in a person of
+acuter sensibilities.  "It's an original Leonardo, you know," she
+said mechanically.
+
+"And Miss Lombard is very proud of it, I suppose?  She seems to
+have inherited her father's love for art."
+
+Mrs. Lombard counted her stitches, and he went on: "It's unusual
+in so young a girl.  Such tastes generally develop later."
+
+Mrs. Lombard looked up eagerly.  "That's what I say!  I was quite
+different at her age, you know.  I liked dancing, and doing a
+pretty bit of fancy-work.  Not that I couldn't sketch, too; I had
+a master down from London.  My aunts have some of my crayons hung
+up in their drawing-room now--I did a view of Kenilworth which
+was thought pleasing.  But I liked a picnic, too, or a pretty
+walk through the woods with young people of my own age.  I say
+it's more natural, Mr. Wyant; one may have a feeling for art, and
+do crayons that are worth framing, and yet not give up everything
+else.  I was taught that there were other things."
+
+Wyant, half-ashamed of provoking these innocent confidences,
+could not resist another question.  "And Miss Lombard cares for
+nothing else?"
+
+Her mother looked troubled.
+
+"Sybilla is so clever--she says I don't understand.  You know how
+self-confident young people are!  My husband never said that of
+me, now--he knows I had an excellent education.  My aunts were
+very particular; I was brought up to have opinions, and my
+husband has always respected them.  He says himself that he
+wouldn't for the world miss hearing my opinion on any subject;
+you may have noticed that he often refers to my tastes.  He has
+always respected my preference for living in England; he likes to
+hear me give my reasons for it.  He is so much interested in my
+ideas that he often says he knows just what I am going to say
+before I speak.  But Sybilla does not care for what I think--"
+
+At this point Doctor Lombard entered.  He glanced sharply at
+Wyant.  "The servant is a fool; she didn't tell me you were
+here."  His eye turned to his wife.  "Well, my dear, what have
+you been telling Mr. Wyant?  About the aunts at Bonchurch, I'll
+be bound!"
+
+Mrs. Lombard looked triumphantly at Wyant, and her husband rubbed
+his hooked fingers, with a smile.
+
+"Mrs. Lombard's aunts are very superior women.  They subscribe to
+the circulating library, and borrow Good Words and the Monthly
+Packet from the curate's wife across the way.  They have the
+rector to tea twice a year, and keep a page-boy, and are visited
+by two baronets' wives.  They devoted themselves to the education
+of their orphan niece, and I think I may say without boasting
+that Mrs. Lombard's conversation shows marked traces of the
+advantages she enjoyed."
+
+Mrs. Lombard colored with pleasure.
+
+"I was telling Mr. Wyant that my aunts were very particular."
+
+"Quite so, my dear; and did you mention that they never sleep in
+anything but linen, and that Miss Sophia puts away the furs and
+blankets every spring with her own hands?  Both those facts are
+interesting to the student of human nature."  Doctor Lombard
+glanced at his watch.  "But we are missing an incomparable
+moment; the light is perfect at this hour."
+
+Wyant rose, and the doctor led him through the tapestried door
+and down the passageway.
+
+The light was, in fact, perfect, and the picture shone with an
+inner radiancy, as though a lamp burned behind the soft screen of
+the lady's flesh.  Every detail of the foreground detached itself
+with jewel-like precision.  Wyant noticed a dozen accessories
+which had escaped him on the previous day.
+
+He drew out his note-book, and the doctor, who had dropped his
+sardonic grin for a look of devout contemplation, pushed a chair
+forward, and seated himself on a carved settle against the wall.
+
+"Now, then," he said, "tell Clyde what you can; but the letter
+killeth."
+
+He sank down, his hands hanging on the arm of the settle like the
+claws of a dead bird, his eyes fixed on Wyant's notebook with the
+obvious intention of detecting any attempt at a surreptitious
+sketch.
+
+Wyant, nettled at this surveillance, and disturbed by the
+speculations which Doctor Lombard's strange household excited,
+sat motionless for a few minutes, staring first at the picture
+and then at the blank pages of the note-book.  The thought that
+Doctor Lombard was enjoying his discomfiture at length roused
+him, and he began to write.
+
+He was interrupted by a knock on the iron door.  Doctor Lombard
+rose to unlock it, and his daughter entered.
+
+She bowed hurriedly to Wyant, without looking at him.
+
+"Father, had you forgotten that the man from Monte Amiato was to
+come back this morning with an answer about the bas-relief?  He
+is here now; he says he can't wait."
+
+"The devil!" cried her father impatiently.  "Didn't you tell him--"
+
+"Yes; but he says he can't come back.  If you want to see him you
+must come now."
+
+"Then you think there's a chance?--"
+
+She nodded.
+
+He turned and looked at Wyant, who was writing assiduously.
+
+"You will stay here, Sybilla; I shall be back in a moment."
+
+He hurried out, locking the door behind him.
+
+Wyant had looked up, wondering if Miss Lombard would show any
+surprise at being locked in with him; but it was his turn to be
+surprised, for hardly had they heard the key withdrawn when she
+moved close to him, her small face pale and tumultuous.
+
+"I arranged it--I must speak to you," she gasped.  "He'll be back
+in five minutes."
+
+Her courage seemed to fail, and she looked at him helplessly.
+
+Wyant had a sense of stepping among explosives.  He glanced about
+him at the dusky vaulted room, at the haunting smile of the
+strange picture overhead, and at the pink-and-white girl
+whispering of conspiracies in a voice meant to exchange
+platitudes with a curate.
+
+"How can I help you?" he said with a rush of compassion.
+
+"Oh, if you would!  I never have a chance to speak to any one;
+it's so difficult--he watches me--he'll be back immediately."
+
+"Try to tell me what I can do."
+
+"I don't dare; I feel as if he were behind me."  She turned away,
+fixing her eyes on the picture.  A sound startled her.  "There he
+comes, and I haven't spoken!  It was my only chance; but it
+bewilders me so to be hurried."
+
+"I don't hear any one," said Wyant, listening.  "Try to tell me."
+
+"How can I make you understand?  It would take so long to
+explain."  She drew a deep breath, and then with a plunge--"Will
+you come here again this afternoon--at about five?" she
+whispered.
+
+"Come here again?"
+
+"Yes--you can ask to see the picture,--make some excuse.  He will
+come with you, of course; I will open the door for you--and--and
+lock you both in"--she gasped.
+
+"Lock us in?"
+
+"You see?  You understand?  It's the only way for me to leave the
+house--if I am ever to do it"-- She drew another difficult
+breath.  "The key will be returned--by a safe person--in half an
+hour,--perhaps sooner--"
+
+She trembled so much that she was obliged to lean against the
+settle for support.
+
+"Wyant looked at her steadily; he was very sorry for her.
+
+"I can't, Miss Lombard," he said at length.
+
+"You can't?"
+
+"I'm sorry; I must seem cruel; but consider--"
+
+He was stopped by the futility of the word: as well ask a hunted
+rabbit to pause in its dash for a hole!
+
+Wyant took her hand; it was cold and nerveless.
+
+"I will serve you in any way I can; but you must see that this
+way is impossible.  Can't I talk to you again?  Perhaps--"
+
+"Oh," she cried, starting up, "there he comes!"
+
+Doctor Lombard's step sounded in the passage.
+
+Wyant held her fast.  "Tell me one thing: he won't let you sell
+the picture?"
+
+"No--hush!"
+
+"Make no pledges for the future, then; promise me that."
+
+"The future?"
+
+"In case he should die: your father is an old man.  You haven't
+promised?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Don't, then; remember that."
+
+She made no answer, and the key turned in the lock.
+
+As he passed out of the house, its scowling cornice and facade of
+ravaged brick looked down on him with the startlingness of a
+strange face, seen momentarily in a crowd, and impressing itself
+on the brain as part of an inevitable future.  Above the doorway,
+the marble hand reached out like the cry of an imprisoned
+anguish.
+
+Wyant turned away impatiently.
+
+"Rubbish!" he said to himself.  "SHE isn't walled in; she can get
+out if she wants to."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Wyant had any number of plans for coming to Miss Lombard's aid:
+he was elaborating the twentieth when, on the same afternoon, he
+stepped into the express train for Florence.  By the time the
+train reached Certaldo he was convinced that, in thus hastening
+his departure, he had followed the only reasonable course; at
+Empoli, he began to reflect that the priest and the Levite had
+probably justified themselves in much the same manner.
+
+A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly
+relieved from these alternatives of extenuation and approval.  A
+paragraph in the morning paper announced the sudden death of
+Doctor Lombard, the distinguished English dilettante who had long
+resided in Siena.  Wyant's justification was complete.  Our
+blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall
+in with the course of events.
+
+Wyant could now comfortably speculate on the particular
+complications from which his foresight had probably saved him.
+The climax was unexpectedly dramatic.  Miss Lombard, on the brink
+of a step which, whatever its issue, would have burdened her with
+retrospective compunction, had been set free before her suitor's
+ardor could have had time to cool, and was now doubtless planning
+a life of domestic felicity on the proceeds of the Leonardo.  One
+thing, however, struck Wyant as odd--he saw no mention of the
+sale of the picture.  He had scanned the papers for an immediate
+announcement of its transfer to one of the great museums; but
+presently concluding that Miss Lombard, out of filial piety, had
+wished to avoid an appearance of unseemly haste in the disposal
+of her treasure, he dismissed the matter from his mind.  Other
+affairs happened to engage him; the months slipped by, and
+gradually the lady and the picture dwelt less vividly in his
+mind.
+
+It was not till five or six years later, when chance took him
+again to Siena, that the recollection started from some inner
+fold of memory.  He found himself, as it happened, at the head of
+Doctor Lombard's street, and glancing down that grim
+thoroughfare, caught an oblique glimpse of the doctor's house
+front, with the Dead Hand projecting above its threshold.
+The sight revived his interest, and that evening, over an
+admirable frittata, he questioned his landlady about Miss
+Lombard's marriage.
+
+"The daughter of the English doctor?  But she has never married,
+signore."
+
+"Never married?  What, then, became of Count Ottaviano?"
+
+"For a long time he waited; but last year he married a noble lady
+of the Maremma."
+
+"But what happened--why was the marriage broken?"
+
+The landlady enacted a pantomime of baffled interrogation.
+
+"And Miss Lombard still lives in her father's house?"
+
+"Yes, signore; she is still there."
+
+"And the Leonardo--"
+
+"The Leonardo, also, is still there."
+
+The next day, as Wyant entered the House of the Dead Hand, he
+remembered Count Ottaviano's injunction to ring twice, and smiled
+mournfully to think that so much subtlety had been vain.  But
+what could have prevented the marriage?  If Doctor Lombard's
+death had been long delayed, time might have acted as a
+dissolvent, or the young lady's resolve have failed; but it
+seemed impossible that the white heat of ardor in which Wyant had
+left the lovers should have cooled in a few short weeks.
+
+As he ascended the vaulted stairway the atmosphere of the place
+seemed a reply to his conjectures.  The same numbing air fell on
+him, like an emanation from some persistent will-power, a
+something fierce and imminent which might reduce to impotence
+every impulse within its range.  Wyant could almost fancy a hand
+on his shoulder, guiding him upward with the ironical intent of
+confronting him with the evidence of its work.
+
+A strange servant opened the door, and he was presently
+introduced to the tapestried room, where, from their usual seats
+in the window, Mrs. Lombard and her daughter advanced to welcome
+him with faint ejaculations of surprise.
+
+Both had grown oddly old, but in a dry, smooth way, as fruits
+might shrivel on a shelf instead of ripening on the tree.  Mrs.
+Lombard was still knitting, and pausing now and then to warm her
+swollen hands above the brazier; and Miss Lombard, in rising, had
+laid aside a strip of needle-work which might have been the same
+on which Wyant had first seen her engaged.
+
+Their visitor inquired discreetly how they had fared in the
+interval, and learned that they had thought of returning to
+England, but had somehow never done so.
+
+"I am sorry not to see my aunts again," Mrs. Lombard said
+resignedly; "but Sybilla thinks it best that we should not go
+this year."
+
+"Next year, perhaps," murmured Miss Lombard, in a voice which
+seemed to suggest that they had a great waste of time to fill.
+
+She had returned to her seat, and sat bending over her work.  Her
+hair enveloped her head in the same thick braids, but the rose
+color of her cheeks had turned to blotches of dull red, like some
+pigment which has darkened in drying.
+
+"And Professor Clyde--is he well?" Mrs. Lombard asked affably;
+continuing, as her daughter raised a startled eye: "Surely,
+Sybilla, Mr. Wyant was the gentleman who was sent by Professor
+Clyde to see the Leonardo?"
+
+Miss Lombard was silent, but Wyant hastened to assure the elder
+lady of his friend's well-being.
+
+"Ah--perhaps, then, he will come back some day to Siena," she
+said, sighing.  Wyant declared that it was more than likely; and
+there ensued a pause, which he presently broke by saying to Miss
+Lombard: "And you still have the picture?"
+
+She raised her eyes and looked at him.  "Should you like to see
+it?" she asked.
+
+On his assenting, she rose, and extracting the same key from the
+same secret drawer, unlocked the door beneath the tapestry.  They
+walked down the passage in silence, and she stood aside with a
+grave gesture, making Wyant pass before her into the room.  Then
+she crossed over and drew the curtain back from the picture.
+
+The light of the early afternoon poured full on it: its surface
+appeared to ripple and heave with a fluid splendor.  The colors
+had lost none of their warmth, the outlines none of their pure
+precision; it seemed to Wyant like some magical flower which had
+burst suddenly from the mould of darkness and oblivion.
+
+He turned to Miss Lombard with a movement of comprehension.
+
+"Ah, I understand--you couldn't part with it, after all!" he cried.
+
+"No--I couldn't part with it," she answered.
+
+"It's too beautiful,--too beautiful,"--he assented.
+
+"Too beautiful?"  She turned on him with a curious stare.  "I
+have never thought it beautiful, you know."
+
+He gave back the stare.  "You have never--"
+
+She shook her head.  "It's not that.  I hate it; I've always
+hated it.  But he wouldn't let me--he will never let me now."
+
+Wyant was startled by her use of the present tense.  Her look
+surprised him, too: there was a strange fixity of resentment in
+her innocuous eye.  Was it possible that she was laboring under
+some delusion?  Or did the pronoun not refer to her father?
+
+"You mean that Doctor Lombard did not wish you to part with the
+picture?"
+
+"No--he prevented me; he will always prevent me."
+
+There was another pause.  "You promised him, then, before his
+death--"
+
+"No; I promised nothing.  He died too suddenly to make me."  Her
+voice sank to a whisper.  "I was free--perfectly free--or I
+thought I was till I tried."
+
+"Till you tried?"
+
+"To disobey him--to sell the picture.  Then I found it was
+impossible.  I tried again and again; but he was always in the
+room with me."
+
+She glanced over her shoulder as though she had heard a step; and
+to Wyant, too, for a moment, the room seemed full of a third
+presence.
+
+"And you can't"--he faltered, unconsciously dropping his voice to
+the pitch of hers.
+
+She shook her head, gazing at him mystically.  "I can't lock him
+out; I can never lock him out now.  I told you I should never
+have another chance."
+
+Wyant felt the chill of her words like a cold breath in his hair.
+
+"Oh"--he groaned; but she cut him off with a grave gesture.
+
+"It is too late," she said; "but you ought to have helped me that day."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext of Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
+
+