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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tales Of Men And Ghosts, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Tales Of Men And Ghosts
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+
+Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext# 4514]
+This file was first posted on January 28, 2002
+Last Updated: April 15, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Aldarondo
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+London
+
+1910
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+     I     _The Bolted Door_
+     II    _His Father's Son_
+     III   _The Daunt Diana_
+     IV    _The Debt_
+     V     _Full Circle_
+     VI    _The Legend_
+     VII   _The Eyes_
+     VIII  _The Blond Beast_
+     IX    _Afterward_
+     X     _The Letters_
+
+
+
+
+THE BOLTED DOOR
+
+
+I
+
+
+HUBERT GRANICE, pacing the length of his pleasant lamp-lit library,
+paused to compare his watch with the clock on the chimney-piece.
+
+Three minutes to eight.
+
+In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm of
+Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the door-bell of
+the flat. It was a comfort to reflect that Ascham was so punctual--the
+suspense was beginning to make his host nervous. And the sound of the
+door-bell would be the beginning of the end--after that there'd be no
+going back, by God--no going back!
+
+Granice resumed his pacing. Each time he reached the end of the room
+opposite the door he caught his reflection in the Florentine mirror
+above the fine old walnut _credence_ he had picked up at Dijon--saw
+himself spare, quick-moving, carefully brushed and dressed, but
+furrowed, gray about the temples, with a stoop which he corrected by
+a spasmodic straightening of the shoulders whenever a glass confronted
+him: a tired middle-aged man, baffled, beaten, worn out.
+
+As he summed himself up thus for the third or fourth time the door
+opened and he turned with a thrill of relief to greet his guest. But it
+was only the man-servant who entered, advancing silently over the mossy
+surface of the old Turkey rug.
+
+"Mr. Ascham telephones, sir, to say he's unexpectedly detained and can't
+be here till eight-thirty."
+
+Granice made a curt gesture of annoyance. It was becoming harder and
+harder for him to control these reflexes. He turned on his heel, tossing
+to the servant over his shoulder: "Very good. Put off dinner."
+
+Down his spine he felt the man's injured stare. Mr. Granice had always
+been so mild-spoken to his people--no doubt the odd change in his manner
+had already been noticed and discussed below stairs. And very likely
+they suspected the cause. He stood drumming on the writing-table till he
+heard the servant go out; then he threw himself into a chair, propping
+his elbows on the table and resting his chin on his locked hands.
+
+Another half hour alone with it!
+
+He wondered irritably what could have detained his guest. Some
+professional matter, no doubt--the punctilious lawyer would have allowed
+nothing less to interfere with a dinner engagement, more especially
+since Granice, in his note, had said: "I shall want a little business
+chat afterward."
+
+But what professional matter could have come up at that unprofessional
+hour? Perhaps some other soul in misery had called on the lawyer; and,
+after all, Granice's note had given no hint of his own need! No doubt
+Ascham thought he merely wanted to make another change in his will.
+Since he had come into his little property, ten years earlier, Granice
+had been perpetually tinkering with his will.
+
+Suddenly another thought pulled him up, sending a flush to his sallow
+temples. He remembered a word he had tossed to the lawyer some six weeks
+earlier, at the Century Club. "Yes--my play's as good as taken. I shall
+be calling on you soon to go over the contract. Those theatrical chaps
+are so slippery--I won't trust anybody but you to tie the knot for me!"
+That, of course, was what Ascham would think he was wanted for. Granice,
+at the idea, broke into an audible laugh--a queer stage-laugh, like
+the cackle of a baffled villain in a melodrama. The absurdity, the
+unnaturalness of the sound abashed him, and he compressed his lips
+angrily. Would he take to soliloquy next?
+
+He lowered his arms and pulled open the upper drawer of the
+writing-table. In the right-hand corner lay a thick manuscript, bound
+in paper folders, and tied with a string beneath which a letter had been
+slipped. Next to the manuscript was a small revolver. Granice stared a
+moment at these oddly associated objects; then he took the letter from
+under the string and slowly began to open it. He had known he should do
+so from the moment his hand touched the drawer. Whenever his eye fell on
+that letter some relentless force compelled him to re-read it.
+
+It was dated about four weeks back, under the letter-head of
+
+"The Diversity Theatre."
+
+"MY DEAR MR. GRANICE:
+
+"I have given the matter my best consideration for the last month,
+and it's no use--the play won't do. I have talked it over with Miss
+Melrose--and you know there isn't a gamer artist on our stage--and I
+regret to tell you she feels just as I do about it. It isn't the poetry
+that scares her--or me either. We both want to do all we can to help
+along the poetic drama--we believe the public's ready for it, and we're
+willing to take a big financial risk in order to be the first to give
+them what they want. _But we don't believe they could be made to
+want this._ The fact is, there isn't enough drama in your play to the
+allowance of poetry--the thing drags all through. You've got a big idea,
+but it's not out of swaddling clothes.
+
+"If this was your first play I'd say: _Try again_. But it has been
+just the same with all the others you've shown me. And you remember
+the result of 'The Lee Shore,' where you carried all the expenses of
+production yourself, and we couldn't fill the theatre for a week. Yet
+'The Lee Shore' was a modern problem play--much easier to swing than
+blank verse. It isn't as if you hadn't tried all kinds--"
+
+Granice folded the letter and put it carefully back into the envelope.
+Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every phrase in it by
+heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night after night, stand
+out in letters of flame against the darkness of his sleepless lids?
+
+"_It has been just the same with all the others you've shown me._"
+
+That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting
+work!
+
+"_You remember the result of 'The Lee Shore.'_"
+
+Good God--as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all now in a
+drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play, his sudden resolve
+to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten thousand dollars of his
+inheritance on testing his chance of success--the fever of preparation,
+the dry-mouthed agony of the "first night," the flat fall, the stupid
+press, his secret rush to Europe to escape the condolence of his
+friends!
+
+"_It isn't as if you hadn't tried all kinds._"
+
+No--he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the light
+curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-realistic and the
+lyrical-romantic--finally deciding that he would no longer "prostitute
+his talent" to win popularity, but would impose on the public his own
+theory of art in the form of five acts of blank verse. Yes, he had
+offered them everything--and always with the same result.
+
+Ten years of it--ten years of dogged work and unrelieved failure. The
+ten years from forty to fifty--the best ten years of his life! And if
+one counted the years before, the silent years of dreams, assimilation,
+preparation--then call it half a man's life-time: half a man's life-time
+thrown away!
+
+And what was he to do with the remaining half? Well, he had settled
+that, thank God! He turned and glanced anxiously at the clock. Ten
+minutes past eight--only ten minutes had been consumed in that stormy
+rush through his whole past! And he must wait another twenty minutes for
+Ascham. It was one of the worst symptoms of his case that, in proportion
+as he had grown to shrink from human company, he dreaded more and more
+to be alone. ... But why the devil was he waiting for Ascham? Why didn't
+he cut the knot himself? Since he was so unutterably sick of the whole
+business, why did he have to call in an outsider to rid him of this
+nightmare of living?
+
+He opened the drawer again and laid his hand on the revolver. It was a
+small slim ivory toy--just the instrument for a tired sufferer to give
+himself a "hypodermic" with. Granice raised it slowly in one hand, while
+with the other he felt under the thin hair at the back of his head,
+between the ear and the nape. He knew just where to place the muzzle: he
+had once got a young surgeon to show him. And as he found the spot, and
+lifted the revolver to it, the inevitable phenomenon occurred. The hand
+that held the weapon began to shake, the tremor communicated itself
+to his arm, his heart gave a wild leap which sent up a wave of deadly
+nausea to his throat, he smelt the powder, he sickened at the crash of
+the bullet through his skull, and a sweat of fear broke out over his
+forehead and ran down his quivering face...
+
+He laid away the revolver with an oath and, pulling out a
+cologne-scented handkerchief, passed it tremulously over his brow and
+temples. It was no use--he knew he could never do it in that way. His
+attempts at self-destruction were as futile as his snatches at fame! He
+couldn't make himself a real life, and he couldn't get rid of the life
+he had. And that was why he had sent for Ascham to help him...
+
+The lawyer, over the Camembert and Burgundy, began to excuse himself for
+his delay.
+
+"I didn't like to say anything while your man was about--but the fact
+is, I was sent for on a rather unusual matter--"
+
+"Oh, it's all right," said Granice cheerfully. He was beginning to
+feel the usual reaction that food and company produced. It was not any
+recovered pleasure in life that he felt, but only a deeper withdrawal
+into himself. It was easier to go on automatically with the social
+gestures than to uncover to any human eye the abyss within him.
+
+"My dear fellow, it's sacrilege to keep a dinner waiting--especially
+the production of an artist like yours." Mr. Ascham sipped his Burgundy
+luxuriously. "But the fact is, Mrs. Ashgrove sent for me."
+
+Granice raised his head with a quick movement of surprise. For a moment
+he was shaken out of his self-absorption.
+
+"_Mrs. Ashgrove?_"
+
+Ascham smiled. "I thought you'd be interested; I know your passion for
+_causes celebres_. And this promises to be one. Of course it's out of
+our line entirely--we never touch criminal cases. But she wanted to
+consult me as a friend. Ashgrove was a distant connection of my wife's.
+And, by Jove, it _is_ a queer case!" The servant re-entered, and Ascham
+snapped his lips shut.
+
+Would the gentlemen have their coffee in the dining-room?
+
+"No--serve it in the library," said Granice, rising. He led the way back
+to the curtained confidential room. He was really curious to hear what
+Ascham had to tell him.
+
+While the coffee and cigars were being served he fidgeted about the
+library, glancing at his letters--the usual meaningless notes and
+bills--and picking up the evening paper. As he unfolded it a headline
+caught his eye.
+
+"ROSE MELROSE WANTS TO PLAY POETRY.
+
+"THINKS SHE HAS FOUND HER POET."
+
+He read on with a thumping heart--found the name of a young author he
+had barely heard of, saw the title of a play, a "poetic drama," dance
+before his eyes, and dropped the paper, sick, disgusted. It was true,
+then--she _was_ "game"--it was not the manner but the matter she
+mistrusted!
+
+Granice turned to the servant, who seemed to be purposely lingering. "I
+shan't need you this evening, Flint. I'll lock up myself."
+
+He fancied the man's acquiescence implied surprise. What was going on,
+Flint seemed to wonder, that Mr. Granice should want him out of the
+way? Probably he would find a pretext for coming back to see. Granice
+suddenly felt himself enveloped in a network of espionage.
+
+As the door closed he threw himself into an armchair and leaned forward
+to take a light from Ascham's cigar.
+
+"Tell me about Mrs. Ashgrove," he said, seeming to himself to speak
+stiffly, as if his lips were cracked.
+
+"Mrs. Ashgrove? Well, there's not much to _tell_."
+
+"And you couldn't if there were?" Granice smiled.
+
+"Probably not. As a matter of fact, she wanted my advice about her
+choice of counsel. There was nothing especially confidential in our
+talk."
+
+"And what's your impression, now you've seen her?"
+
+"My impression is, very distinctly, _that nothing will ever be known._"
+
+"Ah--?" Granice murmured, puffing at his cigar.
+
+"I'm more and more convinced that whoever poisoned Ashgrove knew his
+business, and will consequently never be found out. That's a capital
+cigar you've given me."
+
+"You like it? I get them over from Cuba." Granice examined his own
+reflectively. "Then you believe in the theory that the clever criminals
+never _are_ caught?"
+
+"Of course I do. Look about you--look back for the last dozen
+years--none of the big murder problems are ever solved." The lawyer
+ruminated behind his blue cloud. "Why, take the instance in your own
+family: I'd forgotten I had an illustration at hand! Take old Joseph
+Lenman's murder--do you suppose that will ever be explained?"
+
+As the words dropped from Ascham's lips his host looked slowly about
+the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale
+unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was
+as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his throat
+slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: "I could explain
+the Lenman murder myself."
+
+Ascham's eye kindled: he shared Granice's interest in criminal cases.
+
+"By Jove! You've had a theory all this time? It's odd you never
+mentioned it. Go ahead and tell me. There are certain features in the
+Lenman case not unlike this Ashgrove affair, and your idea may be a
+help."
+
+Granice paused and his eye reverted instinctively to the table drawer in
+which the revolver and the manuscript lay side by side. What if he were
+to try another appeal to Rose Melrose? Then he looked at the notes
+and bills on the table, and the horror of taking up again the lifeless
+routine of life--of performing the same automatic gestures another
+day--displaced his fleeting vision.
+
+"I haven't a theory. I _know_ who murdered Joseph Lenman."
+
+Ascham settled himself comfortably in his chair, prepared for enjoyment.
+
+"You _know?_ Well, who did?" he laughed.
+
+"I did," said Granice, rising.
+
+He stood before Ascham, and the lawyer lay back staring up at him. Then
+he broke into another laugh.
+
+"Why, this is glorious! You murdered him, did you? To inherit his money,
+I suppose? Better and better! Go on, my boy! Unbosom yourself! Tell me
+all about it! Confession is good for the soul."
+
+Granice waited till the lawyer had shaken the last peal of laughter from
+his throat; then he repeated doggedly: "I murdered him."
+
+The two men looked at each other for a long moment, and this time Ascham
+did not laugh.
+
+"Granice!"
+
+"I murdered him--to get his money, as you say."
+
+There was another pause, and Granice, with a vague underlying sense of
+amusement, saw his guest's look change from pleasantry to apprehension.
+
+"What's the joke, my dear fellow? I fail to see."
+
+"It's not a joke. It's the truth. I murdered him." He had spoken
+painfully at first, as if there were a knot in his throat; but each time
+he repeated the words he found they were easier to say.
+
+Ascham laid down his extinct cigar.
+
+"What's the matter? Aren't you well? What on earth are you driving at?"
+
+"I'm perfectly well. But I murdered my cousin, Joseph Lenman, and I want
+it known that I murdered him."
+
+"_You want it known?_"
+
+"Yes. That's why I sent for you. I'm sick of living, and when I try to
+kill myself I funk it." He spoke quite naturally now, as if the knot in
+his throat had been untied.
+
+"Good Lord--good Lord," the lawyer gasped.
+
+"But I suppose," Granice continued, "there's no doubt this would be
+murder in the first degree? I'm sure of the chair if I own up?"
+
+Ascham drew a long breath; then he said slowly: "Sit down, Granice.
+Let's talk."
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+GRANICE told his story simply, connectedly.
+
+He began by a quick survey of his early years--the years of drudgery and
+privation. His father, a charming man who could never say "no," had so
+signally failed to say it on certain essential occasions that when he
+died he left an illegitimate family and a mortgaged estate. His lawful
+kin found themselves hanging over a gulf of debt, and young Granice, to
+support his mother and sister, had to leave Harvard and bury himself at
+eighteen in a broker's office. He loathed his work, and he was always
+poor, always worried and in ill-health. A few years later his mother
+died, but his sister, an ineffectual neurasthenic, remained on his
+hands. His own health gave out, and he had to go away for six months,
+and work harder than ever when he came back. He had no knack for
+business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of
+commerce. He wanted to travel and write--those were his inmost longings.
+And as the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making
+any more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed
+him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so tired
+that his brain could not work. For half the year he did not reach his
+dim up-town flat till after dark, and could only "brush up" for dinner,
+and afterward lie on the lounge with his pipe, while his sister droned
+through the evening paper. Sometimes he spent an evening at the theatre;
+or he dined out, or, more rarely, strayed off with an acquaintance or
+two in quest of what is known as "pleasure." And in summer, when he
+and Kate went to the sea-side for a month, he dozed through the days in
+utter weariness. Once he fell in love with a charming girl--but what had
+he to offer her, in God's name? She seemed to like him, and in common
+decency he had to drop out of the running. Apparently no one
+replaced him, for she never married, but grew stoutish, grayish,
+philanthropic--yet how sweet she had been when he had first kissed her!
+One more wasted life, he reflected...
+
+But the stage had always been his master-passion. He would have sold his
+soul for the time and freedom to write plays! It was _in him_--he could
+not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated instinct. As the
+years passed it became a morbid, a relentless obsession--yet with every
+year the material conditions were more and more against it. He felt
+himself growing middle-aged, and he watched the reflection of the
+process in his sister's wasted face. At eighteen she had been
+pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now she was sour, trivial,
+insignificant--she had missed her chance of life. And she had no
+resources, poor creature, was fashioned simply for the primitive
+functions she had been denied the chance to fulfil! It exasperated him
+to think of it--and to reflect that even now a little travel, a
+little health, a little money, might transform her, make her young and
+desirable... The chief fruit of his experience was that there is no such
+fixed state as age or youth--there is only health as against sickness,
+wealth as against poverty; and age or youth as the outcome of the lot
+one draws.
+
+At this point in his narrative Granice stood up, and went to lean
+against the mantel-piece, looking down at Ascham, who had not moved from
+his seat, or changed his attitude of rigid fascinated attention.
+
+"Then came the summer when we went to Wrenfield to be near old
+Lenman--my mother's cousin, as you know. Some of the family always
+mounted guard over him--generally a niece or so. But that year they were
+all scattered, and one of the nieces offered to lend us her cottage if
+we'd relieve her of duty for two months. It was a nuisance for me, of
+course, for Wrenfield is two hours from town; but my mother, who was a
+slave to family observances, had always been good to the old man, so it
+was natural we should be called on--and there was the saving of rent and
+the good air for Kate. So we went.
+
+"You never knew Joseph Lenman? Well, picture to yourself an amoeba or
+some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan's microscope. He was
+large, undifferentiated, inert--since I could remember him he had done
+nothing but take his temperature and read the _Churchman_. Oh,
+and cultivate melons--that was his hobby. Not vulgar, out-of-door
+melons--his were grown under glass. He had miles of it at Wrenfield--his
+big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking battalions of
+green-houses. And in nearly all of them melons were grown--early melons
+and late, French, English, domestic--dwarf melons and monsters: every
+shape, colour and variety. They were petted and nursed like children--a
+staff of trained attendants waited on them. I'm not sure they didn't
+have a doctor to take their temperature--at any rate the place was full
+of thermometers. And they didn't sprawl on the ground like ordinary
+melons; they were trained against the glass like nectarines, and each
+melon hung in a net which sustained its weight and left it free on all
+sides to the sun and air...
+
+"It used to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of
+his own melons--the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic
+and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated
+atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of
+his existence was not to let himself be 'worried.' . . I remember his
+advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate's
+bad health, and her need of a change. 'I never let myself worry,' he
+said complacently. 'It's the worst thing for the liver--and you look to
+me as if you had a liver. Take my advice and be cheerful. You'll make
+yourself happier and others too.' And all he had to do was to write a
+cheque, and send the poor girl off for a holiday!
+
+"The hardest part of it was that the money half-belonged to us already.
+The old skin-flint only had it for life, in trust for us and the others.
+But his life was a good deal sounder than mine or Kate's--and one could
+picture him taking extra care of it for the joke of keeping us waiting.
+I always felt that the sight of our hungry eyes was a tonic to him.
+
+"Well, I tried to see if I couldn't reach him through his vanity. I
+flattered him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he was
+taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine days he was
+driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and waddled through them,
+prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat Turk in his seraglio.
+When he bragged to me of the expense of growing them I was reminded of
+a hideous old Lothario bragging of what his pleasures cost. And the
+resemblance was completed by the fact that he couldn't eat as much as
+a mouthful of his melons--had lived for years on buttermilk and toast.
+'But, after all, it's my only hobby--why shouldn't I indulge it?' he
+said sentimentally. As if I'd ever been able to indulge any of mine! On
+the keep of those melons Kate and I could have lived like gods...
+
+"One day toward the end of the summer, when Kate was too unwell to drag
+herself up to the big house, she asked me to go and spend the afternoon
+with cousin Joseph. It was a lovely soft September afternoon--a day to
+lie under a Roman stone-pine, with one's eyes on the sky, and let the
+cosmic harmonies rush through one. Perhaps the vision was suggested
+by the fact that, as I entered cousin Joseph's hideous black walnut
+library, I passed one of the under-gardeners, a handsome full-throated
+Italian, who dashed out in such a hurry that he nearly knocked me down.
+I remember thinking it queer that the fellow, whom I had often seen
+about the melon-houses, did not bow to me, or even seem to see me.
+
+"Cousin Joseph sat in his usual seat, behind the darkened windows, his
+fat hands folded on his protuberant waistcoat, the last number of the
+_Churchman_ at his elbow, and near it, on a huge dish, a fat melon--the
+fattest melon I'd ever seen. As I looked at it I pictured the ecstasy
+of contemplation from which I must have roused him, and congratulated
+myself on finding him in such a mood, since I had made up my mind to ask
+him a favour. Then I noticed that his face, instead of looking as calm
+as an egg-shell, was distorted and whimpering--and without stopping to
+greet me he pointed passionately to the melon.
+
+"'Look at it, look at it--did you ever see such a beauty? Such
+firmness--roundness--such delicious smoothness to the touch?' It was
+as if he had said 'she' instead of 'it,' and when he put out his senile
+hand and touched the melon I positively had to look the other way.
+
+"Then he told me what had happened. The Italian under-gardener, who had
+been specially recommended for the melon-houses--though it was against
+my cousin's principles to employ a Papist--had been assigned to the care
+of the monster: for it had revealed itself, early in its existence, as
+destined to become a monster, to surpass its plumpest, pulpiest
+sisters, carry off prizes at agricultural shows, and be photographed and
+celebrated in every gardening paper in the land. The Italian had done
+well--seemed to have a sense of responsibility. And that very morning
+he had been ordered to pick the melon, which was to be shown next day at
+the county fair, and to bring it in for Mr. Lenman to gaze on its blonde
+virginity. But in picking it, what had the damned scoundrelly Jesuit
+done but drop it--drop it crash on the sharp spout of a watering-pot,
+so that it received a deep gash in its firm pale rotundity, and was
+henceforth but a bruised, ruined, fallen melon?
+
+"The old man's rage was fearful in its impotence--he shook, spluttered
+and strangled with it. He had just had the Italian up and had sacked
+him on the spot, without wages or character--had threatened to have him
+arrested if he was ever caught prowling about Wrenfield. 'By God, and
+I'll do it--I'll write to Washington--I'll have the pauper scoundrel
+deported! I'll show him what money can do!' As likely as not there was
+some murderous Black-hand business under it--it would be found that the
+fellow was a member of a 'gang.' Those Italians would murder you for a
+quarter. He meant to have the police look into it... And then he grew
+frightened at his own excitement. 'But I must calm myself,' he said. He
+took his temperature, rang for his drops, and turned to the _Churchman_.
+He had been reading an article on Nestorianism when the melon was
+brought in. He asked me to go on with it, and I read to him for an
+hour, in the dim close room, with a fat fly buzzing stealthily about the
+fallen melon.
+
+"All the while one phrase of the old man's buzzed in my brain like the
+fly about the melon. '_I'll show him what money can do!_' Good heaven!
+If _I_ could but show the old man! If I could make him see his power of
+giving happiness as a new outlet for his monstrous egotism! I tried
+to tell him something about my situation and Kate's--spoke of my
+ill-health, my unsuccessful drudgery, my longing to write, to make
+myself a name--I stammered out an entreaty for a loan. 'I can guarantee
+to repay you, sir--I've a half-written play as security...'
+
+"I shall never forget his glassy stare. His face had grown as smooth as
+an egg-shell again--his eyes peered over his fat cheeks like sentinels
+over a slippery rampart.
+
+"'A half-written play--a play of _yours_ as security?' He looked at me
+almost fearfully, as if detecting the first symptoms of insanity. 'Do
+you understand anything of business?' he enquired mildly. I laughed and
+answered: 'No, not much.'
+
+"He leaned back with closed lids. 'All this excitement has been too much
+for me,' he said. 'If you'll excuse me, I'll prepare for my nap.' And I
+stumbled out of the room, blindly, like the Italian."
+
+Granice moved away from the mantel-piece, and walked across to the tray
+set out with decanters and soda-water. He poured himself a tall glass of
+soda-water, emptied it, and glanced at Ascham's dead cigar.
+
+"Better light another," he suggested.
+
+The lawyer shook his head, and Granice went on with his tale. He told
+of his mounting obsession--how the murderous impulse had waked in him on
+the instant of his cousin's refusal, and he had muttered to himself:
+"By God, if you won't, I'll make you." He spoke more tranquilly as the
+narrative proceeded, as though his rage had died down once the resolve
+to act on it was taken. He applied his whole mind to the question of how
+the old man was to be "disposed of." Suddenly he remembered the outcry:
+"Those Italians will murder you for a quarter!" But no definite project
+presented itself: he simply waited for an inspiration.
+
+Granice and his sister moved to town a day or two after the incident of
+the melon. But the cousins, who had returned, kept them informed of
+the old man's condition. One day, about three weeks later, Granice,
+on getting home, found Kate excited over a report from Wrenfield. The
+Italian had been there again--had somehow slipped into the house,
+made his way up to the library, and "used threatening language." The
+house-keeper found cousin Joseph gasping, the whites of his eyes showing
+"something awful." The doctor was sent for, and the attack warded off;
+and the police had ordered the Italian from the neighbourhood.
+
+But cousin Joseph, thereafter, languished, had "nerves," and lost his
+taste for toast and butter-milk. The doctor called in a colleague, and
+the consultation amused and excited the old man--he became once more
+an important figure. The medical men reassured the family--too
+completely!--and to the patient they recommended a more varied diet:
+advised him to take whatever "tempted him." And so one day, tremulously,
+prayerfully, he decided on a tiny bit of melon. It was brought up
+with ceremony, and consumed in the presence of the house-keeper and a
+hovering cousin; and twenty minutes later he was dead...
+
+"But you remember the circumstances," Granice went on; "how suspicion
+turned at once on the Italian? In spite of the hint the police had given
+him he had been seen hanging about the house since 'the scene.' It was
+said that he had tender relations with the kitchen-maid, and the rest
+seemed easy to explain. But when they looked round to ask him for the
+explanation he was gone--gone clean out of sight. He had been 'warned'
+to leave Wrenfield, and he had taken the warning so to heart that no one
+ever laid eyes on him again."
+
+Granice paused. He had dropped into a chair opposite the lawyer's, and
+he sat for a moment, his head thrown back, looking about the familiar
+room. Everything in it had grown grimacing and alien, and each strange
+insistent object seemed craning forward from its place to hear him.
+
+"It was I who put the stuff in the melon," he said. "And I don't want
+you to think I'm sorry for it. This isn't 'remorse,' understand. I'm
+glad the old skin-flint is dead--I'm glad the others have their money.
+But mine's no use to me any more. My sister married miserably, and died.
+And I've never had what I wanted."
+
+Ascham continued to stare; then he said: "What on earth was your object,
+then?"
+
+"Why, to _get_ what I wanted--what I fancied was in reach! I wanted
+change, rest, _life_, for both of us--wanted, above all, for myself, the
+chance to write! I travelled, got back my health, and came home to
+tie myself up to my work. And I've slaved at it steadily for ten years
+without reward--without the most distant hope of success! Nobody will
+look at my stuff. And now I'm fifty, and I'm beaten, and I know it."
+His chin dropped forward on his breast. "I want to chuck the whole
+business," he ended.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+IT was after midnight when Ascham left.
+
+His hand on Granice's shoulder, as he turned to go--"District Attorney
+be hanged; see a doctor, see a doctor!" he had cried; and so, with an
+exaggerated laugh, had pulled on his coat and departed.
+
+Granice turned back into the library. It had never occurred to him that
+Ascham would not believe his story. For three hours he had explained,
+elucidated, patiently and painfully gone over every detail--but without
+once breaking down the iron incredulity of the lawyer's eye.
+
+At first Ascham had feigned to be convinced--but that, as Granice now
+perceived, was simply to get him to expose himself, to entrap him into
+contradictions. And when the attempt failed, when Granice triumphantly
+met and refuted each disconcerting question, the lawyer dropped the mask
+suddenly, and said with a good-humoured laugh: "By Jove, Granice you'll
+write a successful play yet. The way you've worked this all out is a
+marvel."
+
+Granice swung about furiously--that last sneer about the play inflamed
+him. Was all the world in a conspiracy to deride his failure?
+
+"I did it, I did it," he muttered sullenly, his rage spending itself
+against the impenetrable surface of the other's mockery; and Ascham
+answered with a smile: "Ever read any of those books on hallucination?
+I've got a fairly good medico-legal library. I could send you one or two
+if you like..."
+
+Left alone, Granice cowered down in the chair before his writing-table.
+He understood that Ascham thought him off his head.
+
+"Good God--what if they all think me crazy?"
+
+The horror of it broke out over him in a cold sweat--he sat there and
+shook, his eyes hidden in his icy hands. But gradually, as he began
+to rehearse his story for the thousandth time, he saw again how
+incontrovertible it was, and felt sure that any criminal lawyer would
+believe him.
+
+"That's the trouble--Ascham's not a criminal lawyer. And then he's a
+friend. What a fool I was to talk to a friend! Even if he did believe
+me, he'd never let me see it--his instinct would be to cover the whole
+thing up... But in that case--if he _did_ believe me--he might think it
+a kindness to get me shut up in an asylum..." Granice began to tremble
+again. "Good heaven! If he should bring in an expert--one of those
+damned alienists! Ascham and Pettilow can do anything--their word always
+goes. If Ascham drops a hint that I'd better be shut up, I'll be in a
+strait-jacket by to-morrow! And he'd do it from the kindest motives--be
+quite right to do it if he thinks I'm a murderer!"
+
+The vision froze him to his chair. He pressed his fists to his bursting
+temples and tried to think. For the first time he hoped that Ascham had
+not believed his story.
+
+"But he did--he did! I can see it now--I noticed what a queer eye he
+cocked at me. Good God, what shall I do--what shall I do?"
+
+He started up and looked at the clock. Half-past one. What if Ascham
+should think the case urgent, rout out an alienist, and come back with
+him? Granice jumped to his feet, and his sudden gesture brushed the
+morning paper from the table. Mechanically he stooped to pick it up, and
+the movement started a new train of association.
+
+He sat down again, and reached for the telephone book in the rack by his
+chair.
+
+"Give me three-o-ten ... yes."
+
+The new idea in his mind had revived his flagging energy. He would
+act--act at once. It was only by thus planning ahead, committing himself
+to some unavoidable line of conduct, that he could pull himself through
+the meaningless days. Each time he reached a fresh decision it was like
+coming out of a foggy weltering sea into a calm harbour with lights. One
+of the queerest phases of his long agony was the intense relief produced
+by these momentary lulls.
+
+"That the office of the _Investigator?_ Yes? Give me Mr. Denver,
+please... Hallo, Denver... Yes, Hubert Granice. ... Just caught you?
+Going straight home? Can I come and see you ... yes, now ... have a
+talk? It's rather urgent ... yes, might give you some first-rate 'copy.'
+... All right!" He hung up the receiver with a laugh. It had been a
+happy thought to call up the editor of the _Investigator_--Robert Denver
+was the very man he needed...
+
+Granice put out the lights in the library--it was odd how the automatic
+gestures persisted!--went into the hall, put on his hat and overcoat,
+and let himself out of the flat. In the hall, a sleepy elevator boy
+blinked at him and then dropped his head on his folded arms. Granice
+passed out into the street. At the corner of Fifth Avenue he hailed a
+crawling cab, and called out an up-town address. The long thoroughfare
+stretched before him, dim and deserted, like an ancient avenue of tombs.
+But from Denver's house a friendly beam fell on the pavement; and as
+Granice sprang from his cab the editor's electric turned the corner.
+
+The two men grasped hands, and Denver, feeling for his latch-key,
+ushered Granice into the brightly-lit hall.
+
+"Disturb me? Not a bit. You might have, at ten to-morrow morning ... but
+this is my liveliest hour ... you know my habits of old."
+
+Granice had known Robert Denver for fifteen years--watched his rise
+through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the
+_Investigator's_ editorial office. In the thick-set man with grizzling
+hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young reporter who,
+on his way home in the small hours, used to "bob in" on Granice, while
+the latter sat grinding at his plays. Denver had to pass Granice's flat
+on the way to his own, and it became a habit, if he saw a light in the
+window, and Granice's shadow against the blind, to go in, smoke a pipe,
+and discuss the universe.
+
+"Well--this is like old times--a good old habit reversed." The editor
+smote his visitor genially on the shoulder. "Reminds me of the nights
+when I used to rout you out... How's the play, by the way? There _is_
+a play, I suppose? It's as safe to ask you that as to say to some men:
+'How's the baby?'"
+
+Denver laughed good-naturedly, and Granice thought how thick and heavy
+he had grown. It was evident, even to Granice's tortured nerves, that
+the words had not been uttered in malice--and the fact gave him a new
+measure of his insignificance. Denver did not even know that he had been
+a failure! The fact hurt more than Ascham's irony.
+
+"Come in--come in." The editor led the way into a small cheerful room,
+where there were cigars and decanters. He pushed an arm-chair toward his
+visitor, and dropped into another with a comfortable groan.
+
+"Now, then--help yourself. And let's hear all about it."
+
+He beamed at Granice over his pipe-bowl, and the latter, lighting his
+cigar, said to himself: "Success makes men comfortable, but it makes
+them stupid."
+
+Then he turned, and began: "Denver, I want to tell you--"
+
+The clock ticked rhythmically on the mantel-piece. The room was
+gradually filled with drifting blue layers of smoke, and through them
+the editor's face came and went like the moon through a moving sky. Once
+the hour struck--then the rhythmical ticking began again. The atmosphere
+grew denser and heavier, and beads of perspiration began to roll from
+Granice's forehead.
+
+"Do you mind if I open the window?"
+
+"No. It _is_ stuffy in here. Wait--I'll do it myself." Denver pushed
+down the upper sash, and returned to his chair. "Well--go on," he said,
+filling another pipe. His composure exasperated Granice.
+
+"There's no use in my going on if you don't believe me."
+
+The editor remained unmoved. "Who says I don't believe you? And how can
+I tell till you've finished?"
+
+Granice went on, ashamed of his outburst. "It was simple enough, as
+you'll see. From the day the old man said to me, 'Those Italians would
+murder you for a quarter,' I dropped everything and just worked at
+my scheme. It struck me at once that I must find a way of getting to
+Wrenfield and back in a night--and that led to the idea of a motor. A
+motor--that never occurred to you? You wonder where I got the money, I
+suppose. Well, I had a thousand or so put by, and I nosed around till I
+found what I wanted--a second-hand racer. I knew how to drive a car,
+and I tried the thing and found it was all right. Times were bad, and I
+bought it for my price, and stored it away. Where? Why, in one of those
+no-questions-asked garages where they keep motors that are not for
+family use. I had a lively cousin who had put me up to that dodge, and I
+looked about till I found a queer hole where they took in my car like a
+baby in a foundling asylum... Then I practiced running to Wrenfield and
+back in a night. I knew the way pretty well, for I'd done it often with
+the same lively cousin--and in the small hours, too. The distance is
+over ninety miles, and on the third trial I did it under two hours. But
+my arms were so lame that I could hardly get dressed the next morning...
+
+"Well, then came the report about the Italian's threats, and I saw I
+must act at once... I meant to break into the old man's room, shoot him,
+and get away again. It was a big risk, but I thought I could manage it.
+Then we heard that he was ill--that there'd been a consultation. Perhaps
+the fates were going to do it for me! Good Lord, if that could only be!..."
+
+Granice stopped and wiped his forehead: the open window did not seem to
+have cooled the room.
+
+"Then came word that he was better; and the day after, when I came up
+from my office, I found Kate laughing over the news that he was to try
+a bit of melon. The house-keeper had just telephoned her--all Wrenfield
+was in a flutter. The doctor himself had picked out the melon, one of
+the little French ones that are hardly bigger than a large tomato--and
+the patient was to eat it at his breakfast the next morning.
+
+"In a flash I saw my chance. It was a bare chance, no more. But I knew
+the ways of the house--I was sure the melon would be brought in over
+night and put in the pantry ice-box. If there were only one melon in the
+ice-box I could be fairly sure it was the one I wanted. Melons
+didn't lie around loose in that house--every one was known, numbered,
+catalogued. The old man was beset by the dread that the servants would
+eat them, and he took a hundred mean precautions to prevent it. Yes,
+I felt pretty sure of my melon ... and poisoning was much safer than
+shooting. It would have been the devil and all to get into the old man's
+bedroom without his rousing the house; but I ought to be able to break
+into the pantry without much trouble.
+
+"It was a cloudy night, too--everything served me. I dined quietly, and
+sat down at my desk. Kate had one of her usual headaches, and went to
+bed early. As soon as she was gone I slipped out. I had got together a
+sort of disguise--red beard and queer-looking ulster. I shoved them
+into a bag, and went round to the garage. There was no one there but a
+half-drunken machinist whom I'd never seen before. That served me, too.
+They were always changing machinists, and this new fellow didn't even
+bother to ask if the car belonged to me. It was a very easy-going
+place...
+
+"Well, I jumped in, ran up Broadway, and let the car go as soon as I was
+out of Harlem. Dark as it was, I could trust myself to strike a sharp
+pace. In the shadow of a wood I stopped a second and got into the beard
+and ulster. Then away again--it was just eleven-thirty when I got to
+Wrenfield.
+
+"I left the car in a dark lane behind the Lenman place, and slipped
+through the kitchen-garden. The melon-houses winked at me through the
+dark--I remember thinking that they knew what I wanted to know. ... By
+the stable a dog came out growling--but he nosed me out, jumped on me,
+and went back... The house was as dark as the grave. I knew everybody
+went to bed by ten. But there might be a prowling servant--the
+kitchen-maid might have come down to let in her Italian. I had to
+risk that, of course. I crept around by the back door and hid in the
+shrubbery. Then I listened. It was all as silent as death. I crossed
+over to the house, pried open the pantry window and climbed in. I had a
+little electric lamp in my pocket, and shielding it with my cap I groped
+my way to the ice-box, opened it--and there was the little French
+melon... only one.
+
+"I stopped to listen--I was quite cool. Then I pulled out my bottle of
+stuff and my syringe, and gave each section of the melon a hypodermic.
+It was all done inside of three minutes--at ten minutes to twelve I was
+back in the car. I got out of the lane as quietly as I could, struck a
+back road that skirted the village, and let the car out as soon as I was
+beyond the last houses. I only stopped once on the way in, to drop the
+beard and ulster into a pond. I had a big stone ready to weight them
+with and they went down plump, like a dead body--and at two o'clock I
+was back at my desk."
+
+Granice stopped speaking and looked across the smoke-fumes at his
+listener; but Denver's face remained inscrutable.
+
+At length he said: "Why did you want to tell me this?"
+
+The question startled Granice. He was about to explain, as he had
+explained to Ascham; but suddenly it occurred to him that if his motive
+had not seemed convincing to the lawyer it would carry much less weight
+with Denver. Both were successful men, and success does not understand
+the subtle agony of failure. Granice cast about for another reason.
+
+"Why, I--the thing haunts me ... remorse, I suppose you'd call it..."
+
+Denver struck the ashes from his empty pipe.
+
+"Remorse? Bosh!" he said energetically.
+
+Granice's heart sank. "You don't believe in--_remorse?_"
+
+"Not an atom: in the man of action. The mere fact of your talking of
+remorse proves to me that you're not the man to have planned and put
+through such a job."
+
+Granice groaned. "Well--I lied to you about remorse. I've never felt
+any."
+
+Denver's lips tightened sceptically about his freshly-filled pipe. "What
+was your motive, then? You must have had one."
+
+"I'll tell you--" And Granice began again to rehearse the story of his
+failure, of his loathing for life. "Don't say you don't believe me this
+time ... that this isn't a real reason!" he stammered out piteously as
+he ended.
+
+Denver meditated. "No, I won't say that. I've seen too many queer
+things. There's always a reason for wanting to get out of life--the
+wonder is that we find so many for staying in!"
+
+Granice's heart grew light. "Then you _do_ believe me?" he faltered.
+
+"Believe that you're sick of the job? Yes. And that you haven't the
+nerve to pull the trigger? Oh, yes--that's easy enough, too. But all
+that doesn't make you a murderer--though I don't say it proves you could
+never have been one."
+
+"I _have_ been one, Denver--I swear to you."
+
+"Perhaps." He meditated. "Just tell me one or two things."
+
+"Oh, go ahead. You won't stump me!" Granice heard himself say with a
+laugh.
+
+"Well--how did you make all those trial trips without exciting your
+sister's curiosity? I knew your night habits pretty well at that time,
+remember. You were very seldom out late. Didn't the change in your ways
+surprise her?"
+
+"No; because she was away at the time. She went to pay several visits in
+the country soon after we came back from Wrenfield, and was only in town
+for a night or two before--before I did the job."
+
+"And that night she went to bed early with a headache?"
+
+"Yes--blinding. She didn't know anything when she had that kind. And her
+room was at the back of the flat."
+
+Denver again meditated. "And when you got back--she didn't hear you? You
+got in without her knowing it?"
+
+"Yes. I went straight to my work--took it up at the word where I'd left
+off--_why, Denver, don't you remember?_" Granice suddenly, passionately
+interjected.
+
+"Remember--?"
+
+"Yes; how you found me--when you looked in that morning, between two and
+three ... your usual hour ...?"
+
+"Yes," the editor nodded.
+
+Granice gave a short laugh. "In my old coat--with my pipe: looked as if
+I'd been working all night, didn't I? Well, I hadn't been in my chair
+ten minutes!"
+
+Denver uncrossed his legs and then crossed them again. "I didn't know
+whether _you_ remembered that."
+
+"What?"
+
+"My coming in that particular night--or morning."
+
+Granice swung round in his chair. "Why, man alive! That's why I'm here
+now. Because it was you who spoke for me at the inquest, when they
+looked round to see what all the old man's heirs had been doing that
+night--you who testified to having dropped in and found me at my desk as
+usual. ... I thought _that_ would appeal to your journalistic sense if
+nothing else would!"
+
+Denver smiled. "Oh, my journalistic sense is still susceptible
+enough--and the idea's picturesque, I grant you: asking the man who
+proved your alibi to establish your guilt."
+
+"That's it--that's it!" Granice's laugh had a ring of triumph.
+
+"Well, but how about the other chap's testimony--I mean that young
+doctor: what was his name? Ned Ranney. Don't you remember my testifying
+that I'd met him at the elevated station, and told him I was on my way
+to smoke a pipe with you, and his saying: 'All right; you'll find him
+in. I passed the house two hours ago, and saw his shadow against the
+blind, as usual.' And the lady with the toothache in the flat across the
+way: she corroborated his statement, you remember."
+
+"Yes; I remember."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"Simple enough. Before starting I rigged up a kind of mannikin with old
+coats and a cushion--something to cast a shadow on the blind. All
+you fellows were used to seeing my shadow there in the small hours--I
+counted on that, and knew you'd take any vague outline as mine."
+
+"Simple enough, as you say. But the woman with the toothache saw the
+shadow move--you remember she said she saw you sink forward, as if you'd
+fallen asleep."
+
+"Yes; and she was right. It _did_ move. I suppose some extra-heavy dray
+must have jolted by the flimsy building--at any rate, something gave my
+mannikin a jar, and when I came back he had sunk forward, half over the
+table."
+
+There was a long silence between the two men. Granice, with a throbbing
+heart, watched Denver refill his pipe. The editor, at any rate, did not
+sneer and flout him. After all, journalism gave a deeper insight than
+the law into the fantastic possibilities of life, prepared one better to
+allow for the incalculableness of human impulses.
+
+"Well?" Granice faltered out.
+
+Denver stood up with a shrug. "Look here, man--what's wrong with you?
+Make a clean breast of it! Nerves gone to smash? I'd like to take you
+to see a chap I know--an ex-prize-fighter--who's a wonder at pulling
+fellows in your state out of their hole--"
+
+"Oh, oh--" Granice broke in. He stood up also, and the two men eyed each
+other. "You don't believe me, then?"
+
+"This yarn--how can I? There wasn't a flaw in your alibi."
+
+"But haven't I filled it full of them now?"
+
+Denver shook his head. "I might think so if I hadn't happened to know
+that you _wanted_ to. There's the hitch, don't you see?"
+
+Granice groaned. "No, I didn't. You mean my wanting to be found
+guilty--?"
+
+"Of course! If somebody else had accused you, the story might have been
+worth looking into. As it is, a child could have invented it. It doesn't
+do much credit to your ingenuity."
+
+Granice turned sullenly toward the door. What was the use of arguing?
+But on the threshold a sudden impulse drew him back. "Look here,
+Denver--I daresay you're right. But will you do just one thing to
+prove it? Put my statement in the _Investigator_, just as I've made it.
+Ridicule it as much as you like. Only give the other fellows a chance at
+it--men who don't know anything about me. Set them talking and looking
+about. I don't care a damn whether _you_ believe me--what I want is
+to convince the Grand Jury! I oughtn't to have come to a man who knows
+me--your cursed incredulity is infectious. I don't put my case well,
+because I know in advance it's discredited, and I almost end by not
+believing it myself. That's why I can't convince _you_. It's a vicious
+circle." He laid a hand on Denver's arm. "Send a stenographer, and put
+my statement in the paper."
+
+But Denver did not warm to the idea. "My dear fellow, you seem to forget
+that all the evidence was pretty thoroughly sifted at the time, every
+possible clue followed up. The public would have been ready enough then
+to believe that you murdered old Lenman--you or anybody else. All they
+wanted was a murderer--the most improbable would have served. But your
+alibi was too confoundedly complete. And nothing you've told me has
+shaken it." Denver laid his cool hand over the other's burning fingers.
+"Look here, old fellow, go home and work up a better case--then come in
+and submit it to the _Investigator_."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+THE perspiration was rolling off Granice's forehead. Every few minutes
+he had to draw out his handkerchief and wipe the moisture from his
+haggard face.
+
+For an hour and a half he had been talking steadily, putting his case
+to the District Attorney. Luckily he had a speaking acquaintance with
+Allonby, and had obtained, without much difficulty, a private audience
+on the very day after his talk with Robert Denver. In the interval
+between he had hurried home, got out of his evening clothes, and gone
+forth again at once into the dreary dawn. His fear of Ascham and the
+alienist made it impossible for him to remain in his rooms. And it
+seemed to him that the only way of averting that hideous peril was by
+establishing, in some sane impartial mind, the proof of his guilt. Even
+if he had not been so incurably sick of life, the electric chair seemed
+now the only alternative to the strait-jacket.
+
+As he paused to wipe his forehead he saw the District Attorney glance at
+his watch. The gesture was significant, and Granice lifted an appealing
+hand. "I don't expect you to believe me now--but can't you put me under
+arrest, and have the thing looked into?"
+
+Allonby smiled faintly under his heavy grayish moustache. He had a ruddy
+face, full and jovial, in which his keen professional eyes seemed to
+keep watch over impulses not strictly professional.
+
+"Well, I don't know that we need lock you up just yet. But of course I'm
+bound to look into your statement--"
+
+Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief. Surely Allonby wouldn't
+have said that if he hadn't believed him!
+
+"That's all right. Then I needn't detain you. I can be found at any time
+at my apartment." He gave the address.
+
+The District Attorney smiled again, more openly. "What do you say to
+leaving it for an hour or two this evening? I'm giving a little supper
+at Rector's--quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss Melrose--I
+think you know her--and a friend or two; and if you'll join us..."
+
+Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had
+made.
+
+He waited for four days--four days of concentrated horror. During the
+first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham's alienist dogged him; and as
+that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense that his avowal
+had made no impression on the District Attorney. Evidently, if he had
+been going to look into the case, Allonby would have been heard from
+before now. ... And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly
+enough how little the story had impressed him!
+
+Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate
+himself. He was chained to life--a "prisoner of consciousness." Where
+was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was learning what it meant. In
+the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited
+by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable
+_selfness_, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation
+he had ever known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
+intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own
+dark 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.
+
+
+
+
+HIS FATHER'S SON
+
+I
+
+
+AFTER his wife's death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling out
+his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to Brooklyn.
+
+For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had
+never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.
+Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up,
+prospered, and become what the local press described as "prominent."
+He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and
+a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row of
+houses across the street, the "trolley" wires forming a kind of aerial
+pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the steeple of the
+church which he and his wife had always attended, and where their only
+child had been baptized.
+
+It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and
+sentimental; yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far
+from his boy. Ronald Grew was practising law in New York, and there
+was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a river's
+flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to be near him his father must
+move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of the situation
+generally, that the translation, when it took place, was to Brooklyn,
+and not to New York.
+
+"Why you bury yourself in that hole I can't think," had been Ronald's
+comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower in Brooklyn,
+and that he had heard of a house that would suit him. In reality he had
+said to himself--being the only recipient of his own confidences--that
+if he went to New York he might be on the boy's mind; whereas, if
+he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald would always have a good excuse for not
+popping over to see him every other day. The sociological isolation of
+Brooklyn, combined with its geographical nearness, presented in fact the
+precise conditions for Mr. Grew's case. He wanted to be near enough to
+New York to go there often, to feel under his feet the same pavement
+that Ronald trod, to sit now and then in the same theatres, and find
+on his breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency,
+inserted Ronald's name in the sacred bounds of the society column. It
+had always been a trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four hours to
+read that "among those present was Mr. Ronald Grew." Now he had it
+with his coffee, and left it on the breakfast-table to the perusal of a
+"hired girl" cosmopolitan enough to do it justice. In such ways Brooklyn
+attested the advantages of its propinquity to New York, while remaining,
+as regards Ronald's duty to his father, as remote and inaccessible as
+Wingfield.
+
+It was not that Ronald shirked his filial obligations, but rather
+because of his heavy sense of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently sought
+to minimize and lighten them. It was he who insisted, to Ronald, on the
+immense difficulty of getting from New York to Brooklyn.
+
+"Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there's not
+much use in the ragged rim left. You say you're dining out next Sunday?
+Then I forbid you to come over here for lunch. Do you understand me,
+sir? You disobey at the risk of your father's malediction! Where did you
+say you were dining? With the Waltham Bankshires again? Why, that's
+the second time in three weeks, ain't it? Big blow-out, I suppose? Gold
+plate and orchids--opera singers in afterward? Well, you'd be in a nice
+box if there was a fog on the river, and you got hung up half-way over.
+That'd be a handsome return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown
+you--singling out a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks!
+(What's the daughter's name--Daisy?) No, _sir_--don't you come fooling
+round here next Sunday, or I'll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn't
+find me in anyhow, come to think of it. I'm lunching out myself, as it
+happens--yes sir, _lunching out_. Is there anything especially comic in
+my lunching out? I don't often do it, you say? Well, that's no reason
+why I never should. Who with? Why, with--with old Dr. Bleaker: Dr.
+Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn't know about him--he's only an old
+friend of your mother's and mine."
+
+Gradually Ronald's insistence became less difficult to overcome. With
+his customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began to
+"take the hint," to give in to "the old gentleman's" growing desire for
+solitude.
+
+"I'm set in my ways, Ronny, that's about the size of it; I like to
+go tick-ticking along like a clock. I always did. And when you come
+bouncing in I never feel sure there's enough for dinner--or that I
+haven't sent Maria out for the evening. And I don't want the neighbors
+to see me opening my own door to my son. That's the kind of cringing
+snob I am. Don't give me away, will you? I want 'em to think I keep four
+or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and night--same as the lobby
+of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels. And if you pop over when you're not
+expected, how am I going to keep up the bluff?"
+
+Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance--his intuitive
+sense, in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to be
+expended, was one of the qualities his father most admired in him. Mr.
+Grew's perceptions in this line were probably more acute than his son
+suspected. The souls of short thick-set men, with chubby features,
+mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between folds of fat like
+almond kernels in half-split shells--souls thus encased do not reveal
+themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate emotional instruments.
+But in spite of the dense disguise in which he walked Mr. Grew vibrated
+exquisitely in response to every imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald
+was perpetually stimulating and feeding his imagination.
+
+Ronald in fact constituted his father's one escape from the impenetrable
+element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in. To a man so
+enamoured of beauty, and so little qualified to add to its sum total,
+it was a wonderful privilege to have bestowed on the world such a being.
+Ronald's resemblance to Mr. Grew's early conception of what he himself
+would have liked to look might have put new life into the discredited
+theory of pre-natal influences. At any rate, if the young man owed his
+beauty, his distinction and his winning manner to the dreams of one of
+his parents, it was certainly to those of Mr. Grew, who, while outwardly
+devoting his life to the manufacture and dissemination of Grew's Secure
+Suspender Buckle, moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all
+the figures of romance. In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant
+a figure as any of its noble phantoms; and to see his vision of himself
+suddenly projected on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant
+popular conquering son, seemed, in retrospect, to give to that image a
+belated objective reality. There were even moments when, forgetting his
+physiognomy, Mr. Grew said to himself that if he'd had "half a chance"
+he might have done as well as Ronald; but this only fortified his
+resolve that Ronald should do infinitely better.
+
+Ronald's ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking well.
+Mr. Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was "not a genius";
+but, barring this slight deficiency, he was almost everything that
+a parent could wish. Even at Harvard he had managed to be several
+desirable things at once--writing poetry in the college magazine,
+playing delightfully "by ear," acquitting himself honorably in his
+studies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable sporting set that
+formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of Society. Mr. Grew's
+idealism did not preclude the frank desire that his son should pass
+through that gateway; but the wish was not prompted by material
+considerations. It was Mr. Grew's notion that, in the rough and hurrying
+current of a new civilization, the little pools of leisure and enjoyment
+must nurture delicate growths, material graces as well as moral
+refinements, likely to be uprooted and swept away by the rush of the
+main torrent. He based his theory on the fact that he had liked the
+few "society" people he had met--had found their manners simpler, their
+voices more agreeable, their views more consonant with his own, than
+those of the leading citizens of Wingfield. But then he had met very
+few.
+
+Ronald's sympathies needed no urging in the same direction. He took
+naturally, dauntlessly, to all the high and exceptional things about
+which his father's imagination had so long sheepishly and ineffectually
+hovered--from the start he _was_ what Mr. Grew had dreamed of being.
+And so precise, so detailed, was Mr. Grew's vision of his own imaginary
+career, that as Ronald grew up, and began to travel in a widening orbit,
+his father had an almost uncanny sense of the extent to which that
+career was enacting itself before him. At Harvard, Ronald had done
+exactly what the hypothetical Mason Grew would have done, had not his
+actual self, at the same age, been working his way up in old Slagden's
+button factory--the institution which was later to acquire fame, and
+even notoriety, as the birthplace of Grew's Secure Suspender Buckle.
+Afterward, at a period when the actual Grew had passed from the factory
+to the bookkeeper's desk, his invisible double had been reading law at
+Columbia--precisely again what Ronald did! But it was when the young man
+left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast himself
+boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the most
+astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew. It was in
+New York that the scene of this hypothetical being's first exploits had
+always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald was to achieve
+his first triumph. There was nothing small or timid about Mr. Grew's
+imagination; it had never stopped at anything between Wingfield and
+the metropolis. And the real Ronald had the same cosmic vision as his
+parent. He brushed aside with a contemptuous laugh his mother's tearful
+entreaty that he should stay at Wingfield and continue the dynasty of
+the Grew Suspender Buckle. Mr. Grew knew that in reality Ronald winced
+at the Buckle, loathed it, blushed for his connection with it. Yet it
+was the Buckle that had seen him through Groton, Harvard and the Law
+School, and had permitted him to enter the office of a distinguished
+corporation lawyer, instead of being enslaved to some sordid business
+with quick returns. The Buckle had been Ronald's fairy godmother--yet
+his father did not blame him for abhorring and disowning it. Mr. Grew
+himself often bitterly regretted having bestowed his own name on the
+instrument of his material success, though, at the time, his doing so
+had been the natural expression of his romanticism. When he invented
+the Buckle, and took out his patent, he and his wife both felt that to
+bestow their name on it was like naming a battle-ship or a peak of the
+Andes.
+
+Mrs. Grew had never learned to know better; but Mr. Grew had discovered
+his error before Ronald was out of school. He read it first in a black
+eye of his boy's. Ronald's symmetry had been marred by the insolent fist
+of a fourth former whom he had chastised for alluding to his father as
+"Old Buckles;" and when Mr. Grew heard the epithet he understood in a
+flash that the Buckle was a thing to blush for. It was too late then
+to dissociate his name from it, or to efface from the hoardings of the
+entire continent the picture of two gentlemen, one contorting himself in
+the abject effort to repair a broken brace, while the careless ease
+of the other's attitude proclaimed his trust in the Secure Suspender
+Buckle. These records were indelible, but Ronald could at least be
+spared all direct connection with them; and from that day Mr. Grew
+resolved that the boy should not return to Wingfield.
+
+"You'll see," he had said to Mrs. Grew, "he'll take right hold in New
+York. Ronald's got my knack for taking hold," he added, throwing out his
+chest.
+
+"But the way you took hold was in business," objected Mrs. Grew, who was
+large and literal.
+
+Mr. Grew's chest collapsed, and he became suddenly conscious of his
+comic face in its rim of sandy whiskers. "That's not the only way," he
+said, with a touch of wistfulness which escaped his wife's analysis.
+
+"Well, of course you could have written beautifully," she rejoined with
+admiring eyes.
+
+"_ Written?_ Me!" Mr. Grew became sardonic.
+
+"Why, those letters--weren't _they_ beautiful, I'd like to know?"
+
+The couple exchanged a glance, innocently allusive and amused on the
+wife's part, and charged with a sudden tragic significance on the
+husband's.
+
+"Well, I've got to be going along to the office now," he merely said,
+dragging himself out of his rocking-chair.
+
+This had happened while Ronald was still at school; and now Mrs. Grew
+slept in the Wingfield cemetery, under a life-size theological virtue of
+her own choosing, and Mr. Grew's prognostications as to Ronald's ability
+to "take right hold" in New York were being more and more brilliantly
+fulfilled.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+RONALD obeyed his father's injunction not to come to luncheon on the day
+of the Bankshires' dinner; but in the middle of the following week Mr.
+Grew was surprised by a telegram from his son.
+
+"Want to see you important matter. Expect me to-morrow afternoon."
+
+Mr. Grew received the telegram after breakfast. To peruse it he had
+lifted his eye from a paragraph of the morning paper describing a
+fancy-dress dinner which had taken place the night before at the
+Hamilton Gliddens' for the house-warming of their new Fifth Avenue
+palace.
+
+"Among the couples who afterward danced in the Poets' Quadrille were
+Miss Daisy Bankshire, looking more than usually lovely as Laura, and Mr.
+Ronald Grew as the young Petrarch."
+
+Petrarch and Laura! Well--if _anything_ meant anything, Mr. Grew
+supposed he knew what that meant. For weeks past he had noticed how
+constantly the names of the young people appeared together in the
+society notes he so insatiably devoured. Even the soulless reporter was
+getting into the habit of coupling them in his lists. And this Laura and
+Petrarch business was almost an announcement...
+
+Mr. Grew dropped the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read the
+paragraph. "Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely..." Yes;
+she _was_ lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the papers--seen
+her represented in every conceivable attitude of the mundane game:
+fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her thoroughbred, dancing
+a _gavotte_, all patches and plumes, or fingering a guitar, all tulle
+and lilies; and once he had caught a glimpse of her at the theatre.
+Hearing that Ronald was going to a fashionable first-night with the
+Bankshires, Mr. Grew had for once overcome his repugnance to following
+his son's movements, and had secured for himself, under the shadow of
+the balcony, a stall whence he could observe the Bankshire box without
+fear of detection. Ronald had never known of his father's presence at
+the play; and for three blessed hours Mr. Grew had watched his boy's
+handsome dark head bent above the dense fair hair and white averted
+shoulder that were all he could catch of Miss Bankshire's beauties.
+
+He recalled the vision now; and with it came, as usual, its ghostly
+double: the vision of his young self bending above such a white shoulder
+and such shining hair. Needless to say that the real Mason Grew had
+never found himself in so enviable a situation. The late Mrs. Grew had
+no more resembled Miss Daisy Bankshire than he had looked like the happy
+victorious Ronald. And the mystery was that from their dull faces,
+their dull endearments, the miracle of Ronald should have sprung. It was
+almost--fantastically--as if the boy had been a changeling, child of a
+Latmian night, whom the divine companion of Mr. Grew's early reveries
+had secretly laid in the cradle of the Wingfield bedroom while Mr. And
+Mrs. Grew slept the deep sleep of conjugal indifference.
+
+The young Mason Grew had not at first accepted this astral episode as
+the complete cancelling of his claims on romance. He too had grasped at
+the high-hung glory; and, with his fatal tendency to reach too far when
+he reached at all, had singled out the prettiest girl in Wingfield.
+When he recalled his stammered confession of love his face still tingled
+under her cool bright stare. The wonder of his audacity had struck her
+dumb; and when she recovered her voice it was to fling a taunt at him.
+
+"Don't be too discouraged, you know--have you ever thought of trying
+Addie Wicks?"
+
+All Wingfield would have understood the gibe: Addie Wicks was the
+dullest girl in town. And a year later he had married Addie Wicks...
+
+He looked up from the perusal of Ronald's telegram with this memory in
+his mind. Now at last his dream was coming true! His boy would taste
+of the joys that had mocked his thwarted youth and his dull gray
+middle-age. And it was fitting that they should be realized in Ronald's
+destiny. Ronald was made to take happiness boldly by the hand and lead
+it home like a bridegroom. He had the carriage, the confidence, the high
+faith in his fortune, that compel the wilful stars. And, thanks to
+the Buckle, he would have the exceptional setting, the background of
+material elegance, that became his conquering person. Since Mr. Grew
+had retired from business his investments had prospered, and he had been
+saving up his income for just such a contingency. His own wants were
+few: he had transferred the Wingfield furniture to Brooklyn, and his
+sitting-room was a replica of that in which the long years of his
+married life had been spent. Even the florid carpet on which Ronald's
+tottering footsteps had been taken was carefully matched when it
+became too threadbare. And on the marble centre-table, with its
+chenille-fringed cover and bunch of dyed pampas grass, lay the
+illustrated Longfellow and the copy of Ingersoll's lectures which
+represented literature to Mr. Grew when he had led home his bride. In
+the light of Ronald's romance, Mr. Grew found himself re-living, with
+a strange tremor of mingled pain and tenderness, all the poor prosaic
+incidents of his own personal history. Curiously enough, with this new
+splendor on them they began to emit a small faint ray of their own. His
+wife's armchair, in its usual place by the fire, recalled her placid
+unperceiving presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy
+years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he had
+only ached at her obtuseness. And from the chair he glanced up at the
+large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle brown
+wreath suspended on a corner of the frame. The photograph represented
+a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled hair, leaning
+negligently against a Gothic chair-back, a roll of music in his hand;
+and beneath was scrawled a bar of Chopin, with the words: "_ Adieu,
+Adele_."
+
+The portrait was that of the great pianist, Fortune Dolbrowski; and its
+presence on the wall of Mr. Grew's sitting-room commemorated the only
+exquisite hour of his life save that of Ronald's birth. It was some time
+before the latter memorable event, a few months only after Mr. Grew's
+marriage, that he had taken his wife to New York to hear the great
+Dolbrowski. Their evening had been magically beautiful, and even Addie,
+roused from her habitual inexpressiveness, had quivered into a momentary
+semblance of life. "I never--I never--" she gasped out helplessly when
+they had regained their hotel bedroom, and sat staring back entranced
+at the evening's evocations. Her large immovable face was pink and
+tremulous, and she sat with her hands on her knees, forgetting to roll
+up her bonnet-strings and prepare her curl-papers.
+
+"I'd like to _write_ him just how I felt--I wisht I knew how!" she burst
+out suddenly in a final effervescence of emotion.
+
+Her husband lifted his head and looked at her.
+
+"Would you? I feel that way too," he said with a sheepish laugh. And
+they continued to stare at each other shyly through a transfiguring mist
+of sound.
+
+Mr. Grew recalled the scene as he gazed up at the pianist's faded
+photograph. "Well, I owe her that anyhow--poor Addie!" he said, with a
+smile at the inconsequences of fate. With Ronald's telegram in his hand
+he was in a mood to count his mercies.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+"A CLEAR twenty-five thousand a year: that's what you can tell 'em
+with my compliments," said Mr. Grew, glancing complacently across the
+centre-table at his boy's charming face.
+
+It struck him that Ronald's gift for looking his part in life had never
+so romantically expressed itself. Other young men, at such a moment,
+would have been red, damp, tight about the collar; but Ronald's cheek
+was only a shade paler, and the contrast made his dark eyes more
+expressive.
+
+"A clear twenty-five thousand; yes, sir--that's what I always meant you
+to have."
+
+Mr. Grew leaned back, his hands thrust carelessly in his pockets, as
+though to divert attention from the agitation of his features. He had
+often pictured himself rolling out that phrase to Ronald, and now that
+it was actually on his lips he could not control their tremor.
+
+Ronald listened in silence, lifting a nervous hand to his slight dark
+moustache, as though he, too, wished to hide some involuntary betrayal
+of emotion. At first Mr. Grew took his silence for an expression of
+gratified surprise; but as it prolonged itself it became less easy to
+interpret.
+
+"I--see here, my boy; did you expect more? Isn't it enough?" Mr. Grew
+cleared his throat. "Do _they_ expect more?" he asked nervously. He was
+hardly able to face the pain of inflicting a disappointment on Ronald
+at the very moment when he had counted on putting the final touch to his
+felicity.
+
+Ronald moved uneasily in his chair and his eyes wandered upward to the
+laurel-wreathed photograph of the pianist above his father's head.
+
+"_ Is_ it that, Ronald? Speak out, my boy. We'll see, we'll look
+round--I'll manage somehow."
+
+"No, no," the young man interrupted, abruptly raising his hand as though
+to silence his father.
+
+Mr. Grew recovered his cheerfulness. "Well, what's the matter than, if
+_she's_ willing?"
+
+Ronald shifted his position again, and finally rose from his seat.
+
+"Father--I--there's something I've got to tell you. I can't take your
+money."
+
+Mr. Grew sat speechless a moment, staring blankly at his son; then he
+emitted a puzzled laugh. "My money? What are you talking about? What's
+this about my money? Why, it ain't _mine_, Ronny; it's all yours--every
+cent of it!" he cried.
+
+The young man met his tender look with a gaze of tragic rejection.
+
+"No, no, it's not mine--not even in the sense you mean. Not in any
+sense. Can't you understand my feeling so?"
+
+"Feeling so? I don't know how you're feeling. I don't know what you're
+talking about. Are you too proud to touch any money you haven't earned?
+Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
+
+"No. It's not that. You must know--"
+
+Mr. Grew flushed to the rim of his bristling whiskers. "Know? Know
+_what?_ Can't you speak?"
+
+Ronald hesitated, and the two men faced each other for a long strained
+moment, during which Mr. Grew's congested countenance grew gradually
+pale again.
+
+"What's the meaning of this? Is it because you've done something ...
+something you're ashamed of ... ashamed to tell me?" he suddenly
+gasped out; and walking around the table he laid his hand on his son's
+shoulder. "There's nothing you can't tell me, my boy."
+
+"It's not that. Why do you make it so hard for me?" Ronald broke out
+with passion. "You must have known this was sure to happen sooner or
+later."
+
+"Happen? What was sure to hap--?" Mr. Grew's question wavered on his lip
+and passed into a tremulous laugh. "Is it something _I've_ done that you
+don't approve of? Is it--is it _the Buckle_ you're ashamed of, Ronald
+Grew?"
+
+Ronald laughed too, impatiently. "The Buckle? No, I'm not ashamed of
+the Buckle; not any more than you are," he returned with a sudden
+bright flush. "But I'm ashamed of all I owe to it--all I owe to
+you--when--when--" He broke off and took a few distracted steps across
+the room. "You might make this easier for me," he protested, turning
+back to his father.
+
+"Make what easier? I know less and less what you're driving at," Mr.
+Grew groaned.
+
+Ronald's walk had once more brought him beneath the photograph on the
+wall. He lifted his head for a moment and looked at it; then he looked
+again at Mr. Grew.
+
+"Do you suppose I haven't always known?"
+
+"Known--?"
+
+"Even before you gave me those letters--after my mother's death--even
+before that, I suspected. I don't know how it began ... perhaps from
+little things you let drop ... you and she ... and resemblances that I
+couldn't help seeing ... in myself ... How on earth could you suppose
+I shouldn't guess? I always thought you gave me the letters as a way of
+telling me--"
+
+Mr. Grew rose slowly from his chair. "The letters? Dolbrowski's
+letters?"
+
+Ronald nodded with white lips. "You must remember giving them to me the
+day after the funeral."
+
+Mr. Grew nodded back. "Of course. I wanted you to have everything your
+mother valued."
+
+"Well--how could I help knowing after that?"
+
+"Knowing _what?_" Mr. Grew stood staring helplessly at his son. Suddenly
+his look caught at a clue that seemed to confront it with a deeper
+bewilderment. "You thought--you thought those letters ... Dolbrowski's
+letters ... you thought they meant ..."
+
+"Oh, it wasn't only the letters. There were so many other signs. My love
+of music--my--all my feelings about life ... and art... And when you
+gave me the letters I thought you must mean me to know."
+
+Mr. Grew had grown quiet. His lips were firm, and his small eyes looked
+out steadily from their creased lids.
+
+"To know that you were Fortune Dolbrowski's son?"
+
+Ronald made a mute sign of assent.
+
+"I see. And what did you mean to do?"
+
+"I meant to wait till I could earn my living, and then repay you ...
+as far as I can ever repay you... But now that there's a chance of
+my marrying ... and your generosity overwhelms me ... I'm obliged to
+speak."
+
+"I see," said Mr. Grew again. He let himself down into his chair,
+looking steadily and not unkindly at the young man. "Sit down, Ronald.
+Let's talk."
+
+Ronald made a protesting movement. "Is anything to be gained by it?
+You can't change me--change what I feel. The reading of those letters
+transformed my whole life--I was a boy till then: they made a man of me.
+From that moment I understood myself." He paused, and then looked up at
+Mr. Grew's face. "Don't imagine I don't appreciate your kindness--your
+extraordinary generosity. But I can't go through life in disguise. And I
+want you to know that I have not won Daisy under false pretences--"
+
+Mr. Grew started up with the first expletive Ronald had ever heard on
+his lips.
+
+"You damned young fool, you, you haven't _told_ her--?"
+
+Ronald raised his head quickly. "Oh, you don't know her, sir! She thinks
+no worse of me for knowing my secret. She is above and beyond all
+such conventional prejudices. She's _proud_ of my parentage--" he
+straightened his slim young shoulders--"as I'm proud of it ... yes, sir,
+proud of it..."
+
+Mr. Grew sank back into his seat with a dry laugh. "Well, you ought to
+be. You come of good stock. And you're father's son, every inch of you!"
+He laughed again, as though the humor of the situation grew on him with
+its closer contemplation.
+
+"Yes, I've always felt that," Ronald murmured, flushing.
+
+"Your father's son, and no mistake." Mr. Grew leaned forward. "You're
+the son of as big a fool as yourself. And here he sits, Ronald Grew."
+
+The young man's flush deepened to crimson; but Mr. Grew checked his
+reply with a decisive gesture. "Here he sits, with all your young
+nonsense still alive in him. Don't you see the likeness? If you don't,
+I'll tell you the story of those letters."
+
+Ronald stared. "What do you mean? Don't they tell their own story?"
+
+"I supposed they did when I gave them to you; but you've given it a
+twist that needs straightening out." Mr. Grew squared his elbows on the
+table, and looked at the young man across the gift-books and the dyed
+pampas grass. "I wrote all the letters that Dolbrowski answered."
+
+Ronald gave back his look in frowning perplexity. "You wrote them? I
+don't understand. His letters are all addressed to my mother."
+
+"Yes. And he thought he was corresponding with her."
+
+"But my mother--what did she think?"
+
+Mr. Grew hesitated, puckering his thick lids. "Well, I guess she kinder
+thought it was a joke. Your mother didn't think about things much."
+
+Ronald continued to bend a puzzled frown on the question. "I don't
+understand," he reiterated.
+
+Mr. Grew cleared his throat with a nervous laugh. "Well, I don't know
+as you ever will--_quite_. But this is the way it came about. I had a
+toughish time of it when I was young. Oh, I don't mean so much the fight
+I had to put up to make my way--there was always plenty of fight in
+me. But inside of myself it was kinder lonesome. And the outside didn't
+attract callers." He laughed again, with an apologetic gesture toward
+his broad blinking face. "When I went round with the other young fellows
+I was always the forlorn hope--the one that had to eat the drumsticks
+and dance with the left-overs. As sure as there was a blighter at a
+picnic I had to swing her, and feed her, and drive her home. And all the
+time I was mad after all the things you've got--poetry and music and all
+the joy-forever business. So there were the pair of us--my face and my
+imagination--chained together, and fighting, and hating each other like
+poison.
+
+"Then your mother came along and took pity on me. It sets up a gawky
+fellow to find a girl who ain't ashamed to be seen walking with him
+Sundays. And I was grateful to your mother, and we got along first-rate.
+Only I couldn't say things to her--and she couldn't answer. Well--one
+day, a few months after we were married, Dolbrowski came to New York,
+and the whole place went wild about him. I'd never heard any good music,
+but I'd always had an inkling of what it must be like, though I couldn't
+tell you to this day how I knew. Well, your mother read about him in the
+papers too, and she thought it'd be the swagger thing to go to New York
+and hear him play--so we went... I'll never forget that evening. Your
+mother wasn't easily stirred up--she never seemed to need to let off
+steam. But that night she seemed to understand the way I felt. And when
+we got back to the hotel she said suddenly: 'I'd like to tell him how I
+feel. I'd like to sit right down and write to him.'
+
+"'Would you?' I said. 'So would I.'
+
+"There was paper and pens there before us, and I pulled a sheet toward
+me, and began to write. 'Is this what you'd like to say to him?' I
+asked her when the letter was done. And she got pink and said: 'I don't
+understand it, but it's lovely.' And she copied it out and signed her
+name to it, and sent it."
+
+Mr. Grew paused, and Ronald sat silent, with lowered eyes.
+
+"That's how it began; and that's where I thought it would end. But it
+didn't, because Dolbrowski answered. His first letter was dated January
+10, 1872. I guess you'll find I'm correct. Well, I went back to hear him
+again, and I wrote him after the performance, and he answered again. And
+after that we kept it up for six months. Your mother always copied the
+letters and signed them. She seemed to think it was a kinder joke, and
+she was proud of his answering my letters. But she never went back to
+New York to hear him, though I saved up enough to give her the treat
+again. She was too lazy, and she let me go without her. I heard him
+three times in New York; and in the spring he came to Wingfield and
+played once at the Academy. Your mother was sick and couldn't go; so I
+went alone. After the performance I meant to get one of the directors to
+take me in to see him; but when the time came, I just went back home
+and wrote to him instead. And the month after, before he went back to
+Europe, he sent your mother a last little note, and that picture hanging
+up there..."
+
+Mr. Grew paused again, and both men lifted their eyes to the photograph.
+
+"Is that all?" Ronald slowly asked.
+
+"That's all--every bit of it," said Mr. Grew.
+
+"And my mother--my mother never even spoke to Dolbrowski?"
+
+"Never. She never even saw him but that once in New York at his
+concert."
+
+The blood crept again to Ronald's face. "Are you sure of that, sir?" he
+asked in a trembling voice.
+
+"Sure as I am that I'm sitting here. Why, she was too lazy to look at
+his letters after the first novelty wore off. She copied the answers
+just to humor me--but she always said she couldn't understand what we
+wrote."
+
+"But how could you go on with such a correspondence? It's incredible!"
+
+Mr. Grew looked at his son thoughtfully. "I suppose it is, to you.
+You've only had to put out your hand and get the things I was starving
+for--music, and good talk, and ideas. Those letters gave me all that.
+You've read them, and you know that Dolbrowski was not only a great
+musician but a great man. There was nothing beautiful he didn't see,
+nothing fine he didn't feel. For six months I breathed his air, and I've
+lived on it ever since. Do you begin to understand a little now?"
+
+"Yes--a little. But why write in my mother's name? Why make it a
+sentimental correspondence?"
+
+Mr. Grew reddened to his bald temples. "Why, I tell you it began that
+way, as a kinder joke. And when I saw that the first letter pleased and
+interested him, I was afraid to tell him--_I couldn't_ tell him. Do you
+suppose he'd gone on writing if he'd ever seen me, Ronny?"
+
+Ronald suddenly looked at him with new eyes. "But he must have thought
+your letters very beautiful--to go on as he did," he broke out.
+
+"Well--I did my best," said Mr. Grew modestly.
+
+Ronald pursued his idea. "Where _are_ all your letters, I wonder?
+Weren't they returned to you at his death?"
+
+Mr. Grew laughed. "Lord, no. I guess he had trunks and trunks full of
+better ones. I guess Queens and Empresses wrote to him."
+
+"I should have liked to see your letters," the young man insisted.
+
+"Well, they weren't bad," said Mr. Grew drily. "But I'll tell you one
+thing, Ronny," he added suddenly. Ronald raised his head with a quick
+glance, and Mr. Grew continued: "I'll tell you where the best of those
+letters is--it's in _you_. If it hadn't been for that one look at life I
+couldn't have made you what you are. Oh, I know you've done a good deal
+of your own making--but I've been there behind you all the time. And
+you'll never know the work I've spared you and the time I've saved you.
+Fortune Dolbrowski helped me do that. I never saw things in little again
+after I'd looked at 'em with him. And I tried to give you the big view
+from the stars... So that's what became of my letters."
+
+Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his elbows
+on the table, his face dropped on his hands.
+
+Suddenly Mr. Grew's touch fell on his shoulder.
+
+"Look at here, Ronald Grew--do you want me to tell you how you're
+feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea
+that you ain't the romantic figure you'd got to think yourself... Well,
+that's natural enough, too; but I'll tell you what it proves. It proves
+you're my son right enough, if any more proof was needed. For it's just
+the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your age--and if there's
+anybody here to laugh at it's myself, and not you. And you can laugh at
+me just as much as you like..."
+
+
+
+
+THE DAUNT DIANA
+
+
+I
+
+
+"WHAT'S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard the
+sequel?"
+
+Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of the
+collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good listener,
+at any rate. I don't think much of Ringham's snuff-boxes, but his
+anecdotes are usually worth while. He's a psychologist astray among
+_bibelots_, and the best bits he brings back from his raids on
+Christie's and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human nature he
+picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his _flair_ in enamel had
+been half as good we should have heard of the Finney collection by this
+time.
+
+He really has--queer fatuous investigator!--an unusually sensitive touch
+for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his museum
+of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the rare and
+chosen. I felt, therefore, that I was really to be congratulated on
+the fact that I didn't know what had become of the Daunt Diana, and on
+having before me a long evening in which to learn. I had just led
+my friend back, after an excellent dinner at Foyot's, to the shabby
+pleasant sitting-room of my _rive-gauche_ hotel; and I knew that, once
+I had settled him in a good arm-chair, and put a box of cigars at his
+elbow, I could trust him not to budge till I had the story.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We
+used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny
+rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among the
+refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a few _soldi_ to spend. But you've
+been out of the collector's world for so long that you may not know what
+happened to him afterward...
+
+He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of
+course--and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he gave
+me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don't think I've ever
+known any one who was at once so intelligent and so simple. It's the
+precise combination that results in romance; and poor little Neave was
+romantic.
+
+He told me once how he'd come to Rome. He was _originaire_ of Mystic,
+Connecticut--and he wanted to get as far away from it as possible. Rome
+seemed as far as anything on the same planet could be; and after he'd
+worried his way through Harvard--with shifts and shavings that you and
+I can't imagine--he contrived to get sent to Switzerland as tutor to a
+chap who'd failed in his examinations. With only the Alps between, he
+wasn't likely to turn back; and he got another fellow to take his pupil
+home, and struck out on foot for the seven hills.
+
+I'm telling you these early details merely to give you a notion of the
+man's idealism. There was a cool persistency and a headlong courage in
+his dash for Rome that one wouldn't have guessed in the little pottering
+chap we used to know. Once on the spot, he got more tutoring, managed to
+make himself a name for coaxing balky youths to take their fences, and
+was finally able to take up the more congenial task of expounding "the
+antiquities" to cultured travellers. I call it more congenial--but how
+it must have seared his soul! Fancy unveiling the sacred scars of Time
+to ladies who murmur: "Was this _actually_ the spot--?" while they
+absently feel for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him
+at it but the exquisite thought of accumulating the _lire_ for his
+collection. For the Neave collection, my dear fellow, began early, began
+almost with his Roman life, began in a series of little nameless odds
+and ends, broken trinkets, torn embroideries, the amputated extremities
+of maimed marbles: things that even the rag-picker had pitched away when
+he sifted his haul. But they weren't nameless or meaningless to Neave;
+his strength lay in his instinct for identifying, putting together,
+seeing significant relations. He was a regular Cuvier of bric-a-brac.
+And during those early years, when he had time to brood over trifles and
+note imperceptible differences, he gradually sharpened his instinct, and
+made it into the delicate and redoubtable instrument it is. Before he
+had a thousand francs' worth of _anticaglie_ to his name he began to be
+known as an expert, and the big dealers were glad to consult him. But
+we're getting no nearer the Daunt Diana...
+
+Well, some fifteen years ago, in London, I ran across Neave at
+Christie's. He was the same little man we'd known, effaced, bleached,
+indistinct, like a poor "impression"--as unnoticeable as one of his own
+early finds, yet, like them, with a _quality_, if one had an eye for
+it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had contrived, by fierce
+self-denial, to get a few decent bits together--"piecemeal, little by
+little, with fasting and prayer; and I mean the fasting literally!" he
+said.
+
+He had run over to London for his annual "look-round"--I fancy one or
+another of the big collectors usually paid his journey--and when we met
+he was on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old Daunt was a
+surly brute, and the things weren't easily seen; but he had heard Neave
+was in London, and had sent--yes, actually sent!--for him to come and
+give his opinion on a few bits, including the Diana. The little man bore
+himself discreetly, but you can imagine his pride. In his exultation he
+asked me to come with him--"Oh, I've the _grandes et petites entrees_,
+my dear fellow: I've made my conditions--" and so it happened that I saw
+the first meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.
+
+For that collection _was_ his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied in
+the Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes--I shall always be
+glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the Diana. I see him
+now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and stroking his seedy
+wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the muscles. It was all very
+quiet, but it was the _coup de foudre_. I could see that by the way
+his hands trembled when he turned away and began to examine the other
+things. You remember Neave's hands--thin, sallow, dry, with long
+inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae? Whatever they hold--bronze
+or lace, hard enamel or brittle glass--they have an air of conforming
+themselves to the texture of the thing, and sucking out of it, by every
+finger-tip, the mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day,
+as he moved about among Daunt's treasures, the Diana followed him
+everywhere. He didn't look back at her--he gave himself to the business
+he was there for--but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the
+threshold he turned and gave her his first free look--the kind of look
+that says: _"You're mine."_
+
+It amused me at the time--the idea of little Neave making eyes at any of
+Daunt's belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the Kohinoor.
+And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned away from the
+big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said, with a bitterness
+I'd never heard in him: "Good Lord! To think of that lumpy fool having
+those things to handle! Did you notice his stupid stumps of fingers? I
+suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets out of the gold fields. And in
+exchange for the nuggets he gets all that in a year--only has to hold
+out his callous palm to have that great ripe sphere of beauty drop into
+it! That's my idea of heaven--to have a great collection drop into
+one's hand, as success, or love, or any of the big shining things,
+drop suddenly on some men. And I've had to worry along for nearly fifty
+years, saving and paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a
+bit and there a bit--and not one perfection in the lot! It's enough to
+poison a man's life."
+
+The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it:
+remember, too, saying in answer: "But, look here, Neave, you wouldn't
+take Daunt's hands for yours, I imagine?"
+
+He stared a moment and smiled. "Have all that, and grope my way through
+it like a blind cave fish? What a question! But the sense that it's
+always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium is what makes
+anarchists, sir!" He looked back from the corner of the square, where we
+had paused while he delivered himself of this remarkable metaphor. "God,
+I'd like to throw a bomb at that place, and be in at the looting!"
+
+And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance--pulled the
+bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made on his
+little white soul.
+
+It wasn't the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him--it was
+the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy of the
+discrepancy between a man's wants and his power to gratify them. Neave's
+taste was too exquisite for his means--was like some strange, delicate,
+capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered and couldn't satisfy.
+
+"Don't you know those little glittering lizards that die if they're not
+fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste's like that, with
+one important difference--if it doesn't get its fly, it simply turns and
+feeds on me. Oh, it doesn't die, my taste--worse luck! It gets larger
+and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger bite of me--that's
+all."
+
+That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into this
+delicate register of perceptions and sensations--as far above the
+ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific registering
+instrument is beyond the rough human senses--only to find that the
+beauty which alone could satisfy him was unattainable--that he was never
+to know the last deep identification which only possession can give. He
+had trained himself in short, to feel, in the rare great thing--such
+an utterance of beauty as the Daunt Diana, say--a hundred elements of
+perfection, a hundred _reasons why_, imperceptible, inexplicable even,
+to the average "artistic" sense; he had reached this point by a long
+austere process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great
+refusals of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will
+make no pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled
+from its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it's a
+poignant case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually
+wins...
+
+You see, the worst of Neave's state was the fact of his not being a mere
+collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of efficiency.
+The whole thing was blent in him with poetry--his imagination had
+romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the religious feeling of the
+Middle Ages turned passion into love. And yet his could never be the
+abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who says: "This or that object is
+really mine because I'm capable of appreciating it." Neave _wanted_ what
+he appreciated--wanted it with his touch and his sight as well as with
+his imagination.
+
+It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in
+India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline: "Mr.
+Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection"... I rubbed my eyes and read
+again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. "An American
+living in Rome ... one of our most discerning collectors"; there was no
+mistaking the description. I clapped on my hat and bolted out to see the
+first dealer I could find; and there I had the incredible details. Neave
+had come into a fortune--two or three million dollars, amassed by an
+uncle who had a corset-factory, and who had attained wealth as the
+creator of the Mystic Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by
+the way, doesn't it? One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a
+highly specialized garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to
+modify; but, after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or
+three moulds--and so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic
+Super-straight.)
+
+The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny of
+the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed, leaving
+a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had to go out to
+"realize" on the corset-factory; and his description of _that_ ... Well,
+he came back with his money in his pocket, and the day he landed old
+Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a Chinese puzzle. I believe
+Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt House: at any rate, within two
+months the collection was his, and at a price that made the trade sit
+up. Trust old Daunt for that!
+
+I was in Rome the following spring, and you'd better believe I looked
+him up. A big porter glared at me from the door of the Palazzo Neave:
+I had almost to produce my passport to get in. But that wasn't Neave's
+fault--the poor fellow was so beset by people clamouring to see his
+collection that he had to barricade himself, literally. When I had
+mounted the state _Scalone_, and come on him, at the end of half a dozen
+echoing saloons, in the farthest, smallest _reduit_ of the vast suite, I
+received the same welcome that he used to give us in his little den over
+the wine shop.
+
+"Well--so you've got her?" I said. For I'd caught sight of the Diana
+in passing, against the bluish blur of an old _verdure_--just the
+background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she
+wasn't in the room where he sat.
+
+He smiled. "Yes, I've got her," he returned, more calmly than I had
+expected.
+
+"And all the rest of the loot?"
+
+"Yes. I had to buy the lump."
+
+"Had to? But you wanted to, didn't you? You used to say it was your
+idea of heaven--to stretch out your hand and have a great ripe sphere of
+beauty drop into it. I'm quoting your own words, by the way."
+
+Neave blinked and stroked his seedy moustache. "Oh, yes. I remember the
+phrase. It's true--it _is_ the last luxury." He paused, as if seeking a
+pretext for his lack of warmth. "The thing that bothered me was having
+to move. I couldn't cram all the stuff into my old quarters."
+
+"Well, I should say not! This is rather a better setting."
+
+He got up. "Come and take a look round. I want to show you two or three
+things--new attributions I've made. I'm doing the catalogue over."
+
+The interest of showing me the things seemed to dispel the vague apathy
+I had felt in him. He grew keen again in detailing his redistribution of
+values, and above all in convicting old Daunt and his advisers of their
+repeated aberrations of judgment. "The miracle is that he should have
+got such things, knowing as little as he did what he was getting. And
+the egregious asses who bought for him were no better, were worse in
+fact, since they had all sorts of humbugging wrong reasons for admiring
+what old Daunt simply coveted because it belonged to some other rich
+man."
+
+Never had Neave had so wondrous a field for the exercise of his
+perfected faculty; and I saw then how in the real, the great collector's
+appreciations the keenest scientific perception is suffused with
+imaginative sensibility, and how it's to the latter undefinable quality
+that in the last resort he trusts himself.
+
+Nevertheless, I still felt the shadow of that hovering apathy, and he
+knew I felt it, and was always breaking off to give me reasons for it.
+For one thing, he wasn't used to his new quarters--hated their bigness
+and formality; then the requests to show his things drove him mad. "The
+women--oh, the women!" he wailed, and interrupted himself to describe
+a heavy-footed German Princess who had marched past his treasures as
+if she were inspecting a cavalry regiment, applying an unmodulated
+_Mugneeficent_ to everything from the engraved gems to the Hercules
+torso.
+
+"Not that she was half as bad as the other kind," he added, as if with
+a last effort at optimism. "The kind who discriminate and say: 'I'm not
+sure if it's Botticelli or Cellini I mean, but _one of that school_, at
+any rate.' And the worst of all are the ones who know--up to a certain
+point: have the schools, and the dates and the jargon pat, and yet
+wouldn't know a Phidias if it stood where they hadn't expected it."
+
+He had all my sympathy, poor Neave; yet these were trials inseparable
+from the collector's lot, and not always without their secret
+compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my friend's
+attitude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to some strange
+disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But no! the Daunt
+collection was almost above criticism; and as we passed from one object
+to another I saw there was no mistaking the genuineness of Neave's pride
+in his possessions. The ripe sphere of beauty was his, and he had found
+no flaw in it as yet...
+
+A year later came the amazing announcement--the Daunt collection was for
+sale. At first we all supposed it was a case of weeding out (though how
+old Daunt would have raged at the thought of anybody's weeding _his_
+collection!) But no--the catalogue corrected that idea. Every stick and
+stone was to go under the hammer. The news ran like wildfire from Rome
+to Berlin, from Paris to London and New York. Was Neave ruined, then?
+Wrong again--the dealers nosed that out in no time. He was simply
+selling because he chose to sell; and in due time the things came up at
+Christie's.
+
+But you may be sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and
+the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the collection
+less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a preposterous answer--but
+then there was no other. Neave, by this time, was pretty generally
+recognized as having the subtlest _flair_ of any collector in Europe,
+and if he didn't choose to keep the Daunt collection it could be only
+because he had reason to think he could do better.
+
+In a flash this report had gone the rounds and the buyers were on their
+guard. I had run over to London to see the thing through, and it was the
+queerest sale I ever was at. Some of the things held their own, but a
+lot--and a few of the best among them--went for half their value. You
+see, they'd been locked up in old Daunt's house for nearly twenty years,
+and hardly shown to any one, so that the whole younger generation of
+dealers and collectors knew of them only by hearsay. Then you know
+the effect of suggestion in such cases. The undefinable sense we were
+speaking of is a ticklish instrument, easily thrown out of gear by
+a sudden fall of temperature; and the sharpest experts grow shy and
+self-distrustful when the cold current of depreciation touches them. The
+sale was a slaughter--and when I saw the Daunt Diana fall at the wink of
+a little third-rate _brocanteur_ from Vienna I turned sick at the folly
+of my kind.
+
+For my part, I had never believed that Neave had sold the collection
+because he'd "found it out"; and within a year my incredulity was
+justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were known
+for the marvels they are. There was hardly a poor bit in the lot; and
+my wonder grew at Neave's madness. All over Europe, dealers began to be
+fighting for the spoils; and all kinds of stuff were palmed off on the
+unsuspecting as fragments of the Daunt collection!
+
+Meanwhile, what was Neave doing? For a long time I didn't hear, and
+chance kept me from returning to Rome. But one day, in Paris, I ran
+across a dealer who had captured for a song one of the best Florentine
+bronzes in the Daunt collection--a marvellous _plaquette_ of
+Donatello's. I asked him what had become of it, and he said with a grin:
+"I sold it the other day," naming a price that staggered me.
+
+"Ye gods! Who paid you that for it?"
+
+His grin broadened, and he answered: "Neave."
+
+"_ Neave?_ Humphrey Neave?"
+
+"Didn't you know he was buying back his things?"
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"He is, though. Not in his own name--but he's doing it."
+
+And he _was_, do you know--and at prices that would have made a sane man
+shudder! A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London, where he
+was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel--another of his scattered
+treasures. Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it out with him.
+
+"Look here, Neave, what are you up to?"
+
+He wouldn't tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I
+took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened
+to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the
+Penicaud--and at that he broke down and confessed.
+
+"Yes, I'm buying them back, Finney--it's true." He laughed nervously,
+twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the story.
+
+"You know how I'd hungered and thirsted for the _real thing_--you quoted
+my own phrase to me once, about the 'ripe sphere of beauty.' So when I
+got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same moment, I saw the
+hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I'd been younger, and had
+more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to form such a collection as
+_that_. There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when
+I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was a
+_mariage de convenance_--there'd been no wooing, no winning. Each of
+my little old bits--the rubbish I chucked out to make room for Daunt's
+glories--had its own personal history, the drama of my relation to it,
+of the discovery, the struggle, the capture, the first divine moment
+of possession. There was a romantic secret between us. And then I
+had absorbed its beauties one by one, they had become a part of
+my imagination, they held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching
+association. And suddenly I had expected to create this kind of
+intense personal tie between myself and a roomful of new cold alien
+presences--things staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown
+pasts! Can you fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, my
+_own_ things, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them: there was a
+certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me,
+drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable
+surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she shrank
+out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has seen
+certain women--rare, shy, exquisite--made almost invisible by the vulgar
+splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who was just
+a specious seventeenth century attempt at the 'antique,' but who had
+penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the easily
+guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to me
+imaginatively--yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt
+Diana..."
+
+"The Daunt Diana!" I broke in. "Hold up, Neave--_the Daunt Diana?_"
+
+He smiled contemptuously. "A professional beauty, my dear
+fellow--expected every head to be turned when she came into a room."
+
+"Oh, Neave," I groaned.
+
+"Yes, I know. You're thinking of what we felt that day we first saw her
+in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of such
+a first sight! Well, I sold _her_ instead. Do you want the truth about
+her? _Elle etait bete a pleurer._"
+
+He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment.
+
+"And so you're impenitent?" I paused. "And yet you're buying some of the
+things back?"
+
+Neave laughed again, ironically. "I knew you'd find me out and call
+me to account. Well, yes: I'm buying back." He stood before me half
+sheepish, half defiant. "I'm buying back because there's nothing else
+as good in the market. And because I've a queer feeling that, this time,
+they'll be _mine_. But I'm ruining myself at the game!" he confessed.
+
+It was true: Neave was ruining himself. And he's gone on ruining himself
+ever since, till now the job's nearly done. Bit by bit, year by year,
+he has gathered in his scattered treasures, at higher prices than the
+dealers ever dreamed of getting. There are fabulous details in the story
+of his quest. Now and then I ran across him, and was able to help him
+recover a fragment; and it was wonderful to see his delight in the
+moment of reunion. Finally, about two years ago, we met in Paris, and he
+told me he had got back all the important pieces except the Diana.
+
+"The Diana? But you told me you didn't care for her."
+
+"Didn't care?" He leaned across the restaurant table that divided us.
+"Well, no, in a sense I didn't. I wanted her to want me, you see; and
+she didn't then! Whereas now she's crying to me to come to her. You know
+where she is?" he broke off.
+
+Yes, I knew: in the centre of Mrs. Willy P. Goldmark's yellow and gold
+drawing-room, under a thousand-candle-power chandelier, with reflectors
+aimed at her from every point of the compass. I had seen her wincing and
+shivering there in her outraged nudity at one of the Goldmark "crushes."
+
+"But you can't get her, Neave," I objected.
+
+"No, I can't get her," he said.
+
+Well, last month I was in Rome, for the first time in six or seven
+years, and of course I looked about for Neave. The Palazzo Neave was let
+to some rich Russians, and the splendid new porter didn't know where the
+proprietor lived. But I got on his trail easily enough, and it led me to
+a strange old place in the Trastevere, an ancient crevassed black palace
+turned tenement house, and fluttering with pauper clothes-lines. I found
+Neave under the leads, in two or three cold rooms that smelt of the
+_cuisine_ of all his neighbours: a poor shrunken little figure, seedier
+and shabbier than ever, yet more alive than when we had made the tour of
+his collection in the Palazzo Neave.
+
+The collection was around him again, not displayed in tall cabinets and
+on marble tables, but huddled on shelves, perched on chairs, crammed in
+corners, putting the gleam of bronze, the opalescence of old glass, the
+pale lustre of marble, into all the angles of his low dim rooms. There
+they were, the proud presences that had stared at him down the vistas of
+Daunt House, and shone in cold transplanted beauty under his own painted
+cornices: there they were, gathered in humble promiscuity about his bent
+shabby figure, like superb wild creatures tamed to become the familiars
+of some harmless old wizard.
+
+As we went from bit to bit, as he lifted one piece after another, and
+held it to the light of his low windows, I saw in his hands the same
+tremor of sensation that I had noticed when he first examined the same
+objects at Daunt House. All his life was in his finger-tips, and it
+seemed to communicate life to the exquisite things he touched. But
+you'll think me infected by his mysticism if I tell you they gained new
+beauty while he held them...
+
+We went the rounds slowly and reverently; and then, when I supposed our
+inspection was over, and was turning to take my leave, he opened a door
+I had not noticed, and showed me into a slit of a room beyond. It was
+a mere monastic cell, scarcely large enough for his narrow iron bed and
+the chest which probably held his few clothes; but there, in a niche of
+the bare wall, facing the foot of the bed--there stood the Daunt Diana.
+
+I gasped at the sight and turned to him; and he looked back at me
+without speaking.
+
+"In the name of magic, Neave, how did you do it?"
+
+He smiled as if from the depths of some secret rapture. "Call it magic,
+if you like; but I ruined myself doing it," he said.
+
+I stared at him in silence, breathless with the madness and the
+wonder of it; and suddenly, red to the ears, he flung out his boyish
+confession. "I lied to you that day in London--the day I said I didn't
+care for her. I always cared--always worshipped--always wanted her. But
+she wasn't mine then, and I knew it, and she knew it ... and now at last
+we understand each other." He looked at me shyly, and then glanced about
+the bare cold cell. "The setting isn't worthy of her, I know; she
+was meant for glories I can't give her; but beautiful things, my dear
+Finney, like beautiful spirits, live in houses not made with hands..."
+
+His face shone with extraordinary sweetness as he spoke; and I saw he'd
+got hold of the secret we're all after. No, the setting isn't worthy of
+her, if you like. The rooms are as shabby and mean as those we used
+to see him in years ago over the wine shop. I'm not sure they're not
+shabbier and meaner. But she rules there at last, she shines and hovers
+there above him, and there at night, I doubt not, steals down from her
+cloud to give him the Latmian kiss.
+
+
+
+
+THE DEBT
+
+
+I
+
+
+YOU remember--it's not so long ago--the talk there was about Dredge's
+"Arrival of the Fittest"? The talk has subsided, but the book of
+course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of its kind
+since--well, I'd almost said since "The Origin of Species."
+
+I'm not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important
+contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or
+rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that theory
+has had to make such a circuit. Dredge's hypothesis will be contested,
+may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out of the way all
+previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear's magnificent attempt;
+and for our generation of scientific investigators it will serve as the
+first safe bridge across a murderous black whirlpool.
+
+It's all very interesting--there are few things more stirring to the
+imagination than that sudden projection of the new hypothesis, light as
+a cobweb and strong as steel, across the intellectual abyss; but, for
+an idle observer of human motives, the other, the personal, side of
+Dredge's case is even more interesting and arresting.
+
+Personal side? You didn't know there was one? Pictured him simply as
+a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision, the
+result of a long series of "adaptations," as his own jargon would put
+it? Well, I don't wonder--if you've met him. He does give the impression
+of being something out of his own laboratory: a delicate scientific
+instrument that reveals wonders to the initiated, and is absolutely
+useless in an ordinary hand.
+
+In his youth it was just the other way. I knew him twenty years ago, as
+an awkward lout whom young Archie Lanfear had picked up at college, and
+brought home for a visit. I happened to be staying at the Lanfears' when
+the boys arrived, and I shall never forget Dredge's first appearance on
+the scene. You know the Lanfears always lived very simply. That summer
+they had gone to Buzzard's Bay, in order that Professor Lanfear might be
+near the Biological Station at Wood's Holl, and they were picnicking in
+a kind of sketchy bungalow without any attempt at elegance. But Galen
+Dredge couldn't have been more awe-struck if he'd been suddenly plunged
+into a Fifth Avenue ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against
+the low doorway, and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel
+Lanfear's foot, and became hopelessly entangled in her mother's
+draperies--though how he managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear's
+dowdy muslins ran to no excess of train.
+
+When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw
+then that Dredge's emotion was a tribute to the great man's proximity.
+That made the boy interesting, and I began to watch. Archie, always
+enthusiastic but vague, had said: "Oh, he's a tremendous chap--you'll
+see--" but I hadn't expected to see quite so clearly. Lanfear's vision,
+of course, was sharper than mine; and the next morning he had carried
+Dredge off to the Biological Station. And that was the way it began.
+
+Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe, New
+York State, and was working his way through college--waiting at White
+Mountain hotels in summer--when Archie Lanfear ran across him. There
+were eight children in the family, and the mother was an invalid. Dredge
+never had a penny from his father after he was fourteen; but his mother
+wanted him to be a scholar, and "kept at him," as he put it, in the hope
+of his going back to "teach school" at East Lethe. He developed slowly,
+as the scientific mind generally does, and was still adrift about
+himself and his tendencies when Archie took him down to Buzzard's Bay.
+But he had read Lanfear's "Utility and Variation," and had always been
+a patient and curious observer of nature. And his first meeting with
+Lanfear explained him to himself. It didn't, however, enable him to
+explain himself to others, and for a long time he remained, to all but
+Lanfear, an object of incredulity and conjecture.
+
+"_ Why_ my husband wants him about--" poor Mrs. Lanfear, the kindest of
+women, privately lamented to her friends; for Dredge, at that time--they
+kept him all summer at the bungalow--had one of the most encumbering
+personalities you can imagine. He was as inexpressive as he is to-day,
+and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable presences whose
+silence is an interruption.
+
+The poor Lanfears almost died of him that summer, and the pity of it
+was that he never suspected it, but continued to lavish on them a
+floundering devotion as uncomfortable as the endearments of a dripping
+dog--all out of gratitude for the Professor's kindness! He was full,
+in those days, of raw enthusiasms, which he forced on any one who
+would listen when his first shyness had worn off. You can't picture him
+spouting sentimental poetry, can you? Yet I've seen him petrify a whole
+group of Mrs. Lanfear's callers by suddenly discharging on them, in the
+strident drawl of Western New York, "Barbara Frietchie" or "The Queen of
+the May." His taste in literature was uniformly bad, but very definite,
+and far more assertive than his views on biological questions. In his
+scientific judgments he showed, even then, a remarkable temperance, a
+precocious openness to the opposite view; but in literature he was a
+furious propagandist, aggressive, disputatious, and extremely sensitive
+to adverse opinion.
+
+Lanfear, of course, had been struck from the first by his gift of
+accurate observation, and by the fact that his eagerness to learn was
+offset by his reluctance to conclude. I remember Lanfear's telling me
+that he had never known a lad of Dredge's age who gave such promise of
+uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the plodding patience of the
+accumulator of facts. Of course when Lanfear talked like that of a young
+biologist his fate was sealed. There could be no question of Dredge's
+going back to "teach school" at East Lethe. He must take a course in
+biology at Columbia, spend his vacations at the Wood's Holl laboratory,
+and then, if possible, go to Germany for a year or two.
+
+All this meant his virtual adoption by the Lanfears. Most of Lanfear's
+fortune went in helping young students to a start, and he devoted his
+heaviest subsidies to Dredge.
+
+"Dredge will be my biggest dividend--you'll see!" he used to say, in the
+chrysalis days when poor Galen was known to the world of science only
+as a perpetual slouching presence in Mrs. Lanfear's drawing-room. And
+Dredge, it must be said, took his obligations simply, with that kind of
+personal dignity, and quiet sense of his own worth, which in such cases
+saves the beneficiary from abjectness. He seemed to trust himself as
+fully as Lanfear trusted him.
+
+The comic part of it was that his only idea of making what is known as
+"a return" was to devote himself to the Professor's family. When I hear
+pretty women lamenting that they can't coax Professor Dredge out of his
+laboratory I remember Mabel Lanfear's cry to me: "If Galen would only
+keep away!" When Mabel fell on the ice and broke her leg, Galen walked
+seven miles in a blizzard to get a surgeon; but if he did her this
+service one day in the year, he bored her by being in the way for the
+other three hundred and sixty-four. One would have imagined at that
+time that he thought his perpetual presence the greatest gift he could
+bestow; for, except on the occasion of his fetching the surgeon, I don't
+remember his taking any other way of expressing his gratitude.
+
+In love with Mabel? Not a bit! But the queer thing was that he _did_
+have a passion in those days--a blind, hopeless passion for Mrs.
+Lanfear! Yes: I know what I'm saying. I mean Mrs. Lanfear, the
+Professor's wife, poor Mrs. Lanfear, with her tight hair and her loose
+figure, her blameless brow and earnest eye-glasses, and her perpetual
+attitude of mild misapprehension. I can see Dredge cowering, long and
+many-jointed, in a diminutive drawing-room chair, one square-toed
+shoe coiled round an exposed ankle, his knees clasped in a knot of
+red knuckles, and his spectacles perpetually seeking Mrs. Lanfear's
+eye-glasses. I never knew if the poor lady was aware of the sentiment
+she inspired, but her children observed it, and it provoked them to
+irreverent mirth. Galen was the predestined butt of Mabel and
+Archie; and secure in their mother's virtuous obtuseness, and in her
+worshipper's timidity, they allowed themselves a latitude of banter
+that sometimes turned their audience cold. Dredge meanwhile was going on
+obstinately with his work. Now and then he had queer fits of idleness,
+when he lapsed into a state of sulky inertia from which even Lanfear's
+admonitions could not rouse him. Once, just before an examination,
+he suddenly went off to the Maine woods for two weeks, came back, and
+failed to pass. I don't know if his benefactor ever lost hope; but at
+times his confidence must have been sorely strained. The queer part of
+it was that when Dredge emerged from these eclipses he seemed keener and
+more active than ever. His slowly growing intelligence probably needed
+its periodical pauses of assimilation; and Lanfear was marvellously
+patient.
+
+At last Dredge finished his course and went to Germany; and when he came
+back he was a new man--was, in fact, the Dredge we all know. He seemed
+to have shed his blundering, encumbering personality, and come to
+life as a disembodied intelligence. His fidelity to the Lanfears
+was unchanged; but he showed it negatively, by his discretions and
+abstentions. I have an idea that Mabel was less disposed to deride him,
+might even have been induced to softer sentiments; but I doubt if Dredge
+even noticed the change. As for his ex-goddess, he seemed to regard her
+as a motherly household divinity, the guardian genius of the darning
+needle; but on Professor Lanfear he looked with a deepening reverence.
+If the rest of the family had diminished in his eyes, its head had grown
+even greater.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+FROM that day Dredge's progress continued steadily. If not always
+perceptible to the untrained eye, in Lanfear's sight it never deviated,
+and the great man began to associate Dredge with his work, and to lean
+on him more and more. Lanfear's health was already failing, and in my
+confidential talks with him I saw how he counted on Galen Dredge to
+continue and amplify his doctrine. If he did not describe the young man
+as his predestined Huxley, it was because any such comparison between
+himself and his great predecessors would have been repugnant to his
+taste; but he evidently felt that it would be Dredge's role to reveal
+him to posterity. And the young man seemed at that time to take the same
+view of his calling. When he was not busy about Lanfear's work he was
+recording their conversations with the diligence of a biographer and the
+accuracy of a naturalist. Any attempt to question or minimize Lanfear's
+theories roused in his disciple the only flashes of wrath I have ever
+seen a scientific discussion provoke in him. In defending his master
+he became almost as intemperate as in the early period of his literary
+passions.
+
+Such filial dedication must have been all the more precious to Lanfear
+because, about that time, it became evident that Archie would never
+carry on his father's work. He had begun brilliantly, you may remember,
+by a little paper on _Limulus Polyphemus_ that attracted a good deal
+of notice when it appeared in the _Central Blatt_; but gradually his
+zoological ardour yielded to an absorbing passion for the violin,
+which was followed by a sudden plunge into physics. At present, after a
+side-glance at the drama, I understand he's devoting what is left of his
+father's money to archaeological explorations in Asia Minor.
+
+"Archie's got a delightful little mind," Lanfear used to say to me,
+rather wistfully, "but it's just a highly polished surface held up to
+the show as it passes. Dredge's mind takes in only a bit at a time,
+but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of
+fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just how it would
+be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a flash, and answer
+me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared into one of his
+fathomless silences, and then came to the surface like a dripping
+retriever, a long way beyond Archie's objections, and with an answer to
+them in his mouth."
+
+It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear's
+career came to him: I mean, of course, John Weyman's gift to Columbia
+of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection with it, of a
+chair of Experimental Evolution. Weyman had always taken an interest in
+Lanfear's work, but no one had supposed that his interest would express
+itself so magnificently. The honour came to Lanfear at a time when he
+was fighting an accumulation of troubles: failing health, the
+money difficulties resulting from his irrepressible generosity, his
+disappointment about Archie's career, and perhaps also the persistent
+attacks of the new school of German zoologists.
+
+"If I hadn't Galen I should feel the game was up," he said to me once,
+in a fit of half-real, half-mocking despondency. "But he'll do what I
+haven't time to do myself, and what my boy can't do for me."
+
+That meant that he would answer the critics, and triumphantly affirm
+Lanfear's theory, which had been rudely shaken, but not displaced.
+
+"A scientific hypothesis lasts till there's something else to put in
+its place. People who want to get across a river will use the old bridge
+till the new one's built. And I don't see any one who's particularly
+anxious, in this case, to take a contract for the new one," Lanfear
+ended; and I remember answering with a laugh: "Not while Horatius Dredge
+holds the other."
+
+It was generally known that Lanfear had not long to live, and the
+Laboratory was hardly opened before the question of his successor in
+the chair of Experimental Evolution began to be a matter of public
+discussion. It was conceded that whoever followed him ought to be a
+man of achieved reputation, some one carrying, as the French say, a
+considerable "baggage." At the same time, even Lanfear's critics felt
+that he should be succeeded by a man who held his views and would
+continue his teaching. This was not in itself a difficulty, for German
+criticism had so far been mainly negative, and there were plenty of
+good men who, while they questioned the permanent validity of Lanfear's
+conclusions, were yet ready to accept them for their provisional
+usefulness. And then there was the added inducement of the Laboratory!
+The Columbia Professor of Experimental Evolution has at his disposal the
+most complete instrument of biological research that modern ingenuity
+has yet produced; and it's not only in theology or politics _que Paris
+vaut bien une messe!_ There was no trouble about finding a candidate;
+but the whole thing turned on Lanfear's decision, since it was tacitly
+understood that, by Weyman's wish, he was to select his successor. And
+what a cry there was when he selected Galen Dredge!
+
+Not in the scientific world, though. The specialists were beginning to
+know about Dredge. His remarkable paper on Sexual Dimorphism had been
+translated into several languages, and a furious polemic had broken out
+over it. When a young fellow can get the big men fighting over him his
+future is pretty well assured. But Dredge was only thirty-four, and some
+people seemed to feel that there was a kind of deflected nepotism in
+Lanfear's choice.
+
+"If he could choose Dredge he might as well have chosen his own son,"
+I've heard it said; and the irony was that Archie--will you believe
+it?--actually thought so himself! But Lanfear had Weyman behind him,
+and when the end came the Faculty at once appointed Galen Dredge to the
+chair of Experimental Evolution.
+
+For the first two years things went quietly, along accustomed
+lines. Dredge simply continued the course which Lanfear's death had
+interrupted. He lectured well even then, with a persuasive simplicity
+surprising in the slow, inarticulate creature one knew him for. But
+haven't you noticed that certain personalities reveal themselves only
+in the more impersonal relations of life? It's as if they woke only
+to collective contacts, and the single consciousness were an unmeaning
+fragment to them.
+
+If there was anything to criticize in that first part of the course,
+it was the avoidance of general ideas, of those brilliant rockets of
+conjecture that Lanfear's students were used to seeing him fling
+across the darkness. I remember once saying this to Archie, who, having
+recovered from his absurd disappointment, had returned to his old
+allegiance to Dredge.
+
+"Oh, that's Galen all over. He doesn't want to jump into the ring till
+he has a big swishing knock-down argument in his fist. He'll wait twenty
+years if he has to. That's his strength: he's never afraid to wait."
+
+I thought this shrewd of Archie, as well as generous; and I saw the
+wisdom of Dredge's course. As Lanfear himself had said, his theory was
+safe enough till somebody found a more attractive one; and before
+that day Dredge would probably have accumulated sufficient proof to
+crystallize the fluid hypothesis.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THE third winter I was off collecting in Central America, and didn't
+get back till Dredge's course had been going for a couple of months.
+The very day I turned up in town Archie Lanfear descended on me with a
+summons from his mother. I was wanted at once at a family council.
+
+I found the Lanfear ladies in a state of incoherent distress, which
+Archie's own indignation hardly made more intelligible. But gradually
+I put together their fragmentary charges, and learned that Dredge's
+lectures were turning into an organized assault on his master's
+doctrine.
+
+"It amounts to just this," Archie said, controlling his women with the
+masterful gesture of the weak man. "Galen has simply turned round and
+betrayed my father."
+
+"Just for a handful of silver he left us," Mabel sobbed in parenthesis,
+while Mrs. Lanfear tearfully cited Hamlet.
+
+Archie silenced them again. "The ugly part of it is that he must have
+had this up his sleeve for years. He must have known when he was asked
+to succeed my father what use he meant to make of his opportunity. What
+he's doing isn't the result of a hasty conclusion: it means years of
+work and preparation."
+
+Archie broke off to explain himself. He had returned from Europe the
+week before, and had learned on arriving that Dredge's lectures were
+stirring the world of science as nothing had stirred it since Lanfear's
+"Utility and Variation." And the incredible outrage was that they owed
+their sensational effect to the fact of being an attempted refutation of
+Lanfear's great work.
+
+I own that I was staggered: the case looked ugly, as Archie said. And
+there was a veil of reticence, of secrecy, about Dredge, that always
+kept his conduct in a half-light of uncertainty. Of some men one would
+have said off-hand: "It's impossible!" But one couldn't affirm it of
+him.
+
+Archie hadn't seen him as yet; and Mrs. Lanfear had sent for me because
+she wished me to be present at the interview between the two men. The
+Lanfear ladies had a touching belief in Archie's violence: they thought
+him as terrible as a natural force. My own idea was that if there were
+any broken bones they wouldn't be Dredge's; but I was too curious as to
+the outcome not to be glad to offer my services as moderator.
+
+First, however, I wanted to hear one of the lectures; and I went the
+next afternoon. The hall was jammed, and I saw, as soon as Dredge
+appeared, what increased security and ease the interest of his public
+had given him. He had been clear the year before, now he was also
+eloquent. The lecture was a remarkable effort: you'll find the gist of
+it in Chapter VII of "The Arrival of the Fittest." Archie sat at my
+side in a white rage; he was too clever not to measure the extent of the
+disaster. And I was almost as indignant as he when we went to see Dredge
+the next day.
+
+I saw at a glance that the latter suspected nothing; and it was
+characteristic of him that he began by questioning me about my finds,
+and only afterward turned to reproach Archie for having been back a week
+without notifying him.
+
+"You know I'm up to my neck in this job. Why in the world didn't you
+hunt me up before this?"
+
+The question was exasperating, and I could understand Archie's stammer
+of wrath.
+
+"Hunt you up? Hunt you up? What the deuce are you made of, to ask me
+such a question instead of wondering why I'm here now?"
+
+Dredge bent his slow calm scrutiny on his friend's quivering face; then
+he turned to me.
+
+"What's the matter?" he said simply.
+
+"The matter?" shrieked Archie, his clenched fist hovering excitedly
+above the desk by which he stood; but Dredge, with unwonted quickness,
+caught the fist as it descended.
+
+"Careful--I've got a _Kallima_ in that jar there." He pushed a chair
+forward, and added quietly: "Sit down."
+
+Archie, ignoring the gesture, towered pale and avenging in his place;
+and Dredge, after a moment, took the chair himself.
+
+"The matter?" Archie reiterated with rising passion. "Are you so lost to
+all sense of decency and honour that you can put that question in good
+faith? Don't you really _know_ what's the matter?"
+
+Dredge smiled slowly. "There are so few things one _really knows_."
+
+"Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting! Don't you know you're
+insulting my father's memory?"
+
+Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of us
+to the other.
+
+"Oh, that's it, is it? Then you'd better sit down. If you don't see at
+once it'll take some time to make you."
+
+Archie burst into an ironic laugh.
+
+"I rather think it will!" he conceded.
+
+"Sit down, Archie," I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with a
+gesture that made his consent a protest.
+
+Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors were
+seated. He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care which the
+habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of his long,
+knotty hands.
+
+"It's about the lectures?" he said.
+
+Archie's answer was a deep scornful breath.
+
+"You've only been back a week, so you've only heard one, I suppose?"
+
+"It was not necessary to hear even that one. You must know the talk
+they're making. If notoriety is what you're after--"
+
+"Well, I'm not sorry to make a noise," said Dredge, putting a match to
+his pipe.
+
+Archie bounded in his chair. "There's no easier way of doing it than to
+attack a man who can't answer you!"
+
+Dredge raised a sobering hand. "Hold on. Perhaps you and I don't mean
+the same thing. Tell me first what's in your mind."
+
+The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance really
+eloquent with filial indignation.
+
+"It's an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what's in
+yours. Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn't stand
+in his place and use the chance he's given you to push yourself at his
+expense."
+
+Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.
+
+"Is that the way it strikes you?" he asked at length.
+
+"God! It's the way it would strike most men."
+
+He turned to me. "You too?"
+
+"I can see how Archie feels," I said.
+
+"That I'm attacking his father's memory to glorify myself?"
+
+"Well, not precisely: I think what he really feels is that, if your
+convictions didn't permit you to continue his father's teaching, you
+might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear
+lectureship."
+
+"Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded
+to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?"
+
+"Certainly not," Archie broke in. "But there's a question of taste,
+of delicacy, involved in the case that can't be decided on abstract
+principles. We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory
+and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to
+his own special convictions; what we feel--and you don't seem to--is
+that you're the last man to put them to that use; and I don't want to
+remind you why."
+
+A slight redness rose through Dredge's sallow skin. "You needn't," he
+said. "It's because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me,
+shoved me off from the shore. Because he saved me ten or twenty years
+of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working
+years are still ahead of me. Every one knows that's what your father did
+for me, but I'm the only person who knows the time and trouble that it
+took."
+
+It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never closed
+to generous emotions.
+
+"Well, then--?" he said, flushing also.
+
+"Well, then," Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its nasal
+edge, "I had to pay him back, didn't I?"
+
+The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony. "It
+would be the natural inference--with most men."
+
+"Just so. And I'm not so very different. I knew your father wanted a
+successor--some one who'd try and tie up the loose ends. And I took the
+lectureship with that object."
+
+"And you're using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!"
+
+Dredge paused to re-light his pipe. "Looks that way," he conceded. "This
+year anyhow."
+
+"_ This year_--?" Archie gasped at him.
+
+"Yes. When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it. Or
+rather, I didn't see any other way of going on with it. The change came
+gradually, as I worked."
+
+"Gradually? So that you had time to look round you, to know where you
+were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he had
+done?"
+
+"Oh, yes--I had time," Dredge conceded.
+
+"And yet you kept the chair and went on with the course?"
+
+Dredge refilled his pipe, and then turned in his seat so that he looked
+squarely at Archie.
+
+"What would your father have done in my place?" he asked.
+
+"In your place--?"
+
+"Yes: supposing he'd found out the things I've found out in the last
+year or two. You'll see what they are, and how much they count, if
+you'll run over the report of the lectures. If your father'd been alive
+he might have come across the same facts just as easily."
+
+There was a silence which Archie at last broke by saying: "But he
+didn't, and you did. There's the difference."
+
+"The difference? What difference? Would your father have suppressed the
+facts if he'd found them? It's _you_ who insult his memory by implying
+it! And if I'd brought them to him, would he have used his hold over me
+to get me to suppress them?"
+
+"Certainly not. But can't you see it's his death that makes the
+difference? He's not here to defend his case."
+
+Dredge laughed, but not unkindly. "My dear Archie, your father wasn't
+one of the kind who bother to defend their case. Men like him are the
+masters, not the servants, of their theories. They respect an idea only
+as long as it's of use to them; when it's usefulness ends they chuck it
+out. And that's what your father would have done."
+
+Archie reddened. "Don't you assume a good deal in taking it for granted
+that he would have had to in this particular case?"
+
+Dredge reflected. "Yes: I was going too far. Each of us can only answer
+for himself. But to my mind your father's theory is refuted."
+
+"And you don't hesitate to be the man to do it?"
+
+"Should I have been of any use if I had? And did your father ever ask
+anything of me but to be of as much use as I could?"
+
+It was Archie's turn to reflect. "No. That was what he always wanted, of
+course."
+
+"That's the way I've always felt. The first day he took me away from
+East Lethe I knew the debt I was piling up against him, and I never had
+any doubt as to how I'd pay it, or how he'd want it paid. He didn't pick
+me out and train me for any object but to carry on the light. Do you
+suppose he'd have wanted me to snuff it out because it happened to light
+up a fact he didn't fancy? I'm using _his_ oil to feed my torch with:
+yes, but it isn't really his torch or mine, or his oil or mine: they
+belong to each of us till we drop and hand them on."
+
+Archie turned a sobered glance on him. "I see your point. But if the job
+had to be done I don't see that you need have done it from his chair."
+
+"There's where we differ. If I did it at all I had to do it in the
+best way, and with all the authority his backing gave me. If I owe your
+father anything, I owe him that. It would have made him sick to see the
+job badly done. And don't you see that the way to honour him, and show
+what he's done for science, was to spare no advantage in my attack on
+him--that I'm proving the strength of his position by the desperateness
+of my assault?" Dredge paused and squared his lounging shoulders. "After
+all," he added, "he's not down yet, and if I leave him standing I guess
+it'll be some time before anybody else cares to tackle him."
+
+There was a silence between the two men; then Dredge continued in a
+lighter tone: "There's one thing, though, that we're both in danger
+of forgetting: and that is how little, in the long run, it all counts
+either way." He smiled a little at Archie's outraged gesture. "The
+most we can any of us do--even by such a magnificent effort as your
+father's--is to turn the great marching army a hair's breadth nearer
+what seems to us the right direction; if one of us drops out, here and
+there, the loss of headway's hardly perceptible. And that's what I'm
+coming to now."
+
+He rose from his seat, and walked across to the hearth; then, cautiously
+resting his shoulder-blades against the mantel-shelf jammed with
+miscellaneous specimens, he bent his musing spectacles on Archie.
+
+"Your father would have understood why I've done, what I'm doing; but
+that's no reason why the rest of you should. And I rather think it's
+the rest of you who've suffered most from me. He always knew what I was
+_there for_, and that must have been some comfort even when I was most
+in the way; but I was just an ordinary nuisance to you and your mother
+and Mabel. You were all too kind to let me see it at the time, but I've
+seen it since, and it makes me feel that, after all, the settling of
+this matter lies with you. If it hurts you to have me go on with my
+examination of your father's theory, I'm ready to drop the lectures
+to-morrow, and trust to the Lanfear Laboratory to breed up a young chap
+who'll knock us both out in time. You've only got to say the word."
+
+There was a pause while Dredge turned and laid his extinguished
+pipe carefully between a jar of embryo sea-urchins and a colony of
+regenerating planarians.
+
+Then Archie rose and held out his hand.
+
+"No," he said simply; "go on."
+
+
+
+
+FULL CIRCLE
+
+
+I
+
+
+GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight
+sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on the
+pillow.
+
+Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining
+dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his side,
+put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the bright
+morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the shrill crisp
+morning noises--those piercing notes of the American thoroughfare
+that seem to take a sharper vibration from the clearness of the medium
+through which they pass.
+
+Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue
+below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms
+eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the
+complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now it
+filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the symbol of
+the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less hurried in
+the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at the office sharp
+at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his life had no fixed
+framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a pack of blood-hounds.
+
+He dropped back on his pillows with a groan. Yes--not a year ago there
+had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling
+under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the
+shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its
+renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still call up the horror
+of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings: the listening for other
+bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in "crimping"-pins, the cold
+wait on the landing, the reluctant descent into a blotchy tin bath, and
+the effort to identify one's soap and nail-brush among the promiscuous
+implements of ablution. That memory had faded now, and Betton saw only
+the dark hours to which his blue and white temple of refreshment formed
+a kind of glittering antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast,
+and on the breakfast-tray his letters. His letters!
+
+He remembered--and _that_ memory had not faded!--the thrill with which
+he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand: the letter
+beginning: "I wonder if you'll mind an unknown reader's telling you all
+that your book has been to her?"
+
+_ Mind?_ Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after
+the publication of "Diadems and Faggots" the letters, the inane
+indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of interrogation,
+had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of unknown readers had told
+him with unsparing detail all that his book had been to them. And the
+wonder of it was, when all was said and done, that it had really been so
+little--that when their thick broth of praise was strained through the
+author's anxious vanity there remained to him so small a sediment of
+definite specific understanding! No--it was always the same thing, over
+and over and over again--the same vague gush of adjectives, the same
+incorrigible tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer's
+personal preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing
+to be measured by objective standards!
+
+He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of it
+all. He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of popularity:
+the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of "clippings," the
+sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a theatre, people nudged
+each other and said "That's Betton." Yes, the publicity had been sweet
+to him--at first. He had been touched by the sympathy of his fellow-men:
+had thought indulgently of the world, as a better place than the
+failures and the dyspeptics would acknowledge. And then his success
+began to submerge him: he gasped under the thickening shower of letters.
+His admirers were really unappeasable. And they wanted him to do such
+preposterous things--to give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered
+receptions, to speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for
+orphans, to go up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk.
+They wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for
+charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational,
+and social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on
+Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug-habit, democratic
+government, female suffrage and love. Perhaps the chief benefit of this
+demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions he really
+had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted horror of all
+forms of correspondence. He had been unutterably thankful when the
+letters began to fall off.
+
+"Diadems and Faggots" was now two years old, and the moment was at hand
+when its author might have counted on regaining the blessed shelter of
+oblivion--if only he had not written another book! For it was the
+worst part of his plight that his first success had goaded him to
+the perpetration of this particular folly--that one of the incentives
+(hideous thought!) to his new work had been the desire to extend and
+perpetuate his popularity. And this very week the book was to come out,
+and the letters, the cursed letters, would begin again!
+
+Wistfully, almost plaintively, he contemplated the breakfast-tray with
+which Strett presently appeared. It bore only two notes and the morning
+journals, but he knew that within the week it would groan under its
+epistolary burden. The very newspapers flung the fact at him as he
+opened them.
+
+READY ON MONDAY.
+
+GEOFFREY BETTON'S NEW NOVEL
+
+ABUNDANCE.
+
+BY THE AUTHOR OF "DIADEMS AND FAGGOTS."
+
+FIRST EDITION OF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND ALREADY SOLD OUT.
+
+ORDER NOW.
+
+A hundred and fifty thousand volumes! And an average of three readers to
+each! Half a million of people would be reading him within a week, and
+every one of them would write to him, and their friends and relations
+would write too. He laid down the paper with a shudder.
+
+The two notes looked harmless enough, and the calligraphy of one was
+vaguely familiar. He opened the envelope and looked at the signature:
+_Duncan Vyse_. He had not seen the name in years--what on earth could
+Duncan Vyse have to say? He ran over the page and dropped it with a
+wondering exclamation, which the watchful Strett, re-entering, met by a
+tentative "Yes, sir?"
+
+"Nothing. Yes--that is--" Betton picked up the note. "There's a
+gentleman, a Mr. Vyse, coming to see me at ten."
+
+Strett glanced at the clock. "Yes, sir. You'll remember that ten was the
+hour you appointed for the secretaries to call, sir."
+
+Betton nodded. "I'll see Mr. Vyse first. My clothes, please."
+
+As he got into them, in the state of irritable hurry that had become
+almost chronic with him, he continued to think about Duncan Vyse. They
+had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had left
+Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at his
+business and Vyse--poor devil!--trying to write. The novelist recalled
+his friend's attempts with a smile; then the memory of one small volume
+came back to him. It was a novel: "The Lifted Lamp." There was stuff in
+that, certainly. He remembered Vyse's tossing it down on his table with
+a gesture of despair when it came back from the last publisher. Betton,
+taking it up indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight. When he
+ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: "I'll
+tell Apthorn about it--I'll go and see him to-morrow." His own secret
+literary yearnings gave him a passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see
+him triumph over the ignorance and timidity of the publishers. Apthorn
+was the youngest of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage
+of them, a personal friend of Betton's, and, as it happened, the man
+afterward to become known as the privileged publisher of "Diadems and
+Faggots." Unluckily the next day something unexpected turned up, and
+Betton forgot about Vyse and his manuscript. He continued to forget for
+a month, and then came a note from Vyse, who was ill, and wrote to
+ask what his friend had done. Betton did not like to say "I've done
+nothing," so he left the note unanswered, and vowed again: "I'll see
+Apthorn."
+
+The following day he was called to the West on business, and was gone
+a month. When he came back, there was another note from Vyse, who was
+still ill, and desperately hard up. "I'll take anything for the book,
+if they'll advance me two hundred dollars." Betton, full of compunction,
+would gladly have advanced the sum himself; but he was hard up too,
+and could only swear inwardly: "I'll write to Apthorn." Then he glanced
+again at the manuscript, and reflected: "No--there are things in it that
+need explaining. I'd better see him."
+
+Once he went so far as to telephone Apthorn, but the publisher was out.
+Then he finally and completely forgot.
+
+One Sunday he went out of town, and on his return, rummaging among
+the papers on his desk, he missed "The Lifted Lamp," which had been
+gathering dust there for half a year. What the deuce could have become
+of it? Betton spent a feverish hour in vainly increasing the disorder of
+his documents, and then bethought himself of calling the maid-servant,
+who first indignantly denied having touched anything ("I can see that's
+true from the dust," Betton scathingly interjected), and then mentioned
+with hauteur that a young lady had called in his absence and asked to be
+allowed to get a book.
+
+"A lady? Did you let her come up?"
+
+"She said somebody'd sent her."
+
+Vyse, of course--Vyse had sent her for his manuscript! He was always
+mixed up with some woman, and it was just like him to send the girl of
+the moment to Betton's lodgings, with instructions to force the door
+in his absence. Vyse had never been remarkable for delicacy. Betton,
+furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own effects were
+missing--one couldn't tell, with the company Vyse kept!--and then
+dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague sense of magnanimity in
+doing so. He felt himself exonerated by Vyse's conduct.
+
+The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened the
+door to announce "Mr. Vyse," and Betton, a moment later, crossed the
+threshold of his pleasant library.
+
+His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug was
+the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking, with the
+same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic truculence. Only
+he had grown shabbier, and bald.
+
+Betton held out a hospitable hand.
+
+"This is a good surprise! Glad you looked me up, my dear fellow."
+
+Vyse's palm was damp and bony: he had always had a disagreeable hand.
+
+"You got my note? You know what I've come for?" he said.
+
+"About the secretaryship? (Sit down.) Is that really serious?"
+
+Betton lowered himself luxuriously into one of his vast Maple
+arm-chairs. He had grown stouter in the last year, and the cushion
+behind him fitted comfortably into the crease of his nape. As he leaned
+back he caught sight of his image in the mirror between the windows, and
+reflected uneasily that Vyse would not find _him_ unchanged.
+
+"Serious?" Vyse rejoined. "Why not? Aren't _you?_"
+
+"Oh, perfectly." Betton laughed apologetically. "Only--well, the fact
+is, you may not understand what rubbish a secretary of mine would have
+to deal with. In advertising for one I never imagined--I didn't aspire
+to any one above the ordinary hack."
+
+"I'm the ordinary hack," said Vyse drily.
+
+Betton's affable gesture protested. "My dear fellow--. You see it's not
+business--what I'm in now," he continued with a laugh.
+
+Vyse's thin lips seemed to form a noiseless "_ Isn't_ it?" which they
+instantly transposed into the audibly reply: "I inferred from your
+advertisement that you want some one to relieve you in your literary
+work. Dictation, short-hand--that kind of thing?"
+
+"Well, no: not that either. I type my own things. What I'm looking for
+is somebody who won't be above tackling my correspondence."
+
+Vyse looked slightly surprised. "I should be glad of the job," he then
+said.
+
+Betton began to feel a vague embarrassment. He had supposed that such a
+proposal would be instantly rejected. "It would be only for an hour
+or two a day--if you're doing any writing of your own?" he threw out
+interrogatively.
+
+"No. I've given all that up. I'm in an office now--business. But it
+doesn't take all my time, or pay enough to keep me alive."
+
+"In that case, my dear fellow--if you could come every morning; but
+it's mostly awful bosh, you know," Betton again broke off, with growing
+awkwardness.
+
+Vyse glanced at him humorously. "What you want me to write?"
+
+"Well, that depends--" Betton sketched the obligatory smile. "But I was
+thinking of the letters you'll have to answer. Letters about my books,
+you know--I've another one appearing next week. And I want to be
+beforehand now--dam the flood before it swamps me. Have you any idea of
+the deluge of stuff that people write to a successful novelist?"
+
+As Betton spoke, he saw a tinge of red on Vyse's thin cheek, and his own
+reflected it in a richer glow of shame. "I mean--I mean--" he stammered
+helplessly.
+
+"No, I haven't," said Vyse; "but it will be awfully jolly finding out."
+
+There was a pause, groping and desperate on Betton's part, sardonically
+calm on his visitor's.
+
+"You--you've given up writing altogether?" Betton continued.
+
+"Yes; we've changed places, as it were." Vyse paused. "But about these
+letters--you dictate the answers?"
+
+"Lord, no! That's the reason why I said I wanted somebody--er--well used
+to writing. I don't want to have anything to do with them--not a thing!
+You'll have to answer them as if they were written to _you_--" Betton
+pulled himself up again, and rising in confusion jerked open one of the
+drawers of his writing-table.
+
+"Here--this kind of rubbish," he said, tossing a packet of letters onto
+Vyse's knee.
+
+"Oh--you keep them, do you?" said Vyse simply.
+
+"I--well--some of them; a few of the funniest only."
+
+Vyse slipped off the band and began to open the letters. While he was
+glancing over them Betton again caught his own reflection in the
+glass, and asked himself what impression he had made on his visitor.
+It occurred to him for the first time that his high-coloured well-fed
+person presented the image of commercial rather than of intellectual
+achievement. He did not look like his own idea of the author of "Diadems
+and Faggots"--and he wondered why.
+
+Vyse laid the letters aside. "I think I can do it--if you'll give me a
+notion of the tone I'm to take."
+
+"The tone?"
+
+"Yes--that is, if I'm to sign your name."
+
+"Oh, of course: I expect you to sign for me. As for the tone, say just
+what you'd--well, say all you can without encouraging them to answer."
+
+Vyse rose from his seat. "I could submit a few specimens," he suggested.
+
+"Oh, as to that--you always wrote better than I do," said Betton
+handsomely.
+
+"I've never had this kind of thing to write. When do you wish me to
+begin?" Vyse enquired, ignoring the tribute.
+
+"The book's out on Monday. The deluge will begin about three days after.
+Will you turn up on Thursday at this hour?" Betton held his hand out
+with real heartiness. "It was great luck for me, your striking that
+advertisement. Don't be too harsh with my correspondents--I owe them
+something for having brought us together."
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+THE deluge began punctually on the Thursday, and Vyse, arriving as
+punctually, had an impressive pile of letters to attack. Betton, on his
+way to the Park for a ride, came into the library, smoking the cigarette
+of indolence, to look over his secretary's shoulder.
+
+"How many of 'em? Twenty? Good Lord! It's going to be worse than
+'Diadems.' I've just had my first quiet breakfast in two years--time
+to read the papers and loaf. How I used to dread the sight of my
+letter-box! Now I sha'n't know I have one."
+
+He leaned over Vyse's chair, and the secretary handed him a letter.
+
+"Here's rather an exceptional one--lady, evidently. I thought you might
+want to answer it yourself--"
+
+"Exceptional?" Betton ran over the mauve pages and tossed them down.
+"Why, my dear man, I get hundreds like that. You'll have to be pretty
+short with her, or she'll send her photograph."
+
+He clapped Vyse on the shoulder and turned away, humming a tune. "Stay
+to luncheon," he called back gaily from the threshold.
+
+After luncheon Vyse insisted on showing a few of his answers to the
+first batch of letters. "If I've struck the note I won't bother you
+again," he urged; and Betton groaningly consented.
+
+"My dear fellow, they're beautiful--too beautiful. I'll be let in for a
+correspondence with every one of these people."
+
+Vyse, at this, meditated for a while above a blank sheet. "All
+right--how's this?" he said, after another interval of rapid writing.
+
+Betton glanced over the page. "By George--by George! Won't she _see_
+it?" he exulted, between fear and rapture.
+
+"It's wonderful how little people see," said Vyse reassuringly.
+
+The letters continued to pour in for several weeks after the appearance
+of "Abundance." For five or six blissful days Betton did not even have
+his mail brought to him, trusting to Vyse to single out his personal
+correspondence, and to deal with the rest according to their agreement.
+During those days he luxuriated in a sense of wild and lawless freedom;
+then, gradually, he began to feel the need of fresh restraints to break,
+and learned that the zest of liberty lies in the escape from specific
+obligations. At first he was conscious only of a vague hunger, but in
+time the craving resolved into a shame-faced desire to see his letters.
+
+"After all, I hated them only because I had to answer them"; and he told
+Vyse carelessly that he wished all his letters submitted to him before
+the secretary answered them.
+
+At first he pushed aside those beginning: "I have just laid down
+'Abundance' after a third reading," or: "Every day for the last month
+I have been telephoning my bookseller to know when your novel would be
+out." But little by little the freshness of his interest revived, and
+even this stereotyped homage began to arrest his eye. At last a day came
+when he read all the letters, from the first word to the last, as he had
+done when "Diadems and Faggots" appeared. It was really a pleasure to
+read them, now that he was relieved of the burden of replying: his new
+relation to his correspondents had the glow of a love-affair unchilled
+by the contingency of marriage.
+
+One day it struck him that the letters were coming in more slowly and in
+smaller numbers. Certainly there had been more of a rush when "Diadems
+and Faggots" came out. Betton began to wonder if Vyse were exercising
+an unauthorized discrimination, and keeping back the communications
+he deemed least important. This sudden conjecture carried the
+novelist straight to his library, where he found Vyse bending over the
+writing-table with his usual inscrutable pale smile. But once there,
+Betton hardly knew how to frame his question, and blundered into an
+enquiry for a missing invitation.
+
+"There's a note--a personal note--I ought to have had this morning. Sure
+you haven't kept it back by mistake among the others?"
+
+Vyse laid down his pen. "The others? But I never keep back any."
+
+Betton had foreseen the answer. "Not even the worst twaddle about my
+book?" he suggested lightly, pushing the papers about.
+
+"Nothing. I understood you wanted to go over them all first."
+
+"Well, perhaps it's safer," Betton conceded, as if the idea were new to
+him. With an embarrassed hand he continued to turn over the letters at
+Vyse's elbow.
+
+"Those are yesterday's," said the secretary; "here are to-day's," he
+added, pointing to a meagre trio.
+
+"H'm--only these?" Betton took them and looked them over lingeringly.
+"I don't see what the deuce that chap means about the first part of
+'Abundance' 'certainly justifying the title'--do you?"
+
+Vyse was silent, and the novelist continued irritably: "Damned cheek,
+his writing, if he doesn't like the book. Who cares what he thinks about
+it, anyhow?"
+
+And his morning ride was embittered by the discovery that it was
+unexpectedly disagreeable to have Vyse read any letters which did not
+express unqualified praise of his books. He began to fancy there was
+a latent rancour, a kind of baffled sneer, under Vyse's manner; and he
+decided to return to the practice of having his mail brought straight to
+his room. In that way he could edit the letters before his secretary saw
+them.
+
+Vyse made no comment on the change, and Betton was reduced to
+wondering whether his imperturbable composure were the mask of complete
+indifference or of a watchful jealousy. The latter view being more
+agreeable to his employer's self-esteem, the next step was to conclude
+that Vyse had not forgotten the episode of "The Lifted Lamp," and would
+naturally take a vindictive joy in any unfavourable judgments passed on
+his rival's work. This did not simplify the situation, for there was
+no denying that unfavourable criticisms preponderated in Betton's
+correspondence. "Abundance" was neither meeting with the unrestricted
+welcome of "Diadems and Faggots," nor enjoying the alternative of an
+animated controversy: it was simply found dull, and its readers said so
+in language not too tactfully tempered by regretful comparisons with its
+predecessor. To withhold unfavourable comments from Vyse was, therefore,
+to make it appear that correspondence about the book had died out; and
+its author, mindful of his unguarded predictions, found this even more
+embarrassing. The simplest solution would be to get rid of Vyse; and to
+this end Betton began to address his energies.
+
+One evening, finding himself unexpectedly disengaged, he asked Vyse
+to dine; it had occurred to him that, in the course of an after-dinner
+chat, he might delicately hint his feeling that the work he had offered
+his friend was unworthy so accomplished a hand.
+
+Vyse surprised him by a momentary hesitation. "I may not have time to
+dress."
+
+Betton stared. "What's the odds? We'll dine here--and as late as you
+like."
+
+Vyse thanked him, and appeared, punctually at eight, in all the
+shabbiness of his daily wear. He looked paler and more shyly truculent
+than usual, and Betton, from the height of his florid stature, said to
+himself, with the sudden professional instinct for "type": "He might be
+an agent of something--a chap who carries deadly secrets."
+
+Vyse, it was to appear, did carry a deadly secret; but one less
+perilous to society than to himself. He was simply poor--inexcusably,
+irremediably poor. Everything failed him, had always failed him:
+whatever he put his hand to went to bits.
+
+This was the confession that, reluctantly, yet with a kind of
+white-lipped bravado, he flung at Betton in answer to the latter's
+tentative suggestion that, really, the letter-answering job wasn't worth
+bothering him with--a thing that any type-writer could do.
+
+"If you mean you're paying me more than it's worth, I'll take less,"
+Vyse rushed out after a pause.
+
+"Oh, my dear fellow--" Betton protested, flushing.
+
+"What _do_ you mean, then? Don't I answer the letters as you want them
+answered?"
+
+Betton anxiously stroked his silken ankle. "You do it beautifully,
+too beautifully. I mean what I say: the work's not worthy of you. I'm
+ashamed to ask you--"
+
+"Oh, hang shame," Vyse interrupted. "Do you know why I said I shouldn't
+have time to dress to-night? Because I haven't any evening clothes. As
+a matter of fact, I haven't much but the clothes I stand in. One thing
+after another's gone against me; all the infernal ingenuities of chance.
+It's been a slow Chinese torture, the kind where they keep you alive to
+have more fun killing you." He straightened himself with a sudden blush.
+"Oh, I'm all right now--getting on capitally. But I'm still walking
+rather a narrow plank; and if I do your work well enough--if I take your
+idea--"
+
+Betton stared into the fire without answering. He knew next to nothing
+of Vyse's history, of the mischance or mis-management that had brought
+him, with his brains and his training, to so unlikely a pass. But a pang
+of compunction shot through him as he remembered the manuscript of "The
+Lifted Lamp" gathering dust on his table for half a year.
+
+"Not that it would have made any earthly difference--since he's
+evidently never been able to get the thing published." But this
+reflection did not wholly console Betton, and he found it impossible, at
+the moment, to tell Vyse that his services were not needed.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+DURING the ensuing weeks the letters grew fewer and fewer, and Betton
+foresaw the approach of the fatal day when his secretary, in common
+decency, would have to say: "I can't draw my pay for doing nothing."
+
+What a triumph for Vyse!
+
+The thought was intolerable, and Betton cursed his weakness in not
+having dismissed the fellow before such a possibility arose.
+
+"If I tell him I've no use for him now, he'll see straight through it,
+of course;--and then, hang it, he looks so poor!"
+
+This consideration came after the other, but Betton, in rearranging
+them, put it first, because he thought it looked better there, and
+also because he immediately perceived its value in justifying a plan of
+action that was beginning to take shape in his mind.
+
+"Poor devil, I'm damned if I don't do it for him!" said Betton, sitting
+down at his desk.
+
+Three or four days later he sent word to Vyse that he didn't care to go
+over the letters any longer, and that they would once more be carried
+directly to the library.
+
+The next time he lounged in, on his way to his morning ride, he found
+his secretary's pen in active motion.
+
+"A lot to-day," Vyse told him cheerfully.
+
+His tone irritated Betton: it had the inane optimism of the physician
+reassuring a discouraged patient.
+
+"Oh, Lord--I thought it was almost over," groaned the novelist.
+
+"No: they've just got their second wind. Here's one from a Chicago
+publisher--never heard the name--offering you thirty per cent. on your
+next novel, with an advance royalty of twenty thousand. And here's a
+chap who wants to syndicate it for a bunch of Sunday papers: big offer,
+too. That's from Ann Arbor. And this--oh, _this_ one's funny!"
+
+He held up a small scented sheet to Betton, who made no movement to
+receive it.
+
+"Funny? Why's it funny?" he growled.
+
+"Well, it's from a girl--a lady--and she thinks she's the only person
+who understands 'Abundance'--has the clue to it. Says she's never seen a
+book so misrepresented by the critics--"
+
+"Ha, ha! That _is_ good!" Betton agreed with too loud a laugh.
+
+"This one's from a lady, too--married woman. Says she's misunderstood,
+and would like to correspond."
+
+"Oh, Lord," said Betton.--"What are you looking at?" he added sharply,
+as Vyse continued to bend his blinking gaze on the letters.
+
+"I was only thinking I'd never seen such short letters from women.
+Neither one fills the first page."
+
+"Well, what of that?" queried Betton.
+
+Vyse reflected. "I'd like to meet a woman like that," he said wearily;
+and Betton laughed again.
+
+The letters continued to pour in, and there could be no farther question
+of dispensing with Vyse's services. But one morning, about three weeks
+later, the latter asked for a word with his employer, and Betton, on
+entering the library, found his secretary with half a dozen documents
+spread out before him.
+
+"What's up?" queried Betton, with a touch of impatience.
+
+Vyse was attentively scanning the outspread letters.
+
+"I don't know: can't make out." His voice had a faint note of
+embarrassment. "Do you remember a note signed _Hester Macklin_ that
+came three or four weeks ago? Married--misunderstood--Western army
+post--wanted to correspond?"
+
+Betton seemed to grope among his memories; then he assented vaguely.
+
+"A short note," Vyse went on: "the whole story in half a page. The
+shortness struck me so much--and the directness--that I wrote her: wrote
+in my own name, I mean."
+
+"In your own name?" Betton stood amazed; then he broke into a groan.
+
+"Good Lord, Vyse--you're incorrigible!"
+
+The secretary pulled his thin moustache with a nervous laugh. "If you
+mean I'm an ass, you're right. Look here." He held out an envelope
+stamped with the words: "Dead Letter Office." "My effusion has come back
+to me marked 'unknown.' There's no such person at the address she gave
+you."
+
+Betton seemed for an instant to share his secretary's embarrassment;
+then he burst into an uproarious laugh.
+
+"Hoax, was it? That's rough on you, old fellow!"
+
+Vyse shrugged his shoulders. "Yes; but the interesting question is--why
+on earth didn't _your_ answer come back, too?"
+
+"My answer?"
+
+"The official one--the one I wrote in your name. If she's unknown,
+what's become of _that?_"
+
+Betton stared at him with eyes wrinkled by amusement. "Perhaps she
+hadn't disappeared then."
+
+Vyse disregarded the conjecture. "Look here--I believe _all_ these
+letters are a hoax," he broke out.
+
+Betton stared at him with a face that turned slowly red and angry. "What
+are you talking about? All what letters?"
+
+"These I've spread out here: I've been comparing them. And I believe
+they're all written by one man."
+
+Burton's redness turned to a purple that made his ruddy moustache seem
+pale. "What the devil are you driving at?" he asked.
+
+"Well, just look at it," Vyse persisted, still bent above the letters.
+"I've been studying them carefully--those that have come within the last
+two or three weeks--and there's a queer likeness in the writing of some
+of them. The _g_'s are all like corkscrews. And the same phrases keep
+recurring--the Ann Arbor news-agent uses the same expressions as the
+President of the Girls' College at Euphorbia, Maine."
+
+Betton laughed. "Aren't the critics always groaning over the shrinkage
+of the national vocabulary? Of course we all use the same expressions."
+
+"Yes," said Vyse obstinately. "But how about using the same _g_'s?"
+
+Betton laughed again, but Vyse continued without heeding him: "Look
+here, Betton--could Strett have written them?"
+
+"Strett?" Betton roared. "_ Strett?_" He threw himself into his
+arm-chair to shake out his mirth at greater ease.
+
+"I'll tell you why. Strett always posts all my answers. He comes in for
+them every day before I leave. He posted the letter to the misunderstood
+party--the letter from _you_ that the Dead Letter Office didn't return.
+_I_ posted my own letter to her; and that came back."
+
+A measurable silence followed the emission of this ingenious conjecture;
+then Betton observed with gentle irony: "Extremely neat. And of course
+it's no business of yours to supply any valid motive for this remarkable
+attention on my valet's part."
+
+Vyse cast on him a slanting glance.
+
+"If you've found that human conduct's generally based on valid
+motives--!"
+
+"Well, outside of mad-houses it's supposed to be not quite
+incalculable."
+
+Vyse had an odd smile under his thin moustache. "Every house is a
+mad-house at some time or another."
+
+Betton rose with a careless shake of the shoulders. "This one will be if
+I talk to you much longer," he said, moving away with a laugh.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+BETTON did not for a moment believe that Vyse suspected the valet of
+having written the letters.
+
+"Why the devil don't he say out what he thinks? He was always a tortuous
+chap," he grumbled inwardly.
+
+The sense of being held under the lens of Vyse's mute scrutiny became
+more and more exasperating. Betton, by this time, had squared his
+shoulders to the fact that "Abundance" was a failure with the public:
+a confessed and glaring failure. The press told him so openly, and
+his friends emphasized the fact by their circumlocutions and evasions.
+Betton minded it a good deal more than he had expected, but not nearly
+as much as he minded Vyse's knowing it. That remained the central
+twinge in his diffused discomfort. And the problem of getting rid of his
+secretary once more engaged him.
+
+He had set aside all sentimental pretexts for retaining Vyse; but a
+practical argument replaced them. "If I ship him now he'll think it's
+because I'm ashamed to have him see that I'm not getting any more
+letters."
+
+For the letters had ceased again, almost abruptly, since Vyse had
+hazarded the conjecture that they were the product of Strett's devoted
+pen. Betton had reverted only once to the subject--to ask ironically,
+a day or two later: "Is Strett writing to me as much as ever?"--and, on
+Vyse's replying with a neutral head-shake, had added with a laugh: "If
+you suspect _him_ you might as well think I write the letters myself!"
+
+"There are very few to-day," said Vyse, with his irritating evasiveness;
+and Betton rejoined squarely: "Oh, they'll stop soon. The book's a
+failure."
+
+A few mornings later he felt a rush of shame at his own tergiversations,
+and stalked into the library with Vyse's sentence on his tongue.
+
+Vyse started back with one of his anaemic blushes. "I was hoping you'd
+be in. I wanted to speak to you. There've been no letters the last day
+or two," he explained.
+
+Betton drew a quick breath of relief. The man had some sense of decency,
+then! He meant to dismiss himself.
+
+"I told you so, my dear fellow; the book's a flat failure," he said,
+almost gaily.
+
+Vyse made a deprecating gesture. "I don't know that I should regard
+the absence of letters as the ultimate test. But I wanted to ask you
+if there isn't something else I can do on the days when there's no
+writing." He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls. "Don't you
+want your library catalogued?" he asked insidiously.
+
+"Had it done last year, thanks." Betton glanced away from Vyse's face.
+It was piteous, how he needed the job!
+
+"I see. ... Of course this is just a temporary lull in the letters.
+They'll begin again--as they did before. The people who read carefully
+read slowly--you haven't heard yet what _they_ think."
+
+Betton felt a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion. Actually, he hadn't
+thought of that!
+
+"There _was_ a big second crop after 'Diadems and Faggots,'" he mused
+aloud.
+
+"Of course. Wait and see," said Vyse confidently.
+
+The letters in fact began again--more gradually and in smaller numbers.
+But their quality was different, as Vyse had predicted. And in two
+cases Betton's correspondents, not content to compress into one rapid
+communication the thoughts inspired by his work, developed their views
+in a succession of really remarkable letters. One of the writers was
+a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl in Florida. In
+their language, their point of view, their reasons for appreciating
+"Abundance," they differed almost diametrically; but this only made
+the unanimity of their approval the more striking. The rush of
+correspondence evoked by Betton's earlier novel had produced nothing
+so personal, so exceptional as these communications. He had gulped the
+praise of "Diadems and Faggots" as undiscriminatingly as it was offered;
+now he knew for the first time the subtler pleasures of the palate. He
+tried to feign indifference, even to himself; and to Vyse he made no
+sign. But gradually he felt a desire to know what his secretary thought
+of the letters, and, above all, what he was saying in reply to them.
+And he resented acutely the possibility of Vyse's starting one of his
+clandestine correspondences with the girl in Florida. Vyse's notorious
+lack of delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton's
+imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself.
+
+He would keep Vyse on, of course: there were other communications that
+the secretary could attend to. And, if necessary, Betton would invent an
+occupation: he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the fact that his
+books were already catalogued.
+
+Vyse showed no surprise when Betton announced his intention of dealing
+personally with the two correspondents who showed so flattering a
+reluctance to take their leave. But Betton immediately read a criticism
+in his lack of comment, and put forth, on a note of challenge: "After
+all, one must be decent!"
+
+Vyse looked at him with an evanescent smile. "You'll have to explain
+that you didn't write the first answers."
+
+Betton halted. "Well--I--I more or less dictated them, didn't I?"
+
+"Oh, virtually, they're yours, of course."
+
+"You think I can put it that way?"
+
+"Why not?" The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the blotting-pad.
+"Of course they'll keep it up longer if you write yourself," he
+suggested.
+
+Betton blushed, but faced the issue. "Hang it all, I sha'n't be sorry.
+They interest me. They're remarkable letters." And Vyse, without
+observation, returned to his writings.
+
+The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton. His college professor
+continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed intervals, and
+twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida. There were other
+letters, too; he had the solace of feeling that at last "Abundance" was
+making its way, was reaching the people who, as Vyse said, read slowly
+because they read intelligently. But welcome as were all these proofs
+of his restored authority they were but the background of his happiness.
+His life revolved for the moment about the personality of his two
+chief correspondents. The professor's letters satisfied his craving for
+intellectual recognition, and the satisfaction he felt in them proved
+how completely he had lost faith in himself. He blushed to think that
+his opinion of his work had been swayed by the shallow judgments of
+a public whose taste he despised. Was it possible that he had allowed
+himself to think less well of "Abundance" because it was not to
+the taste of the average novel-reader? Such false humility was less
+excusable than the crudest appetite for praise: it was ridiculous to
+try to do conscientious work if one's self-esteem were at the mercy
+of popular judgments. All this the professor's letters delicately
+and indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of
+"Abundance" began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his genius.
+
+But if the professor understood his book, the girl in Florida understood
+_him;_ and Betton was fully alive to the superior qualities of
+discernment which this process implied. For his lovely correspondent
+his novel was but the starting-point, the pretext of her discourse: he
+himself was her real object, and he had the delicious sense, as their
+exchange of thoughts proceeded, that she was interested in "Abundance"
+because of its author, rather than in the author because of his book. Of
+course she laid stress on the fact that his ideas were the object of
+her contemplation; but Betton's agreeable person had permitted him some
+insight into the incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he
+was pleasantly aware, from the lady's tone, that she guessed him to be
+neither old nor ridiculous. And suddenly he wrote to ask if he might see
+her. ...
+
+The answer was long in coming. Betton fumed at the delay, watched,
+wondered, fretted; then he received the one word "Impossible."
+
+He wrote back more urgently, and awaited the reply with increasing
+eagerness. A certain shyness had kept him from once more modifying the
+instructions regarding his mail, and Strett still carried the letters
+directly to Vyse. The hour when he knew they were passing under the
+latter's eyes was now becoming intolerable to Betton, and it was a
+profound relief when the secretary, suddenly advised of his father's
+illness, asked permission to absent himself for a fortnight.
+
+Vyse departed just after Betton had despatched to Florida his second
+missive of entreaty, and for ten days he tasted the furtive joy of a
+first perusal of his letters. The answer from Florida was not among
+them; but Betton said to himself "She's thinking it over," and delay, in
+that light, seemed favourable. So charming, in fact, was this phase of
+sentimental suspense that he felt a start of resentment when a telegram
+apprised him one morning that Vyse would return to his post that day.
+
+Betton had slept later than usual, and, springing out of bed with the
+telegram in his hand, he learned from the clock that his secretary was
+due in half an hour. He reflected that the morning's mail must long
+since be in; and, too impatient to wait for its appearance with his
+breakfast-tray, he threw on a dressing-gown and went to the library.
+There lay the letters, half a dozen of them: but his eye flew to one
+envelope, and as he tore it open a warm wave rocked his heart.
+
+The letter was dated a few days after its writer must have received his
+own: it had all the qualities of grace and insight to which his unknown
+friend had accustomed him, but it contained no allusion, however
+indirect, to the special purport of his appeal. Even a vanity less
+ingenious than Betton's might have read in the lady's silence one of
+the most familiar motions of consent; but the smile provoked by this
+inference faded as he turned to his other letters. For the uppermost
+bore the superscription "Dead Letter Office," and the document that fell
+from it was his own last letter from Florida.
+
+Betton studied the ironic "Unknown" for an appreciable space of time;
+then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse's similar
+experience with "Hester Macklin," and the light he was able to throw
+on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate all the
+dark corners of his own adventure. He felt a rush of heat to the
+ears; catching sight of himself in the glass, he saw a red ridiculous
+congested countenance, and dropped into a chair to hide it between
+flushed fists. He was roused by the opening of the door, and Vyse
+appeared on the threshold.
+
+"Oh, I beg pardon--you're ill?" said the secretary.
+
+Betton's only answer was an inarticulate murmur of derision; then he
+pushed forward the letter with the imprint of the Dead Letter Office.
+
+"Look at that," he jeered.
+
+Vyse peered at the envelope, and turned it over slowly in his hands.
+Betton's eyes, fixed on him, saw his face decompose like a substance
+touched by some powerful acid. He clung to the envelope as if to gain
+time.
+
+"It's from the young lady you've been writing to at Swazee Springs?" he
+asked at length.
+
+"It's from the young lady I've been writing to at Swazee Springs."
+
+"Well--I suppose she's gone away," continued Vyse, rebuilding his
+countenance rapidly.
+
+"Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and seventy-five
+souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local post-office is so
+ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be sent to the Dead
+Letter Office."
+
+Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn. "After all, the same
+thing happened to me--with 'Hester Macklin,' I mean," he recalled
+sheepishly.
+
+"Just so," said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the table. "_
+Just so_," he repeated, in italics.
+
+He caught his secretary's glance, and held it with his own for a moment.
+Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something scared and
+squirming.
+
+"The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote me
+this from there," he said, holding up the last Florida missive.
+
+"Ha! That's funny," said Vyse, with a damp forehead.
+
+"Yes, it's funny; it's funny," said Betton. He leaned back, his hands
+in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a crack in the
+cornice. Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table, waited.
+
+"Shall I get to work?" he began, after a silence measurable by minutes.
+Betton's gaze descended from the cornice.
+
+"I've got your seat, haven't I?" he said, rising and moving away from
+the table.
+
+Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair, and
+began to stir about vaguely among the papers.
+
+"How's your father?" Betton asked from the hearth.
+
+"Oh, better--better, thank you. He'll pull out of it."
+
+"But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?"
+
+"Yes--it was touch and go when I got there."
+
+Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.
+
+"And I suppose," Betton continued in a steady tone, "your anxiety
+made you forget your usual precautions--whatever they were--about this
+Florida correspondence, and before you'd had time to prevent it the
+Swazee post-office blundered?"
+
+Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement. "What do you mean?" he
+asked, pushing his chair back.
+
+"I mean that you saw I couldn't live without flattery, and that you've
+been ladling it out to me to earn your keep."
+
+Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his pen.
+"What on earth are you driving at?" he repeated.
+
+"Though why the deuce," Betton continued in the same steady tone, "you
+should need to do this kind of work when you've got such faculties at
+your service--those letters were magnificent, my dear fellow! Why in the
+world don't you write novels, instead of writing to other people about
+them?"
+
+Vyse straightened himself with an effort. "What are you talking about,
+Betton? Why the devil do you think _I_ wrote those letters?"
+
+Betton held back his answer, with a brooding face. "Because I wrote
+'Hester Macklin's'--to myself!"
+
+Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder. "Well--?" he
+finally said, in a low tone.
+
+"And because you found me out (you see, you can't even feign
+surprise!)--because you saw through it at a glance, knew at once that
+the letters were faked. And when you'd foolishly put me on my guard
+by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had then
+suddenly guessed that _I_ was the forger, you drew the natural inference
+that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to make _you_ think
+I had it. You saw that, to me, the worst thing about the failure of the
+book was having _you_ know it was a failure. And so you applied your
+superior--your immeasurably superior--abilities to carrying on the
+humbug, and deceiving me as I'd tried to deceive you. And you did it
+so successfully that I don't see why the devil you haven't made your
+fortune writing novels!"
+
+Vyse remained silent, his head slightly bent under the mounting tide of
+Betton's denunciation.
+
+"The way you differentiated your people--characterised them--avoided my
+stupid mistake of making the women's letters too short and logical, of
+letting my different correspondents use the same expressions: the amount
+of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! I swear, Vyse, I'm sorry that
+damned post-office went back on you," Betton went on, piling up the
+waves of his irony.
+
+But at this height they suddenly paused, drew back on themselves, and
+began to recede before the spectacle of Vyse's pale distress. Something
+warm and emotional in Betton's nature--a lurking kindliness, perhaps,
+for any one who tried to soothe and smooth his writhing ego--softened
+his eye as it rested on the drooping figure of his secretary.
+
+"Look here, Vyse--I'm not sorry--not altogether sorry this has
+happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm
+on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as
+it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago--oh, out of sheer
+carelessness, of course--about that novel of yours I promised to give to
+Apthorn. If I _had_ given it, it might not have made any difference--I'm
+not sure it wasn't too good for success--but anyhow, I dare say you
+thought my personal influence might have helped you, might at least have
+got you a quicker hearing. Perhaps you thought it was because the thing
+_was_ so good that I kept it back, that I felt some nasty jealousy of
+your superiority. I swear to you it wasn't that--I clean forgot it. And
+one day when I came home it was gone: you'd sent and taken it. And I've
+always thought since you might have owed me a grudge--and not unjustly;
+so this ... this business of the letters ... the sympathy you've shown
+... for I suppose it _is_ sympathy ... ?"
+
+Vyse startled and checked him by a queer crackling laugh.
+
+"It's _not_ sympathy?" broke in Betton, the moisture drying out of his
+voice. He withdrew his hand from Vyse's shoulder. "What is it, then? The
+joy of uncovering my nakedness? An eye for an eye? Is it _that?_"
+
+Vyse rose from his seat, and with a mechanical gesture swept into a heap
+all the letters he had sorted.
+
+"I'm stone broke, and wanted to keep my job--that's what it is," he said
+wearily ...
+
+
+
+
+THE LEGEND
+
+
+I
+
+
+ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first
+conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it
+in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in
+retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades' must
+be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn't
+imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused pattern
+of the century's intellectual life, to fit the stranger in anywhere,
+save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years earlier, had been
+left by Pellerin's unaccountable disappearance; and conversely, such a
+man as the Wades' visitor couldn't have lived for sixty years without
+filling, somewhere in space, a nearly equivalent void.
+
+At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother that
+Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose chief
+charms in the young man's eyes was that they remained so robustly
+untainted by Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor Wade's
+younger brother, Howland, was among its most impudently flourishing
+high-priests.
+
+The incident had begun by Bernald's running across Doctor Robert Wade
+one hot summer night at the University Club, and by Wade's saying, in
+the tone of unprofessional laxity which the shadowy stillness of the
+place invited: "I got hold of a queer fish at St. Martin's the other
+day--case of heat-prostration picked up in Central Park. When we'd
+patched him up I found he had nowhere to go, and not a dollar in his
+pocket, and I sent him down to our place at Portchester to re-build."
+
+The opening roused his hearer's attention. Bob Wade had an odd
+unformulated sense of values that Bernald had learned to trust.
+
+"What sort of chap? Young or old?"
+
+"Oh, every age--full of years, and yet with a lot left. He called
+himself sixty on the books."
+
+"Sixty's a good age for some kinds of living. And age is of course
+purely subjective. How has he used his sixty years?"
+
+"Well--part of them in educating himself, apparently. He's a
+scholar--humanities, languages, and so forth."
+
+"Oh--decayed gentleman," Bernald murmured, disappointed.
+
+"Decayed? Not much!" cried the doctor with his accustomed literalness.
+"I only mentioned that side of Winterman--his name's Winterman--because
+it was the side my mother noticed first. I suppose women generally do.
+But it's only a part--a small part. The man's the big thing."
+
+"Really big?"
+
+"Well--there again. ... When I took him down to the country, looking
+rather like a tramp from a 'Shelter,' with an untrimmed beard, and a
+suit of reach-me-downs he'd slept round the Park in for a week, I felt
+sure my mother'd carry the silver up to her room, and send for the
+gardener's dog to sleep in the hall the first night. But she didn't."
+
+"I see. 'Women and children love him.' Oh, Wade!" Bernald groaned.
+
+"Not a bit of it! You're out again. We don't love him, either of us. But
+we _feel_ him--the air's charged with him. You'll see."
+
+And Bernald agreed that he _would_ see, the following Sunday. Wade's
+inarticulate attempts to characterize the stranger had struck his
+friend. The human revelation had for Bernald a poignant and ever-renewed
+interest, which his trade, as the dramatic critic of a daily paper, had
+hitherto failed to discourage. And he knew that Bob Wade, simple and
+undefiled by literature--Bernald's specific affliction--had a free and
+personal way of judging men, and the diviner's knack of reaching their
+hidden springs. During the days that followed, the young doctor gave
+Bernald farther details about John Winterman: details not of fact--for
+in that respect his visitor's reticence was baffling--but of impression.
+It appeared that Winterman, while lying insensible in the Park, had been
+robbed of the few dollars he possessed; and on leaving the hospital,
+still weak and half-blind, he had quite simply and unprotestingly
+accepted the Wades' offer to give him shelter till such time as he
+should be strong enough to go to work.
+
+"But what's his work?" Bernald interjected. "Hasn't he at least told you
+that?"
+
+"Well, writing. Some kind of writing." Doctor Bob always became vague
+and clumsy when he approached the confines of literature. "He means to
+take it up again as soon as his eyes get right."
+
+Bernald groaned. "Oh, Lord--that finishes him; and _me!_ He's looking
+for a publisher, of course--he wants a 'favourable notice.' I won't
+come!"
+
+"He hasn't written a line for twenty years."
+
+"A line of _what?_ What kind of literature can one keep corked up for
+twenty years?"
+
+Wade surprised him. "The real kind, I should say. But I don't know
+Winterman's line," the doctor added. "He speaks of the things he used
+to write merely as 'stuff that wouldn't sell.' He has a wonderfully
+confidential way of _not_ telling one things. But he says he'll have to
+do something for his living as soon as his eyes are patched up, and that
+writing is the only trade he knows. The queer thing is that he seems
+pretty sure of selling _now_. He even talked of buying the bungalow of
+us, with an acre or two about it."
+
+"The bungalow? What's that?"
+
+"The studio down by the shore that we built for Howland when he thought
+he meant to paint." (Howland Wade, as Bernald knew, had experienced
+various "calls.") "Since he's taken to writing nobody's been near it. I
+offered it to Winterman, and he camps there--cooks his meals, does
+his own house-keeping, and never comes up to the house except in the
+evenings, when he joins us on the verandah, in the dark, and smokes
+while my mother knits."
+
+"A discreet visitor, eh?"
+
+"More than he need be. My mother actually wanted him to stay on in the
+house--in her pink chintz room. Think of it! But he says houses smother
+him. I take it he's lived for years in the open."
+
+"In the open where?"
+
+"I can't make out, except that it was somewhere in the East. 'East of
+everything--beyond the day-spring. In places not on the map.' That's
+the way he put it; and when I said: 'You've been an explorer, then?' he
+smiled in his beard, and answered: 'Yes; that's it--an explorer.' Yet he
+doesn't strike me as a man of action: hasn't the hands or the eyes."
+
+"What sort of hands and eyes has he?"
+
+Wade reflected. His range of observation was not large, but within its
+limits it was exact and could give an account of itself.
+
+"He's worked a lot with his hands, but that's not what they were made
+for. I should say they were extraordinarily delicate conductors of
+sensation. And his eye--his eye too. He hasn't used it to dominate
+people: he didn't care to. He simply looks through 'em all like windows.
+Makes me feel like the fellows who think they're made of glass.
+The mitigating circumstance is that he seems to see such a glorious
+landscape through me." Wade grinned at the thought of serving such a
+purpose.
+
+"I see. I'll come on Sunday and be looked through!" Bernald cried.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+BERNALD came on two successive Sundays; and the second time he lingered
+till the Tuesday.
+
+"Here he comes!" Wade had said, the first evening, as the two young men,
+with Wade's mother sat in the sultry dusk, with the Virginian creeper
+drawing, between the verandah arches, its black arabesques against a
+moon-lined sky.
+
+In the darkness Bernald heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red flit
+of a cigar through the shrubs. Then a loosely-moving figure obscured the
+patch of sky between the creepers, and the red spark became the centre
+of a dim bearded face, in which Bernald discerned only a broad white
+gleam of forehead.
+
+It was the young man's subsequent impression that Winterman had not
+spoken much that first evening; at any rate, Bernald himself remembered
+chiefly what the Wades had said. And this was the more curious because
+he had come for the purpose of studying their visitor, and because
+there was nothing to divert him from that purpose in Wade's halting
+communications or his mother's artless comments. He reflected afterward
+that there must have been a mysteriously fertilizing quality in the
+stranger's silence: it had brooded over their talk like a large moist
+cloud above a dry country.
+
+Mrs. Wade, apparently apprehensive lest her son should have given
+Bernald an exaggerated notion of their visitor's importance, had
+hastened to qualify it before the latter appeared.
+
+"He's not what you or Howland would call intellectual--"(Bernald writhed
+at the coupling of the names)--"not in the least _literary;_ though he
+told Bob he used to write. I don't think, though, it could have been
+what Howland would call writing." Mrs. Wade always mentioned her younger
+son with a reverential drop of the voice. She viewed literature much as
+she did Providence, as an inscrutably mystery; and she spoke of Howland
+as a dedicated being, set apart to perform secret rites within the veil
+of the sanctuary.
+
+"I shouldn't say he had a quick mind," she continued, reverting
+apologetically to Winterman. "Sometimes he hardly seems to follow what
+we're saying. But he's got such sound ideas--when he does speak he's
+never silly. And clever people sometimes _are_, don't you think so?"
+Bernald groaned an unqualified assent. "And he's so capable. The other
+day something went wrong with the kitchen range, just as I was expecting
+some friends of Bob's for dinner; and do you know, when Mr. Winterman
+heard we were in trouble, he came and took a look, and knew at once what
+to do? I told him it was a dreadful pity he wasn't married!"
+
+Close on midnight, when the session on the verandah ended, and the
+two young men were strolling down to the bungalow at Winterman's side,
+Bernald's mind reverted to the image of the fertilizing cloud. There was
+something brooding, pregnant, in the silent presence beside him: he had,
+in place of any circumscribing impression of the individual, a large
+hovering sense of manifold latent meanings. And he felt a distinct
+thrill of relief when, half-way down the lawn, Doctor Bob was checked by
+a voice that called him back to the telephone.
+
+"Now I'll be with him alone!" thought Bernald, with a throb like a
+lover's.
+
+In the low-ceilinged bungalow Winterman had to grope for the lamp on his
+desk, and as its light struck up into his face Bernald's sense of the
+rareness of his opportunity increased. He couldn't have said why, for
+the face, with its ridged brows, its shabby greyish beard and blunt
+Socratic nose, made no direct appeal to the eye. It seemed rather like
+a stage on which remarkable things might be enacted, like some shaggy
+moorland landscape dependent for form and expression on the clouds
+rolling over it, and the bursts of light between; and one of these
+flashed out in the smile with which Winterman, as if in answer to his
+companion's thought, said simply, as he turned to fill his pipe: "Now
+we'll talk."
+
+So he'd known all along that they hadn't yet--and had guessed that, with
+Bernald, one might!
+
+The young man's glow of pleasure was so intense that it left him for
+a moment unable to meet the challenge; and in that moment he felt the
+brush of something winged and summoning. His spirit rose to it with a
+rush; but just as he felt himself poised between the ascending pinions,
+the door opened and Bob Wade plunged in.
+
+"Too bad! I'm so sorry! It was from Howland, to say he can't come
+to-morrow after all." The doctor panted out his news with honest grief.
+
+"I tried my best to pull it off for you; and my brother _wants_ to
+come--he's keen to talk to you and see what he can do. But you see he's
+so tremendously in demand. He'll try for another Sunday later on."
+
+Winterman nodded with a whimsical gesture. "Oh, he'll find me here. I
+shall work my time out slowly." He pointed to the scattered sheets on
+the kitchen table which formed his writing desk.
+
+"Not slowly enough to suit us," Wade answered hospitably. "Only, if
+Howland could have come he might have given you a tip or two--put you on
+the right track--shown you how to get in touch with the public."
+
+Winterman, his hands in his sagging pockets, lounged against the bare
+pine walls, twisting his pipe under his beard. "Does your brother enjoy
+the privilege of that contact?" he questioned gravely.
+
+Wade stared a little. "Oh, of course Howland's not what you'd call a
+_popular_ writer; he despises that kind of thing. But whatever he says
+goes with--well, with the chaps that count; and every one tells me he's
+written _the_ book on Pellerin. You must read it when you get back your
+eyes." He paused, as if to let the name sink in, but Winterman drew
+at his pipe with a blank face. "You must have heard of Pellerin, I
+suppose?" the doctor continued. "I've never read a word of him myself:
+he's too big a proposition for _me_. But one can't escape the talk about
+him. I have him crammed down my throat even in hospital. The internes
+read him at the clinics. He tumbles out of the nurses' pockets. The
+patients keep him under their pillows. Oh, with most of them, of
+course, it's just a craze, like the last new game or puzzle: they don't
+understand him in the least. Howland says that even now, twenty-five
+years after his death, and with his books in everybody's hands, there
+are not twenty people who really understand Pellerin; and Howland ought
+to know, if anybody does. He's--what's their great word?--_interpreted_
+him. You must get Howland to put you through a course of Pellerin."
+
+And as the young men, having taken leave of Winterman, retraced
+their way across the lawn, Wade continued to develop the theme of his
+brother's accomplishments.
+
+"I wish I _could_ get Howland to take an interest in Winterman: this
+is the third Sunday he's chucked us. Of course he does get bored with
+people consulting him about their writings--but I believe if he could
+only talk to Winterman he'd see something in him, as we do. And it would
+be such a god-send to the poor man to have some one to advise him about
+his work. I'm going to make a desperate effort to get Howland here next
+Sunday."
+
+It was then that Bernald vowed to himself that he would return the
+next Sunday at all costs. He hardly knew whether he was prompted by the
+impulse to shield Winterman from Howland Wade's ineptitude, or by the
+desire to see the latter abandon himself to the full shamelessness of
+its display; but of one fact he was blissfully assured--and that was of
+the existence in Winterman of some quality which would provoke Howland
+to the amplest exercise of his fatuity. "How he'll draw him--how he'll
+draw him!" Bernald chuckled, with a security the more unaccountable
+that his one glimpse of Winterman had shown the latter only as a passive
+subject for experimentation; and he felt himself avenged in advance for
+the injury of Howland Wade's existence.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THAT this hope was to be frustrated Bernald learned from Howland Wade's
+own lips, the day before the two young men were to meet at Portchester.
+
+"I can't really, my dear fellow," the Interpreter lisped, passing a
+polished hand over the faded smoothness of his face. "Oh, an authentic
+engagement, I assure you: otherwise, to oblige old Bob I'd submit
+cheerfully to looking over his foundling's literature. But I'm pledged
+this week to the Pellerin Society of Kenosha: I had a hand in founding
+it, and for two years now they've been patiently waiting for a word from
+me--the _Fiat Lux_, so to speak. You see it's a ministry, Bernald--I
+assure you, I look upon my calling quite religiously."
+
+As Bernald listened, his disappointment gradually changed to relief.
+Howland, on trial, always turned out to be too insufferable, and the
+pleasure of watching his antics was invariably lost in the impulse to
+put a sanguinary end to them.
+
+"If he'd only keep his beastly pink hands off Pellerin," Bernald
+groaned, thinking of the thick manuscript condemned to perpetual
+incarceration in his own desk by the publication of Howland's
+"definitive" work on the great man. One couldn't, _after _Howland
+Wade, expose one's self to the derision of writing about Pellerin: the
+eagerness with which Wade's book had been devoured proved, not that the
+public had enough appetite for another, but simply that, for a stomach
+so undiscriminating, anything better than Wade had given it would be too
+good. And Bernald, in the confidence that his own work was open to
+this objection, had stoically locked it up. Yet if he had resigned his
+exasperated intelligence to the fact that Wade's book existed, and was
+already passing into the immortality of perpetual republication, he
+could not, after repeated trials, adjust himself to the author's talk
+about Pellerin. When Wade wrote of the great dead he was egregious, but
+in conversation he was familiar and fond. It might have been supposed
+that one of the beauties of Pellerin's hidden life and mysterious taking
+off would have been to guard him from the fingering of anecdote; but
+biographers like Howland Wade were born to rise above such obstacles. He
+might be vague or inaccurate in dealing with the few recorded events of
+his subject's life; but when he left fact for conjecture no one had a
+firmer footing. Whole chapters in his volume were constructed in the
+conditional mood and packed with hypothetical detail; and in talk, by
+the very law of the process, hypothesis became affirmation, and he was
+ready to tell you confidentially the exact circumstances of Pellerin's
+death, and of the "distressing incident" leading up to it. Bernald
+himself not only questioned the form under which this incident was
+shaping itself before posterity, but the mere radical fact of its
+occurrence: he had never been able to discover any break in the dense
+cloud enveloping Pellerin's later life and its mysterious termination.
+He had gone away--that was all that any of them knew: he who had so
+little, at any time, been with them or of them; and his going had so
+slightly stirred the public consciousness that even the subsequent news
+of his death, laconically imparted from afar, had dropped unheeded into
+the universal scrap-basket, to be long afterward fished out, with all
+its details missing, when some enquiring spirit first became aware, by
+chance encounter with a two-penny volume in a London book-stall, not
+only that such a man as John Pellerin had died, but that he had ever
+lived, or written.
+
+It need hardly be noted that Howland Wade had not been the pioneer in
+question: his had been the wiser part of swelling the chorus when it
+rose, and gradually drowning the other voices by his own insistent note.
+He had pitched the note so screamingly, and held it so long, that he was
+now the accepted authority on Pellerin, not only in the land which had
+given birth to his genius but in the Europe which had first acclaimed
+it; and it was the central point of pain in Bernald's sense of the
+situation that a man who had so yearned for silence as Pellerin should
+have his grave piped over by such a voice as Wade's.
+
+Bernald's talk with the Interpreter had revived this ache to the
+momentary exclusion of other sensations; and he was still sore with
+it when, the next afternoon, he arrived at Portchester for his second
+Sunday with the Wades.
+
+At the station he had the surprise of seeing Winterman's face on the
+platform, and of hearing from him that Doctor Bob had been called away
+to assist at an operation in a distant town.
+
+"Mrs. Wade wanted to put you off, but I believe the message came too
+late; so she sent me down to break the news to you," said Winterman,
+holding out his hand.
+
+Perhaps because they were the first conventional words that Bernald had
+heard him speak, the young man was struck by the relief his intonation
+gave them.
+
+"She wanted to send a carriage," Winterman added, "but I told her
+we'd walk back through the woods." He looked at Bernald with a sudden
+kindness that flushed the young man with pleasure.
+
+"Are you strong enough? It's not too far?"
+
+"Oh, no. I'm pulling myself together. Getting back to work is the
+slowest part of the business: not on account of my eyes--I can use them
+now, though not for reading; but some of the links between things are
+missing. It's a kind of broken spectrum ... here, that boy will look
+after your bag."
+
+The walk through the woods remained in Bernald's memory as an enchanted
+hour. He used the word literally, as descriptive of the way in which
+Winterman's contact changed the face of things, or perhaps restored them
+to their primitive meanings. And the scene they traversed--one of those
+little untended woods that still, in America, fringe the tawdry skirts
+of civilization--acquired, as a background to Winterman, the hush of
+a spot aware of transcendent visitings. Did he talk, or did he make
+Bernald talk? The young man never knew. He recalled only a sense of
+lightness and liberation, as if the hard walls of individuality had
+melted, and he were merged in the poet's deeper interfusion, yet without
+losing the least sharp edge of self. This general impression resolved
+itself afterward into the sense of Winterman's wide elemental range.
+His thought encircled things like the horizon at sea. He didn't, as it
+happened, touch on lofty themes--Bernald was gleefully aware that,
+to Howland Wade, their talk would hardly have been Talk at all--but
+Winterman's mind, applied to lowly topics, was like a powerful lens that
+brought out microscopic delicacies and differences.
+
+The lack of Sunday trains kept Doctor Bob for two days on the scene
+of his surgical duties, and during those two days Bernald seized every
+moment of communion with his friend's guest. Winterman, as Wade had
+said, was reticent as to his personal affairs, or rather as to the
+practical and material conditions to which the term is generally
+applied. But it was evident that, in Winterman's case, the usual
+classification must be reversed, and that the discussion of ideas
+carried one much farther into his intimacy than any specific
+acquaintance with the incidents of his life.
+
+"That's exactly what Howland Wade and his tribe have never understood
+about Pellerin: that it's much less important to know how, or even why,
+he disapp--"
+
+Bernald pulled himself up with a jerk, and turned to look full at his
+companion. It was late on the Monday evening, and the two men, after an
+hour's chat on the verandah to the tune of Mrs. Wade's knitting-needles,
+had bidden their hostess good-night and strolled back to the bungalow
+together.
+
+"Come and have a pipe before you turn in," Winterman had said; and they
+had sat on together till midnight, with the door of the bungalow open on
+a heaving moonlit bay, and summer insects bumping against the chimney of
+the lamp. Winterman had just bent down to re-fill his pipe from the
+jar on the table, and Bernald, jerking about to catch him in the yellow
+circle of lamplight, sat speechless, staring at a fact that seemed
+suddenly to have substituted itself for Winterman's face, or rather to
+have taken on its features.
+
+"No, they never saw that Pellerin's ideas _were_ Pellerin. ..." He
+continued to stare at Winterman. "Just as this man's ideas are--why,
+_are_ Pellerin!"
+
+The thought uttered itself in a kind of inner shout, and Bernald started
+upright with the violent impact of his conclusion. Again and again in
+the last forty-eight hours he had exclaimed to himself: "This is as good
+as Pellerin." Why hadn't he said till now: "This _is_ Pellerin"? ...
+Surprising as the answer was, he had no choice but to take it. He hadn't
+said so simply because Winterman was _better than Pellerin_--that there
+was so much more of him, so to speak. Yes; but--it came to Bernald in
+a flash--wouldn't there by this time have been any amount more of
+Pellerin? ... The young man felt actually dizzy with the thought. That
+was it--there was the solution of the haunting problem! This man
+was Pellerin, and more than Pellerin! It was so fantastic and yet so
+unanswerable that he burst into a sudden startled laugh.
+
+Winterman, at the same moment, brought his palm down with a sudden crash
+on the pile of manuscript covering the desk.
+
+"What's the matter?" Bernald gasped.
+
+"My match wasn't out. In another minute the destruction of the library
+of Alexandria would have been a trifle compared to what you'd have
+seen." Winterman, with his large deep laugh, shook out the smouldering
+sheets. "And I should have been a pensioner on Doctor Bob the Lord knows
+how much longer!"
+
+Bernald pulled himself together. "You've really got going again? The
+thing's actually getting into shape?"
+
+"This particular thing _is_ in shape. I drove at it hard all last week,
+thinking our friend's brother would be down on Sunday, and might look it
+over."
+
+Bernald had to repress the tendency to another wild laugh.
+
+"Howland--you meant to show _Howland_ what you've done?"
+
+Winterman, looming against the moonlight, slowly turned a dusky shaggy
+head toward him.
+
+"Isn't it a good thing to do?"
+
+Bernald wavered, torn between loyalty to his friends and the
+grotesqueness of answering in the affirmative. After all, it was none of
+his business to furnish Winterman with an estimate of Howland Wade.
+
+"Well, you see, you've never told me what your line _is_," he answered,
+temporizing.
+
+"No, because nobody's ever told _me_. It's exactly what I want to find
+out," said the other genially.
+
+"And you expect Wade--?"
+
+"Why, I gathered from our good Doctor that it's his trade. Doesn't he
+explain--interpret?"
+
+"In his own domain--which is Pellerinism."
+
+Winterman gazed out musingly upon the moon-touched dusk of waters. "And
+what _is_ Pellerinism?" he asked.
+
+Bernald sprang to his feet with a cry. "Ah, I don't know--but you're
+Pellerin!"
+
+They stood for a minute facing each other, among the uncertain swaying
+shadows of the room, with the sea breathing through it as something
+immense and inarticulate breathed through young Bernald's thoughts; then
+Winterman threw up his arms with a humorous gesture.
+
+"Don't shoot!" he said.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough
+floor of the bungalow, before either of the men was conscious of the
+passage of time. Bernald, vaguely trying to define his own state in
+retrospect, could only phrase it: "I floated ... floated. ..."
+
+The gist of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was
+simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had voluntarily
+disappeared, causing the rumour of his death to be reported to an
+inattentive world; and that now he had come back to see what that world
+had made of him.
+
+"You'll hardly believe it of me; I hardly believe it of myself; but I
+went away in a rage of disappointment, of wounded pride--no, vanity!
+I don't know which cut deepest--the sneers or the silence--but between
+them, there wasn't an inch of me that wasn't raw. I had just the one
+thing in me: the message, the cry, the revelation. But nobody saw and
+nobody listened. Nobody wanted what I had to give. I was like a poor
+devil of a tramp looking for shelter on a bitter night, in a town with
+every door bolted and all the windows dark. And suddenly I felt that the
+easiest thing would be to lie down and go to sleep in the snow. Perhaps
+I'd a vague notion that if they found me there at daylight, frozen
+stiff, the pathetic spectacle might produce a reaction, a feeling of
+remorse. ... So I took care to be found! Well, a good many thousand
+people die every day on the face of the globe; and I soon discovered
+that I was simply one of the thousands; and when I made that discovery
+I really died--and stayed dead a year or two. ... When I came to life
+again I was off on the under side of the world, in regions unaware of
+what we know as 'the public.' Have you any notion how it shifts the
+point of view to wake under new constellations? I advise any who's been
+in love with a woman under Cassiopeia to go and think about her under
+the Southern Cross. ... It's the only way to tell the pivotal truths
+from the others. ... I didn't believe in my theory any less--there was
+my triumph and my vindication! It held out, resisted, measured itself
+with the stars. But I didn't care a snap of my finger whether anybody
+else believed in it, or even knew it had been formulated. It escaped out
+of my books--my poor still-born books--like Psyche from the chrysalis
+and soared away into the blue, and lived there. I knew then how it frees
+an idea to be ignored; how apprehension circumscribes and deforms it.
+... Once I'd learned that, it was easy enough to turn to and shift
+for myself. I was sure now that my idea would live: the good ones are
+self-supporting. I had to learn to be so; and I tried my hand at a
+number of things ... adventurous, menial, commercial. ... It's not a bad
+thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to
+dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of
+us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat,
+and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms
+reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are,
+committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like
+as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a
+little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between
+times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish,
+aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms,
+and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness. ...
+
+"Well, I proved my first guess, off there in the wilds, and it lived,
+and grew, and took care of itself. And I said 'Some day it will make
+itself heard; but by that time my atoms will have waltzed into a new
+pattern.' Then, in Cashmere one day, I met a fellow in a caravan, with
+a dog-eared book in his pocket. He said he never stirred without
+it--wanted to know where I'd been, never to have heard of it. It was _my
+guess_--in its twentieth edition! ... The globe spun round at that, and
+all of a sudden I was under the old stars. That's the way it happens
+when the ballast of vanity shifts! I'd lived a third of a life
+out there, unconscious of human opinion--because I supposed it was
+unconscious of _me_. But now--now! Oh, it was different. I wanted to
+know what they said. ... Not exactly that, either: I wanted to know
+_what I'd made them say_. There's a difference. ... And here I am," said
+John Pellerin, with a pull at his pipe.
+
+So much Bernald retained of his companion's actual narrative; the rest
+was swept away under the tide of wonder that rose and submerged him as
+Pellerin--at some indefinitely later stage of their talk--picked up his
+manuscript and began to read. Bernald sat opposite, his elbows propped
+on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which
+the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the
+night. As Pellerin read, this density of blackness--which never for a
+moment seemed inert or unalive--was attenuated by imperceptible degrees,
+till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and
+brightened, and suddenly dawn was on the sea.
+
+Something of the same nature went on in the young man's mind while he
+watched and listened. He was conscious of a gradually withdrawing light,
+of an interval of obscurity full of the stir of invisible forces, and
+then of the victorious flush of day. And as the light rose, he saw how
+far he had travelled and what wonders the night had prepared. Pellerin
+had been right in saying that his first idea had survived, had borne the
+test of time; but he had given his hearer no hint of the extent to which
+it had been enlarged and modified, of the fresh implications it now
+unfolded. In a brief flash of retrospection Bernald saw the earlier
+books dwindle and fall into their place as mere precursors of this
+fuller revelation; then, with a leap of helpless rage, he pictured
+Howland Wade's pink hands on the new treasure, and his prophetic feet
+upon the lecture platform.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"IT won't do--oh, he let him down as gently as possible; but it appears
+it simply won't do."
+
+Doctor Bob imparted the ineluctable fact to Bernald while the two men,
+accidentally meeting at their club a few nights later, sat together over
+the dinner they had immediately agreed to consume in company.
+
+Bernald had left Portchester the morning after his strange discovery,
+and he and Bob Wade had not seen each other since. And now Bernald,
+moved by an irresistible instinct of postponement, had waited for his
+companion to bring up Winterman's name, and had even executed several
+conversational diversions in the hope of delaying its mention. For how
+could one talk of Winterman with the thought of Pellerin swelling one's
+breast?
+
+"Yes; the very day Howland got back from Kenosha I brought the
+manuscript to town, and got him to read it. And yesterday evening I
+nailed him, and dragged an answer out of him."
+
+"Then Howland hasn't seen Winterman yet?"
+
+"No. He said: 'Before you let him loose on me I'll go over the stuff,
+and see if it's at all worth while.'"
+
+Bernald drew a freer breath. "And he found it wasn't?"
+
+"Between ourselves, he found it was of no account at all. Queer, isn't
+it, when the _man_ ... but of course literature's another proposition.
+Howland says it's one of the cases where an idea might seem original and
+striking if one didn't happen to be able to trace its descent. And this
+is straight out of bosh--by Pellerin. ... Yes: Pellerin. It seems that
+everything in the article that isn't pure nonsense is just Pellerinism.
+Howland thinks poor Winterman must have been tremendously struck by
+Pellerin's writings, and have lived too much out of the world to know
+that they've become the text-books of modern thought. Otherwise, of
+course, he'd have taken more trouble to disguise his plagiarisms."
+
+"I see," Bernald mused. "Yet you say there _is_ an original element?"
+
+"Yes; but unluckily it's no good."
+
+"It's not--conceivably--in any sense a development of Pellerin's idea: a
+logical step farther?"
+
+"_Logical?_ Howland says it's twaddle at white heat."
+
+Bernald sat silent, divided between the fierce satisfaction of seeing
+the Interpreter rush upon his fate, and the despair of knowing that the
+state of mind he represented was indestructible. Then both emotions were
+swept away on a wave of pure joy, as he reflected that now, at last,
+Howland Wade had given him back John Pellerin.
+
+The possession was one he did not mean to part with lightly; and the
+dread of its being torn from him constrained him to extraordinary
+precautions.
+
+"You've told Winterman, I suppose? How did he take it?"
+
+"Why, unexpectedly, as he does most things. You can never tell which way
+he'll jump. I thought he'd take a high tone, or else laugh it off; but
+he did neither. He seemed awfully cast down. I wished myself well out
+of the job when I saw how cut up he was." Bernald thrilled at the words.
+Pellerin had shared his pang, then--the "old woe of the world" at the
+perpetuity of human dulness!
+
+"But what did he say to the charge of plagiarism--if you made it?"
+
+"Oh, I told him straight out what Howland said. I thought it fairer. And
+his answer to that was the rummest part of all."
+
+"What was it?" Bernald questioned, with a tremor.
+
+"He said: 'That's queer, for I've never read Pellerin.'"
+
+Bernald drew a deep breath of ecstasy. "Well--and I suppose you believed
+him?"
+
+"I believed him, because I know him. But the public won't--the critics
+won't. And if it's a pure coincidence it's just as bad for him as if it
+were a straight steal--isn't it?"
+
+Bernald sighed his acquiescence.
+
+"It bothers me awfully," Wade continued, knitting his kindly brows,
+"because I could see what a blow it was to him. He's got to earn his
+living, and I don't suppose he knows how to do anything else. At his
+age it's hard to start fresh. I put that to Howland--asked him if
+there wasn't a chance he might do better if he only had a little
+encouragement. I can't help feeling he's got the essential thing in him.
+But of course I'm no judge when it comes to books. And Howland says it
+would be cruel to give him any hope." Wade paused, turned his wineglass
+about under a meditative stare, and then leaned across the table toward
+Bernald. "Look here--do you know what I've proposed to Winterman? That
+he should come to town with me to-morrow and go in the evening to hear
+Howland lecture to the Uplift Club. They're to meet at Mrs. Beecher
+Bain's, and Howland is to repeat the lecture that he gave the other day
+before the Pellerin Society at Kenosha. It will give Winterman a chance
+to get some notion of what Pellerin _was:_ he'll get it much straighter
+from Howland than if he tried to plough through Pellerin's books. And
+then afterward--as if accidentally--I thought I might bring him and
+Howland together. If Howland could only see him and hear him talk,
+there's no knowing what might come of it. He couldn't help feeling the
+man's force, as we do; and he might give him a pointer--tell him what
+line to take. Anyhow, it would please Winterman, and take the edge off
+his disappointment. I saw that as soon as I proposed it."
+
+"Some one who's never heard of Pellerin?"
+
+Mrs. Beecher Bain, large, smiling, diffuse, reached out parenthetically
+from the incoming throng on her threshold to waylay Bernald with the
+question as he was about to move past her in the wake of his companion.
+
+"Oh, keep straight on, Mr. Winterman!" she interrupted herself to call
+after the latter. "Into the back drawing-room, please! And remember,
+you're to sit next to me--in the corner on the left, close under the
+platform."
+
+She renewed her interrogative clutch on Bernald's sleeve. "Most curious!
+Doctor Wade has been telling me all about him--how remarkable you all
+think him. And it's actually true that he's never heard of Pellerin?
+Of course as soon as Doctor Wade told me _that_, I said 'Bring him!'
+It will be so extraordinarily interesting to watch the first
+impression.--Yes, do follow him, dear Mr. Bernald, and be sure that you
+and he secure the seats next to me. Of course Alice Fosdick insists on
+being with us. She was wild with excitement when I told her she was to
+meet some one who'd never heard of Pellerin!"
+
+On the indulgent lips of Mrs. Beecher Bain conjecture speedily passed
+into affirmation; and as Bernald's companion, broad and shaggy in his
+visibly new evening clothes, moved down the length of the crowded rooms,
+he was already, to the ladies drawing aside their skirts to let him
+pass, the interesting Huron of the fable.
+
+How far he was aware of the character ascribed to him it was impossible
+for Bernald to discover. He was as unconscious as a tree or a cloud, and
+his observer had never known any one so alive to human contacts and yet
+so secure from them. But the scene was playing such a lively tune on
+Bernald's own sensibilities that for the moment he could not adjust
+himself to the probable effect it produced on his companion. The young
+man, of late, had made but rare appearances in the group of which Mrs.
+Beecher Bain was one of the most indefatigable hostesses, and the Uplift
+Club the chief medium of expression. To a critic, obliged by his trade
+to cultivate convictions, it was the essence of luxury to leave them at
+home in his hours of ease; and Bernald gave his preference to circles in
+which less finality of judgment prevailed, and it was consequently less
+embarrassing to be caught without an opinion.
+
+But in his fresher days he had known the spell of the Uplift Club and
+the thrill of moving among the Emancipated; and he felt an odd sense
+of rejuvenation as he looked at the rows of faces packed about the
+embowered platform from which Howland Wade was presently to hand down
+the eternal verities. Many of these countenances belonged to the
+old days, when the gospel of Pellerin was unknown, and it required
+considerable intellectual courage to avow one's acceptance of the very
+doctrines he had since demolished. The latter moral revolution seemed to
+have been accepted as submissively as a change in hair-dressing; and it
+even struck Bernald that, in the case of many of the assembled ladies,
+their convictions were rather newer than their clothes.
+
+One of the most interesting examples of this facility of adaptation was
+actually, in the person of Miss Alice Fosdick, brushing his elbow with
+exotic amulets, and enveloping him in Arabian odours, as she leaned
+forward to murmur her sympathetic sense of the situation. Miss Fosdick,
+who was one of the most advanced exponents of Pellerinism, had large
+eyes and a plaintive mouth, and Bernald had always fancied that she
+might have been pretty if she had not been perpetually explaining
+things.
+
+"Yes, I know--Isabella Bain told me all about him. (He can't hear us,
+can he?) And I wonder if you realize how remarkably interesting it is
+that we should have such an opportunity _now_--I mean the opportunity to
+see the impression of Pellerinism on a perfectly fresh mind. (You
+must introduce him as soon as the lecture's over.) I explained that to
+Isabella as soon as she showed me Doctor Wade's note. Of course you see
+why, don't you?" Bernald made a faint motion of acquiescence, which she
+instantly swept aside. "At least I think I can _make you see why_.
+(If you're sure he can't hear?) Why, it's just this--Pellerinism is in
+danger of becoming a truism. Oh, it's an awful thing to say! But then
+I'm not afraid of saying awful things! I rather believe it's my mission.
+What I mean is, that we're getting into the way of taking Pellerin for
+granted--as we do the air we breathe. We don't sufficiently lead our
+_conscious life_ in him--we're gradually letting him become subliminal."
+She swayed closer to the young man, and he saw that she was making a
+graceful attempt to throw her explanatory net over his companion, who,
+evading Mrs. Bain's hospitable signal, had cautiously wedged himself
+into a seat between Bernald and the wall.
+
+"_Did_ you hear what I was saying, Mr. Winterman? (Yes, I know who you
+are, of course!) Oh, well, I don't really mind if you did. I was talking
+about you--about you and Pellerin. I was explaining to Mr. Bernald that
+what we need at this very minute is a Pellerin revival; and we need
+some one like you--to whom his message comes as a wonderful new
+interpretation of life--to lead the revival, and rouse us out of our
+apathy. ...
+
+"You see," she went on winningly, "it's not only the big public
+that needs it (of course _their_ Pellerin isn't ours!) It's we, his
+disciples, his interpreters, who discovered him and gave him to the
+world--we, the Chosen People, the Custodians of the Sacred Books, as
+Howland Wade calls us--it's _we_, who are in perpetual danger of sinking
+back into the old stagnant ideals, and practising the Seven Deadly
+Virtues; it's _we_ who need to count our mercies, and realize anew what
+he's done for us, and what we ought to do for him! And it's for that
+reason that I urged Mr. Wade to speak here, in the very inner sanctuary
+of Pellerinism, exactly as he would speak to the uninitiated--to repeat,
+simply, his Kenosha lecture, 'What Pellerinism means'; and we ought all,
+I think, to listen to him with the hearts of little children--just as
+_you_ will, Mr. Winterman--as if he were telling us new things, and
+we--"
+
+"Alice, _dear_--" Mrs. Bain murmured with a deprecating gesture;
+and Howland Wade, emerging between the palms, took the centre of the
+platform.
+
+A pang of commiseration shot through Bernald as he saw him there, so
+innocent and so exposed. His plump pulpy body, which made his evening
+dress fall into intimate and wrapper-like folds, was like a wide surface
+spread to the shafts of irony; and the mild ripples of his voice
+seemed to enlarge the vulnerable area as he leaned forward, poised on
+confidential finger-tips, to say persuasively: "Let me try to tell you
+what Pellerinism means."
+
+Bernald moved restlessly in his seat. He had the obscure sense of being
+a party to something not wholly honourable. He ought not to have come;
+he ought not to have let his companion come. Yet how could he have done
+otherwise? John Pellerin's secret was his own. As long as he chose
+to remain John Winterman it was no one's business to gainsay him; and
+Bernald's scruples were really justifiable only in respect of his own
+presence on the scene. But even in this connection he ceased to feel
+them as soon as Howland Wade began to speak.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+IT had been arranged that Pellerin, after the meeting of the Uplift
+Club, should join Bernald at his rooms and spend the night there,
+instead of returning to Portchester. The plan had been eagerly
+elaborated by the young man, but he had been unprepared for the alacrity
+with which his wonderful friend accepted it. He was beginning to see
+that it was a part of Pellerin's wonderfulness to fall in, quite simply
+and naturally, with any arrangements made for his convenience, or
+tending to promote the convenience of others. Bernald felt that his
+extreme docility in such matters was proportioned to the force of
+resistance which, for nearly half a life-time, had kept him, with his
+back to the wall, fighting alone against the powers of darkness. In such
+a scale of values how little the small daily alternatives must weigh!
+
+At the close of Howland Wade's discourse, Bernald, charged with his
+prodigious secret, had felt the need to escape for an instant from
+the liberated rush of talk. The interest of watching Pellerin was so
+perilously great that the watcher felt it might, at any moment, betray
+him. He lingered in the crowded drawing-room long enough to see his
+friend enclosed in a mounting tide, above which Mrs. Beecher Bain and
+Miss Fosdick actively waved their conversational tridents; then he took
+refuge, at the back of the house, in a small dim library where, in his
+younger days, he had discussed personal immortality and the problem of
+consciousness with beautiful girls whose names he could not remember.
+
+In this retreat he surprised Mr. Beecher Bain, a quiet man with a mild
+brow, who was smoking a surreptitious cigar over the last number of the
+_Strand_. Mr. Bain, at Bernald's approach, dissembled the _Strand_ under
+a copy of the _Hibbert Journal_, but tendered his cigar-case with the
+remark that stocks were heavy again; and Bernald blissfully abandoned
+himself to this unexpected contact with reality.
+
+On his return to the drawing-room he found that the tide had set toward
+the supper-table, and when it finally carried him thither it was to land
+him in the welcoming arms of Bob Wade.
+
+"Hullo, old man! Where have you been all this time?--Winterman? Oh,
+_he's_ talking to Howland: yes, I managed it finally. I believe
+Mrs. Bain has steered them into the library, so that they shan't be
+disturbed. I gave her an idea of the situation, and she was awfully
+kind. We'd better leave them alone, don't you think? I'm trying to get a
+croquette for Miss Fosdick."
+
+Bernald's secret leapt in his bosom, and he devoted himself to the task
+of distributing sandwiches and champagne while his pulses danced to the
+tune of the cosmic laughter. The vision of Pellerin and his Interpreter,
+face to face at last, had a Cyclopean grandeur that dwarfed all other
+comedy. "And I shall hear of it presently; in an hour or two he'll be
+telling me about it. And that hour will be all mine--mine and his!" The
+dizziness of the thought made it difficult for Bernald to preserve the
+balance of the supper-plates he was distributing. Life had for him at
+that moment the completeness which seems to defy disintegration.
+
+The throng in the dining-room was thickening, and Bernald's efforts
+as purveyor were interrupted by frequent appeals, from ladies who had
+reached repleteness, that he should sit down a moment and tell them all
+about his interesting friend. Winterman's fame, trumpeted abroad by Miss
+Fosdick, had reached the four corners of the Uplift Club, and Bernald
+found himself fabricating _de toutes pieces_ a Winterman legend which
+should in some degree respond to the Club's demand for the human
+document. When at length he had acquitted himself of this obligation,
+and was free to work his way back through the lessening groups into the
+drawing-room, he was at last rewarded by a glimpse of his friend, who,
+still densely encompassed, towered in the centre of the room in all his
+sovran ugliness.
+
+Their eyes met across the crowd; but Bernald gathered only perplexity
+from the encounter. What were Pellerin's eyes saying to him? What
+orders, what confidences, what indefinable apprehension did their long
+look impart? The young man was still trying to decipher their complex
+message when he felt a tap on the arm, and turned to encounter the
+rueful gaze of Bob Wade, whose meaning lay clearly enough on the surface
+of his good blue stare.
+
+"Well, it won't work--it won't work," the doctor groaned.
+
+"What won't?"
+
+"I mean with Howland. Winterman won't. Howland doesn't take to him.
+Says he's crude--frightfully crude. And you know how Howland hates
+crudeness."
+
+"Oh, I know," Bernald exulted. It was the word he had waited for--he saw
+it now! Once more he was lost in wonder at Howland's miraculous faculty
+for always, as the naturalists said, being true to type.
+
+"So I'm afraid it's all up with his chance of writing. At least _I_ can
+do no more," said Wade, discouraged.
+
+Bernald pressed him for farther details. "Does Winterman seem to mind
+much? Did you hear his version?"
+
+"His version?"
+
+"I mean what he said to Howland."
+
+"Why no. What the deuce was there for him to say?"
+
+"What indeed? I think I'll take him home," said Bernald gaily.
+
+He turned away to join the circle from which, a few minutes before,
+Pellerin's eyes had vainly and enigmatically signalled to him; but the
+circle had dispersed, and Pellerin himself was not in sight.
+
+Bernald, looking about him, saw that during his brief aside with Wade
+the party had passed into the final phase of dissolution. People still
+delayed, in diminishing groups, but the current had set toward the
+doors, and every moment or two it bore away a few more lingerers.
+Bernald, from his post, commanded the clearing perspective of the two
+drawing-rooms, and a rapid survey of their length sufficed to assure
+him that Pellerin was not in either. Taking leave of Wade, the young
+man made his way back to the drawing-room, where only a few hardened
+feasters remained, and then passed on to the library which had been the
+scene of the late momentous colloquy. But the library too was empty, and
+drifting back uncertainly to the inner drawing-room Bernald found
+Mrs. Beecher Bain domestically putting out the wax candles on the
+mantel-piece.
+
+"Dear Mr. Bernald! Do sit down and have a little chat. What a wonderful
+privilege it has been! I don't know when I've had such an intense
+impression."
+
+She made way for him, hospitably, in a corner of the sofa to which she
+had sunk; and he echoed her vaguely: "You _were_ impressed, then?"
+
+"I can't express to you how it affected me! As Alice said, it was a
+resurrection--it was as if John Pellerin were actually here in the room
+with us!"
+
+Bernald turned on her with a half-audible gasp. "You felt that, dear
+Mrs. Bain?"
+
+"We all felt it--every one of us! I don't wonder the Greeks--it _was_
+the Greeks?--regarded eloquence as a supernatural power. As Alice says,
+when one looked at Howland Wade one understood what they meant by the
+Afflatus."
+
+Bernald rose and held out his hand. "Oh, I see--it was Howland who made
+you feel as if Pellerin were in the room? And he made Miss Fosdick feel
+so too?"
+
+"Why, of course. But why are you rushing off?"
+
+"Because I must hunt up my friend, who's not used to such late hours."
+
+"Your friend?" Mrs. Bain had to collect her thoughts. "Oh, Mr.
+Winterman, you mean? But he's gone already."
+
+"Gone?" Bernald exclaimed, with an odd twinge of foreboding. Remembering
+Pellerin's signal across the crowd, he reproached himself for not having
+answered it more promptly. Yet it was certainly strange that his friend
+should have left the house without him.
+
+"Are you quite sure?" he asked, with a startled glance at the clock.
+
+"Oh, perfectly. He went half an hour ago. But you needn't hurry home
+on his account, for Alice Fosdick carried him off with her. I saw them
+leave together."
+
+"Carried him off? She took him home with her, you mean?"
+
+"Yes. You know what strange hours she keeps. She told me she was going
+to give him a Welsh rabbit, and explain Pellerinism to him."
+
+"Oh, _if_ she's going to explain--" Bernald murmured. But his amazement
+at the news struggled with a confused impatience to reach his rooms in
+time to be there for his friend's arrival. There could be no stranger
+spectacle beneath the stars than that of John Pellerin carried off by
+Miss Fosdick, and listening, in the small hours, to her elucidation of
+his doctrines; but Bernald knew enough of his sex to be aware that such
+an experiment may present a less humorous side to its subject than to
+an impartial observer. Even the Uplift Club and its connotations might
+benefit by the attraction of the unknown; and it was conceivable that
+to a traveller from Mesopotamia Miss Fosdick might present elements of
+interest which she had lost for the frequenters of Fifth Avenue. There
+was, at any rate, no denying that the affair had become unexpectedly
+complex, and that its farther development promised to be rich in comedy.
+
+In the charmed contemplation of these possibilities Bernald sat over his
+fire, listening for Pellerin's ring. He had arranged his modest quarters
+with the reverent care of a celebrant awaiting the descent of his deity.
+He guessed Pellerin to be unconscious of visual detail, but sensitive
+to the happy blending of sensuous impressions: to the intimate spell of
+lamplight on books, and of a deep chair placed where one could watch
+the fire. The chair was there, and Bernald, facing it across the hearth,
+already saw it filled by Pellerin's lounging figure. The autumn dawn
+came late, and even now they had before them the promise of some
+untroubled hours. Bernald, sitting there alone in the warm stillness of
+his room, and in the profounder hush of his expectancy, was conscious
+of gathering up all his sensibilities and perceptions into one
+exquisitely-adjusted instrument of notation. Until now he had tasted
+Pellerin's society only in unpremeditated snatches, and had always left
+him with a sense, on his own part, of waste and shortcoming. Now, in the
+lull of this dedicated hour, he felt that he should miss nothing, and
+forget nothing, of the initiation that awaited him. And catching sight
+of Pellerin's pipe, he rose and laid it carefully on a table by the
+arm-chair.
+
+"No. I've never had any news of him," Bernald heard himself repeating.
+He spoke in a low tone, and with the automatic utterance that alone made
+it possible to say the words.
+
+They were addressed to Miss Fosdick, into whose neighbourhood chance had
+thrown him at a dinner, a year or so later than their encounter at the
+Uplift Club. Hitherto he had successfully, and intentionally, avoided
+Miss Fosdick, not from any animosity toward that unconscious instrument
+of fate, but from an intense reluctance to pronounce the words which he
+knew he should have to speak if they met.
+
+Now, as it turned out, his chief surprise was that she should wait so
+long to make him speak them. All through the dinner she had swept him
+along on a rapid current of talk which showed no tendency to linger or
+turn back upon the past. At first he ascribed her reserve to a sense
+of delicacy with which he reproached himself for not having previously
+credited her; then he saw that she had been carried so far beyond the
+point at which they had last faced each other, that it was by the merest
+hazard of associated ideas that she was now finally borne back to it.
+For it appeared that the very next evening, at Mrs. Beecher Bain's, a
+Hindu Mahatma was to lecture to the Uplift Club on the Limits of the
+Subliminal; and it was owing to no less a person than Howland Wade that
+this exceptional privilege had been obtained.
+
+"Of course Howland's known all over the world as the interpreter of
+Pellerinism, and the Aga Gautch, who had absolutely declined to speak
+anywhere in public, wrote to Isabella that he could not refuse anything
+that Mr. Wade asked. Did you know that Howland's lecture, 'What
+Pellerinism Means,' has been translated into twenty-two languages, and
+gone into a fifth edition in Icelandic? Why, that reminds me,"
+Miss Fosdick broke off--"I've never heard what became of your queer
+friend--what was his name?--whom you and Bob Wade accused me of
+spiriting away after that very lecture. And I've never seen _you_ since
+you rushed into the house the next morning, and dragged me out of bed to
+know what I'd done with him!"
+
+With a sharp effort Bernald gathered himself together to have it out.
+"Well, what _did_ you do with him?" he retorted.
+
+She laughed her appreciation of his humour. "Just what I told you, of
+course. I said good-bye to him on Isabella's door-step."
+
+Bernald looked at her. "It's really true, then, that he didn't go home
+with you?"
+
+She bantered back: "Have you suspected me, all this time, of hiding his
+remains in the cellar?" And with a droop of her fine lids she added:
+"I wish he _had_ come home with me, for he was rather interesting, and
+there were things I think I could have explained to him."
+
+Bernald helped himself to a nectarine, and Miss Fosdick continued on a
+note of amused curiosity: "So you've really never had any news of him
+since that night?"
+
+"No--I've never had any news of him."
+
+"Not the least little message?"
+
+"Not the least little message."
+
+"Or a rumour or report of any kind?"
+
+"Or a rumour or report of any kind."
+
+Miss Fosdick's interest seemed to be revived by the strangeness of the
+case. "It's rather creepy, isn't it? What _could_ have happened? You
+don't suppose he could have been waylaid and murdered?" she asked with
+brightening eyes.
+
+Bernald shook his head serenely. "No. I'm sure he's safe--quite safe."
+
+"But if you're sure, you must know something."
+
+"No. I know nothing," he repeated.
+
+She scanned him incredulously. "But what's your theory--for you must
+have a theory? What in the world can have become of him?"
+
+Bernald returned her look and hesitated. "Do you happen to remember the
+last thing he said to you--the very last, on the door-step, when he left
+you?"
+
+"The last thing?" She poised her fork above the peach on her plate. "I
+don't think he said anything. Oh, yes--when I reminded him that he'd
+solemnly promised to come back with me and have a little talk he said he
+couldn't because he was going home."
+
+"Well, then, I suppose," said Bernald, "he went home."
+
+She glanced at him as if suspecting a trap. "Dear me, how flat! I always
+inclined to a mysterious murder. But of course you know more of him than
+you say."
+
+She began to cut her peach, but paused above a lifted bit to ask, with a
+renewal of animation in her expressive eyes: "By the way, had you heard
+that Howland Wade has been gradually getting farther and farther away
+from Pellerinism? It seems he's begun to feel that there's a Positivist
+element in it which is narrowing to any one who has gone at all deeply
+into the Wisdom of the East. He was intensely interesting about it the
+other day, and of course I _do_ see what he feels. ... Oh, it's too
+long to tell you now; but if you could manage to come in to tea some
+afternoon soon--any day but Wednesday--I should so like to explain--"
+
+
+
+
+THE EYES
+
+
+I
+
+
+WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent
+dinner at our old friend Culwin's, by a tale of Fred Murchard's--the
+narrative of a strange personal visitation.
+
+Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal
+fire, Culwin's library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a
+good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand
+being, after Murchard's brilliant opening, the only kind acceptable to
+us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a
+contribution. There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner
+more or less adequate, to fulfil the condition imposed. It surprised
+us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural
+impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil
+Frenham--whose story was the slightest of the lot--had the habit of
+sending our souls into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had
+every reason to be proud of our seven "exhibits," and none of us would
+have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.
+
+Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his arm-chair,
+listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful
+tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be
+favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy,
+without envying, the superior privileges of his guests. By age and by
+education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit
+of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between
+physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially
+a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety
+show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into
+the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one
+knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a "turn."
+
+Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having,
+at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel;
+but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his
+character than my mother's assertion that he had once been "a charming
+little man with nice eyes" corresponded to any possible reconstitution
+of his dry thwarted physiognomy.
+
+"He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,"
+Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather," some
+one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description
+of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like
+mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had
+nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His
+carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine
+intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the
+disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky.
+Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised
+his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race
+seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous,
+and women necessary only because some one had to do the cooking. On the
+importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy
+was the only science which he revered as dogma. It must be owned that
+his little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view,
+besides being a reason--though not the main one--for the fidelity of his
+friends.
+
+Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less
+stimulating. His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting-place for
+the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and draughty, but light, spacious
+and orderly--a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves had
+fallen. In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont to stretch our
+muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible
+the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two
+neophytes were now and then added to our band.
+
+Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these
+recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat morbid assertion
+that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was indeed a fact that Culwin,
+for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in
+youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of
+soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a
+disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea
+to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for
+experimentation. The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of
+his nature was like the pure paste under a delicate glaze. Culwin had
+fished him out of a thick fog of family dulness, and pulled him up to
+a peak in Darien; and the adventure hadn't hurt him a bit. Indeed,
+the skill with which Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities
+without robbing them of their young bloom of awe seemed to me a
+sufficient answer to Murchard's ogreish metaphor. There was nothing
+hectic in Frenham's efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even
+a finger-tip on the sacred stupidities. One wanted no better proof of
+that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.
+
+"There's a side of him you fellows don't see. _I_ believe that story
+about the duel!" he declared; and it was of the very essence of
+this belief that it should impel him--just as our little party was
+dispersing--to turn back to our host with the absurd demand: "And now
+you've got to tell us about _your_ ghost!"
+
+The outer door had closed on Murchard and the others; only Frenham and I
+remained; and the vigilant servant who presided over Culwin's destinies,
+having brought a fresh supply of soda-water, had been laconically
+ordered to bed.
+
+Culwin's sociability was a night-blooming flower, and we knew that he
+expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after midnight.
+But Frenham's appeal seemed to disconcert him comically, and he rose
+from the chair in which he had just reseated himself after his farewells
+in the hall.
+
+"_My_ ghost? Do you suppose I'm fool enough to go to the expense of
+keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my
+friends' closets?--Take another cigar," he said, revolving toward me
+with a laugh.
+
+Frenham laughed too, pulling up his slender height before the
+chimney-piece as he turned to face his short bristling friend.
+
+"Oh," he said, "you'd never be content to share if you met one you
+really liked."
+
+Culwin had dropped back into his armchair, his shock head embedded in
+its habitual hollow, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh cigar.
+
+"Liked--_liked?_ Good Lord!" he growled.
+
+"Ah, you _have_, then!" Frenham pounced on him in the same instant, with
+a sidewise glance of victory at me; but Culwin cowered gnomelike among
+his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective cloud of smoke.
+
+"What's the use of denying it? You've seen everything, so of course
+you've seen a ghost!" his young friend persisted, talking intrepidly
+into the cloud. "Or, if you haven't seen one, it's only because you've
+seen two!"
+
+The form of the challenge seemed to strike our host. He shot his head
+out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and
+blinked approvingly at Frenham.
+
+"Yes," he suddenly flung at us on a shrill jerk of laughter; "it's only
+because I've seen two!"
+
+The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a
+fathomless silence, while we continued to stare at each other over
+Culwin's head, and Culwin stared at his ghosts. At length Frenham,
+without speaking, threw himself into the chair on the other side of the
+hearth, and leaned forward with his listening smile ...
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"OH, of course they're not show ghosts--a collector wouldn't think
+anything of them ... Don't let me raise your hopes ... their one merit
+is their numerical strength: the exceptional fact of their being _two_.
+But, as against this, I'm bound to admit that at any moment I
+could probably have exorcised them both by asking my doctor for a
+prescription, or my oculist for a pair of spectacles. Only, as I
+never could make up my mind whether to go to the doctor or the
+oculist--whether I was afflicted by an optical or a digestive
+delusion--I left them to pursue their interesting double life, though at
+times they made mine exceedingly comfortable ...
+
+"Yes--uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable! But it
+was part of my stupid pride, when the thing began, not to admit that I
+could be disturbed by the trifling matter of seeing two--
+
+"And then I'd no reason, really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I knew
+I was simply bored--horribly bored. But it was part of my boredom--I
+remember--that I was feeling so uncommonly well, and didn't know how
+on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come back from a long
+journey--down in South America and Mexico--and had settled down for the
+winter near New York, with an old aunt who had known Washington Irving
+and corresponded with N. P. Willis. She lived, not far from Irvington,
+in a damp Gothic villa, overhung by Norway spruces, and looking exactly
+like a memorial emblem done in hair. Her personal appearance was in
+keeping with this image, and her own hair--of which there was little
+left--might have been sacrificed to the manufacture of the emblem.
+
+"I had just reached the end of an agitated year, with considerable
+arrears to make up in money and emotion; and theoretically it seemed as
+though my aunt's mild hospitality would be as beneficial to my nerves as
+to my purse. But the deuce of it was that as soon as I felt myself safe
+and sheltered my energy began to revive; and how was I to work it off
+inside of a memorial emblem? I had, at that time, the agreeable illusion
+that sustained intellectual effort could engage a man's whole activity;
+and I decided to write a great book--I forget about what. My aunt,
+impressed by my plan, gave up to me her Gothic library, filled with
+classics in black cloth and daguerrotypes of faded celebrities; and I
+sat down at my desk to make myself a place among their number. And to
+facilitate my task she lent me a cousin to copy my manuscript.
+
+"The cousin was a nice girl, and I had an idea that a nice girl was just
+what I needed to restore my faith in human nature, and principally
+in myself. She was neither beautiful nor intelligent--poor Alice
+Nowell!--but it interested me to see any woman content to be so
+uninteresting, and I wanted to find out the secret of her content. In
+doing this I handled it rather rashly, and put it out of joint--oh, just
+for a moment! There's no fatuity in telling you this, for the poor girl
+had never seen any one but cousins ...
+
+"Well, I was sorry for what I'd done, of course, and confoundedly
+bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the
+house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down to
+the library to fetch a book she'd mislaid, like any artless heroine on
+the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered, and it suddenly
+occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly thick and pretty,
+would look exactly like my aunt's when she grew older. I was glad I had
+noticed this, for it made it easier for me to do what was right; and
+when I had found the book she hadn't lost I told her I was leaving for
+Europe that week.
+
+"Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once what
+I meant. She didn't take it in the least as I'd expected--it would have
+been easier if she had. She held her book very tight, and turned away a
+moment to wind up the lamp on my desk--it had a ground glass shade with
+vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I remember. Then she came
+back, held out her hand, and said: 'Good-bye.' And as she said it she
+looked straight at me and kissed me. I had never felt anything as fresh
+and shy and brave as her kiss. It was worse than any reproach, and it
+made me ashamed to deserve a reproach from her. I said to myself: 'I'll
+marry her, and when my aunt dies she'll leave us this house, and I'll
+sit here at the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over
+there with her embroidery and look at me as she's looking now. And life
+will go on like that for any number of years.' The prospect frightened
+me a little, but at the time it didn't frighten me as much as doing
+anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on my
+finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with me.
+
+"You'll wonder why I'm enlarging on this familiar incident. It's because
+the evening on which it took place was the very evening on which I
+first saw the queer sight I've spoken of. Being at that time an ardent
+believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect I naturally
+tried to trace some kind of link between what had just happened to me in
+my aunt's library, and what was to happen a few hours later on the same
+night; and so the coincidence between the two events always remained in
+my mind.
+
+"I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under the
+weight of the first good action I had ever consciously committed; and
+young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation. Don't imagine from
+this that I had hitherto been an instrument of destruction. I had been
+merely a harmless young man, who had followed his bent and declined all
+collaboration with Providence. Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote
+the moral order of the world, and I felt a good deal like the trustful
+spectator who has given his gold watch to the conjurer, and doesn't know
+in what shape he'll get it back when the trick is over ... Still, a
+glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I
+undressed that when I'd got used to being good it probably wouldn't make
+me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in bed, and
+had blown out my candle, I felt that I really _was_ getting used to it,
+and that, as far as I'd got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of
+my aunt's very softest wool mattresses.
+
+"I closed my eyes on this image, and when I opened them it must have
+been a good deal later, for my room had grown cold, and the night was
+intensely still. I was waked suddenly by the feeling we all know--the
+feeling that there was something near me that hadn't been there when I
+fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness. The room
+was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague
+glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me.
+I couldn't see the face attached to them--on account of the darkness,
+I imagined--but as I looked the eyes grew more and more distinct: they
+gave out a light of their own.
+
+"The sensation of being thus gazed at was far from pleasant, and you
+might suppose that my first impulse would have been to jump out of bed
+and hurl myself on the invisible figure attached to the eyes. But it
+wasn't--my impulse was simply to lie still ... I can't say whether
+this was due to an immediate sense of the uncanny nature of the
+apparition--to the certainty that if I did jump out of bed I should
+hurl myself on nothing--or merely to the benumbing effect of the eyes
+themselves. They were the very worst eyes I've ever seen: a man's
+eyes--but what a man! My first thought was that he must be frightfully
+old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the
+eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped
+a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and
+between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes,
+the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim about the
+pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish.
+
+"But the age of the eyes was not the most unpleasant thing about them.
+What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security. I don't
+know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to belong to a man
+who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside
+the danger lines. They were not the eyes of a coward, but of some one
+much too clever to take risks; and my gorge rose at their look of base
+astuteness. Yet even that wasn't the worst; for as we continued to scan
+each other I saw in them a tinge of faint derision, and felt myself to
+be its object.
+
+"At that I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me out of bed
+and pitched me straight on the unseen figure at its foot. But of course
+there wasn't any figure there, and my fists struck at emptiness. Ashamed
+and cold, I groped about for a match and lit the candles. The room
+looked just as usual--as I had known it would; and I crawled back to
+bed, and blew out the lights.
+
+"As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now
+applied myself to explaining them on scientific principles. At first
+I thought the illusion might have been caused by the glow of the last
+embers in the chimney; but the fire-place was on the other side of my
+bed, and so placed that the fire could not possibly be reflected in my
+toilet glass, which was the only mirror in the room. Then it occurred
+to me that I might have been tricked by the reflection of the embers in
+some polished bit of wood or metal; and though I couldn't discover any
+object of the sort in my line of vision, I got up again, groped my way
+to the hearth, and covered what was left of the fire. But as soon as I
+was back in bed the eyes were back at its foot.
+
+"They were an hallucination, then: that was plain. But the fact
+that they were not due to any external dupery didn't make them a
+bit pleasanter to see. For if they were a projection of my inner
+consciousness, what the deuce was the matter with that organ? I had gone
+deeply enough into the mystery of morbid pathological states to picture
+the conditions under which an exploring mind might lay itself open to
+such a midnight admonition; but I couldn't fit it to my present case.
+I had never felt more normal, mentally and physically; and the only
+unusual fact in my situation--that of having assured the happiness of an
+amiable girl--did not seem of a kind to summon unclean spirits about my
+pillow. But there were the eyes still looking at me ...
+
+"I shut mine, and tried to evoke a vision of Alice Nowell's. They were
+not remarkable eyes, but they were as wholesome as fresh water, and if
+she had had more imagination--or longer lashes--their expression might
+have been interesting. As it was, they did not prove very efficacious,
+and in a few moments I perceived that they had mysteriously changed into
+the eyes at the foot of the bed. It exasperated me more to feel these
+glaring at me through my shut lids than to see them, and I opened my
+eyes again and looked straight into their hateful stare ...
+
+"And so it went on all night. I can't tell you what that night was, nor
+how long it lasted. Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide awake,
+and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened 'em you'd
+see something you dreaded and loathed? It sounds easy, but it's devilish
+hard. Those eyes hung there and drew me. I had the _vertige de l'abime_,
+and their red lids were the edge of my abyss. ... I had known nervous
+hours before: hours when I'd felt the wind of danger in my neck; but
+never this kind of strain. It wasn't that the eyes were so awful; they
+hadn't the majesty of the powers of darkness. But they had--how shall
+I say?--a physical effect that was the equivalent of a bad smell: their
+look left a smear like a snail's. And I didn't see what business they
+had with me, anyhow--and I stared and stared, trying to find out ...
+
+"I don't know what effect they were trying to produce; but the effect
+they _did_ produce was that of making me pack my portmanteau and bolt to
+town early the next morning. I left a note for my aunt, explaining that
+I was ill and had gone to see my doctor; and as a matter of fact I did
+feel uncommonly ill--the night seemed to have pumped all the blood out
+of me. But when I reached town I didn't go to the doctor's. I went to
+a friend's rooms, and threw myself on a bed, and slept for ten heavenly
+hours. When I woke it was the middle of the night, and I turned cold
+at the thought of what might be waiting for me. I sat up, shaking,
+and stared into the darkness; but there wasn't a break in its blessed
+surface, and when I saw that the eyes were not there I dropped back into
+another long sleep.
+
+"I had left no word for Alice when I fled, because I meant to go back
+the next morning. But the next morning I was too exhausted to stir. As
+the day went on the exhaustion increased, instead of wearing off like
+the lassitude left by an ordinary night of insomnia: the effect of the
+eyes seemed to be cumulative, and the thought of seeing them again grew
+intolerable. For two days I struggled with my dread; but on the third
+evening I pulled myself together and decided to go back the next
+morning. I felt a good deal happier as soon as I'd decided, for I knew
+that my abrupt disappearance, and the strangeness of my not writing,
+must have been very painful for poor Alice. That night I went to bed
+with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once; but in the middle of the
+night I woke, and there were the eyes ...
+
+"Well, I simply couldn't face them; and instead of going back to my
+aunt's I bundled a few things into a trunk and jumped onto the first
+steamer for England. I was so dead tired when I got on board that I
+crawled straight into my berth, and slept most of the way over; and I
+can't tell you the bliss it was to wake from those long stretches of
+dreamless sleep and look fearlessly into the darkness, _knowing_ that I
+shouldn't see the eyes ...
+
+"I stayed abroad for a year, and then I stayed for another; and during
+that time I never had a glimpse of them. That was enough reason for
+prolonging my stay if I'd been on a desert island. Another was, of
+course, that I had perfectly come to see, on the voyage over, the folly,
+complete impossibility, of my marrying Alice Nowell. The fact that I had
+been so slow in making this discovery annoyed me, and made me want to
+avoid explanations. The bliss of escaping at one stroke from the eyes,
+and from this other embarrassment, gave my freedom an extraordinary
+zest; and the longer I savoured it the better I liked its taste.
+
+"The eyes had burned such a hole in my consciousness that for a long
+time I went on puzzling over the nature of the apparition, and wondering
+nervously if it would ever come back. But as time passed I lost this
+dread, and retained only the precision of the image. Then that faded in
+its turn.
+
+"The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I
+believe, to write another great book--a definitive work on Etruscan
+influences in Italian art. At any rate, I'd found some pretext of the
+kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza di Spagna and dabbling
+about indefinitely in the Forum; and there, one morning, a charming
+youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light, slender and
+smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar--one
+to Antinous, say--but he'd come instead from New York, with a letter (of
+all people) from Alice Nowell. The letter--the first I'd had from her
+since our break--was simply a line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert
+Noyes, and appealing to me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that
+he 'had talent,' and 'wanted to write'; and, an obdurate family having
+insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry,
+Alice had intervened to win him six months' respite, during which he was
+to travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability
+to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me
+first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval 'ordeal.' Then I was
+touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some
+service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was
+a beautiful embodiment of my chance.
+
+"Well, I imagine it's safe to lay down the general principle that
+predestined geniuses don't, as a rule, appear before one in the spring
+sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods. At any
+rate, poor Noyes wasn't a predestined genius. But he _was_ beautiful to
+see, and charming as a comrade too. It was only when he began to talk
+literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the symptoms so well--the
+things he had 'in him,' and the things outside him that impinged!
+There's the real test, after all. It was always--punctually, inevitably,
+with the inexorableness of a mechanical law--it was _always_ the wrong
+thing that struck him. I grew to find a certain grim fascination
+in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he'd select; and I
+acquired an astonishing skill at the game ...
+
+"The worst of it was that his _betise_ wasn't of the too obvious sort.
+Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at
+dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the microscope,
+fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent,
+something that he could make 'do' and be happy on; and wasn't that,
+after all, what I was concerned with? He was so charming--he continued
+to be so charming--that he called forth all my charity in support of
+this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was
+a chance for him ...
+
+"Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the
+more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural
+grace--it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And he was so
+gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth
+would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some artless
+animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head
+the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that
+it was simply protective mimicry--an instinctive ruse to get away
+from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn't--dear
+lad!--believe in himself. There wasn't a trace of hypocrisy in his
+composition. He was sure that his 'call' was irresistible, while to me
+it was the saving grace of his situation that it _wasn't_, and that a
+little money, a little leisure, a little pleasure would have turned
+him into an inoffensive idler. Unluckily, however, there was no hope of
+money, and with the grim alternative of the office desk before him he
+couldn't postpone his attempt at literature. The stuff he turned out
+was deplorable, and I see now that I knew it from the first. Still, the
+absurdity of deciding a man's whole future on a first trial seemed to
+justify me in withholding my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging
+him a little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth
+to flower.
+
+"At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the point
+of getting his term of probation extended. When I left Rome he went with
+me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and Venice. I
+said to myself: 'If he has anything in him, it will come out now; and it
+_did_. He was never more enchanting and enchanted. There were moments
+of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring sound seemed actually
+to pass into his face--but only to issue forth in a shallow flood of the
+palest ink ...
+
+"Well the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no hand
+but mine to do it. We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to stay
+with me, not wanting him to be alone in his dismal _pension_ when he had
+to face the necessity of renouncing his ambition. I hadn't, of course,
+relied solely on my own judgment in deciding to advise him to drop
+literature. I had sent his stuff to various people--editors and
+critics--and they had always sent it back with the same chilling lack of
+comment. Really there was nothing on earth to say about it--
+
+"I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I
+decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell myself
+that it was my duty to knock the poor boy's hopes into splinters--but
+I'd like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn't been justified on
+that plea? I've always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence,
+and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn't
+be on an errand of destruction. Besides, in the last issue, who was I to
+decide, even after a year's trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?
+
+"The more I looked at the part I'd resolved to play, the less I liked
+it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his
+head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil's is now ... I'd been
+going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his
+future hung on my verdict--we'd tacitly agreed to that. The manuscript
+lay between us, on my table--a novel, his first novel, if you
+please!--and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at
+me with all his life in the look.
+
+"I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his
+face and on the manuscript.
+
+"'The fact is, my dear Gilbert,' I began--
+
+"I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.
+
+"'Oh, look here, don't take on so, my dear fellow! I'm not so awfully
+cut up as all that!' His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing
+down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety
+that drove the knife into my side.
+
+"He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my
+duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting
+him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more
+particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so uneasily longed to
+prove my good faith and my immense desire to serve her. It really seemed
+like failing her twice to fail Gilbert--
+
+"But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that encircle
+the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I might be letting
+myself in for if I didn't tell the truth. I said to myself: 'I shall
+have him for life'--and I'd never yet seen any one, man or woman, whom I
+was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism
+decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap
+that landed me straight in Gilbert's arms.
+
+"'The thing's all right, and you're all wrong!' I shouted up at him; and
+as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his incredulous clutch,
+I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is supposed to
+attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making people happy _has_
+its charms--
+
+"Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation in some
+spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his emotions,
+and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began to wonder what
+their after-taste would be--so many of the finest don't keep! Still, I
+wasn't sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle, even if it _did_ turn a
+trifle flat.
+
+"After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of his
+eyes--his blissful eyes... Then I fell asleep, and when I woke the room
+was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk--and there were _the other
+eyes_ ...
+
+"It was three years since I'd seen them, but I'd thought of them so
+often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now, with
+their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed they
+would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them ...
+As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming that made it
+so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such
+a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I'd seen
+them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the
+searchings of their infernal glare; but at this particular moment I was
+really in what might have been called a state of grace; and I can't tell
+you how the fact added to their horror ...
+
+"But it's not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were worse.
+Worse by just so much as I'd learned of life in the interval; by all the
+damnable implications my wider experience read into them. I saw now
+what I hadn't seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous
+gradually, which had built up their baseness coral-wise, bit by bit,
+out of a series of small turpitudes slowly accumulated through the
+industrious years. Yes--it came to me that what made them so bad was
+that they'd grown bad so slowly ...
+
+"There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the
+little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of fat
+flesh making a muddy shadow underneath--and as their filmy stare moved
+with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity,
+of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first
+shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they
+made it so clear that some day I should ... Yes, that was the worst part
+of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time
+they came back to me ...
+
+"For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded me
+of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over
+the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to
+claim their morsel of mine: since I'd made Gilbert happy they simply
+wouldn't loosen their fangs. The coincidence almost made me hate him,
+poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over it a good deal,
+but couldn't find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his
+association with Alice Nowell. But then the eyes had let up on me the
+moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a
+woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such
+spirits to avenge her. That set me thinking, and I began to wonder
+if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was
+insidious, and I had to stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy!
+he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all,
+I never found out what they wanted ..."
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THE fire crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the
+narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into
+the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like
+an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the
+eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light it became once
+more a dim Rembrandtish blur.
+
+Phil Frenham, sitting in a low chair on the opposite side of the hearth,
+one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand supporting his
+thrown-back head, and his eyes steadily fixed on his old friend's face,
+had not moved since the tale began. He continued to maintain his silent
+immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak, and it was I who, with a
+vague sense of disappointment at the sudden drop of the story, finally
+asked: "But how long did you keep on seeing them?"
+
+Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own
+empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question. He
+appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.
+
+"How long? Oh, off and on all that winter. It was infernal. I never got
+used to them. I grew really ill."
+
+Frenham shifted his attitude silently, and as he did so his elbow struck
+against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind
+him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his
+former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes
+intent on Culwin's face. Something in his stare embarrassed me, and as
+if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question:
+
+"And you never tried sacrificing Noyes?"
+
+"Oh, no. The fact is I didn't have to. He did it for me, poor infatuated
+boy!"
+
+"Did it for you? How do you mean?"
+
+"He wore me out--wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his
+lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became
+a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing--oh, ever so gently,
+you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a
+chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what he _really_ had
+to give. I'd foreseen this solution from the beginning--felt sure that,
+once the first ardour of authorship was quenched, he'd drop into his
+place as a charming parasitic thing, the kind of chronic Cherubino for
+whom, in old societies, there's always a seat at table, and a shelter
+behind the ladies' skirts. I saw him take his place as 'the poet': the
+poet who doesn't write. One knows the type in every drawing-room. Living
+in that way doesn't cost much--I'd worked it all out in my mind, and
+felt sure that, with a little help, he could manage it for the next
+few years; and meanwhile he'd be sure to marry. I saw him married to
+a widow, rather older, with a good cook and a well-run house. And I
+actually had my eye on the widow ... Meanwhile I did everything to
+facilitate the transition--lent him money to ease his conscience,
+introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing
+would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He
+wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier's
+axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he'd spread it
+out over Lord knows how many thousand sloppy pages. Now and then he
+would send a pailful to a publisher, and of course it would always come
+back.
+
+"At first it didn't matter--he thought he was 'misunderstood.' He took
+the attitudes of genius, and whenever an opus came home he wrote another
+to keep it company. Then he had a reaction of despair, and accused me of
+deceiving him, and Lord knows what. I got angry at that, and told him
+it was he who had deceived himself. He'd come to me determined to write,
+and I'd done my best to help him. That was the extent of my offence, and
+I'd done it for his cousin's sake, not his.
+
+"That seemed to strike home, and he didn't answer for a minute. Then he
+said: 'My time's up and my money's up. What do you think I'd better do?'
+
+"'I think you'd better not be an ass,' I said.
+
+"He turned red, and asked: 'What do you mean by being an ass?'
+
+"I took a letter from my desk and held it out to him.
+
+"'I mean refusing this offer of Mrs. Ellinger's: to be her secretary at
+a salary of five thousand dollars. There may be a lot more in it than
+that.'
+
+"He flung out his hand with a violence that struck the letter from mine.
+'Oh, I know well enough what's in it!' he said, scarlet to the roots of
+his hair.
+
+"'And what's your answer, if you know?' I asked.
+
+"He made none at the minute, but turned away slowly to the door. There,
+with his hand on the threshold, he stopped to ask, almost under his
+breath: 'Then you really think my stuff's no good?'
+
+"I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don't defend my laugh--it
+was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was
+a fool, and that I'd done my best for him--I really had.
+
+"He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That
+afternoon I left for Frascati, where I'd promised to spend the Sunday
+with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by the same
+token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the eyes. I
+dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me before when
+their visitations ceased; and when I woke the next morning, in my
+peaceful painted room above the ilexes, I felt the utter weariness and
+deep relief that always followed on that repairing slumber. I put in two
+blessed nights at Frascati, and when I got back to my rooms in Rome I
+found that Gilbert had gone ... Oh, nothing tragic had happened--the
+episode never rose to _that_. He'd simply packed his manuscripts and
+left for America--for his family and the Wall Street desk. He left a
+decent little note to tell me of his decision, and behaved altogether,
+in the circumstances, as little like a fool as it's possible for a fool
+to behave ..."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+CULWIN paused again, and again Frenham sat motionless, the dusky contour
+of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.
+
+"And what became of Noyes afterward?" I finally asked, still disquieted
+by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread
+between the parallel lines of the tale.
+
+Culwin twitched his shoulders. "Oh, nothing became of him--because he
+became nothing. There could be no question of 'becoming' about it. He
+vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a
+consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong,
+years afterward. He was fat and hadn't shaved. I was told he drank. He
+didn't recognize me."
+
+"And the eyes?" I asked, after another pause which Frenham's continued
+silence made oppressive.
+
+Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the
+shadows. "I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two and
+two together if you can. For my part, I haven't found the link."
+
+He rose stiffly, his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the table
+on which reviving drinks had been set out.
+
+"You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my dear
+fellow. Here, Phil--" He turned back to the hearth.
+
+Frenham still sat in his low chair, making no response to his host's
+hospitable summons. But as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes met in
+a long look; after which, to my intense surprise, the young man, turning
+suddenly in his seat, flung his arms across the table, and dropped his
+face upon them.
+
+Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his face.
+
+"Phil--what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared _you?_ My dear boy--my
+dear fellow--I never had such a tribute to my literary ability, never!"
+
+He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the hearth-rug,
+his hands still in his pockets, gazing down in honest perplexity at the
+youth's bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no answer, he moved a
+step or two nearer.
+
+"Cheer up, my dear Phil! It's years since I've seen them--apparently
+I've done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos. Unless my
+present evocation of them has made _you_ see them; which would be their
+worst stroke yet!"
+
+His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved
+still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on the
+lad's shoulders.
+
+"Phil, my dear boy, really--what's the matter? Why don't you answer?
+_Have_ you seen the eyes?"
+
+Frenham's face was still pressed against his arms, and from where I
+stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this
+unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so,
+the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his perplexed congested
+face, and I caught its sudden reflection in the mirror behind Frenham's
+head.
+
+Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the
+mirror, as if scarcely recognizing the countenance in it as his own. But
+as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable
+space of time he and the image in the glass confronted each other with
+a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go of Frenham's
+shoulders, and drew back a step, covering his eyes with his hands ...
+
+Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLOND BEAST
+
+
+I
+
+
+IT had been almost too easy--that was young Millner's first feeling,
+as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his
+interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at his
+feet.
+
+Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous
+vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the perspective
+of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared to remember
+Rastignac's apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard recklessly under his
+small fair moustache: "Who knows?"
+
+He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already: a good deal
+more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour's talk
+with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city spread
+out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who knew the
+rest.
+
+A gust of wind, whirling down from the dizzy height of the building on
+the next corner, drove sharply through his overcoat and compelled him
+to clutch at his hat. It was a bitter January day, a day of fierce light
+and air, when the sunshine cut like icicles and the wind sucked one into
+black gulfs at the street corners. But Millner's complacency was like
+a warm lining to his shabby coat, and heaving steadied his hat he
+continued to stand on the Spence threshold, lost in the vision revealed
+to him from the Pisgah of its marble steps. Yes, it was wonderful what
+the vision showed him. ... In his absorption he might have frozen
+fast to the door-step if the Rhadamanthine portals behind him had not
+suddenly opened to let out a slim fur-coated figure, the figure, as he
+perceived, of the youth whom he had caught in the act of withdrawal as
+he entered Mr. Spence's study, and whom the latter, with a wave of his
+affable hand, had detained to introduce as "my son Draper."
+
+It was characteristic of the odd friendliness of the whole scene that
+the great man should have thought it worth while to call back and name
+his heir to a mere humble applicant like Millner; and that the heir
+should shed on him, from a pale high-browed face, a smile of such
+deprecating kindness. It was characteristic, equally, of Millner, that
+he should at once mark the narrowness of the shoulders sustaining this
+ingenuous head; a narrowness, as he now observed, imperfectly concealed
+by the wide fur collar of young Spence's expensive and badly cut coat.
+But the face took on, as the youth smiled his surprise at their second
+meeting, a look of almost plaintive good-will: the kind of look that
+Millner scorned and yet could never quite resist.
+
+"Mr. Millner? Are you--er--waiting?" the lad asked, with an intention
+of serviceableness that was like a finer echo of his father's resounding
+cordiality.
+
+"For my motor? No," Millner jested in his frank free voice. "The fact
+is, I was just standing here lost in the contemplation of my luck"--and
+as his companion's pale blue eyes seemed to shape a question, "my
+extraordinary luck," he explained, "in having been engaged as your
+father's secretary."
+
+"Oh," the other rejoined, with a faint colour in his sallow cheek. "I'm
+so glad," he murmured: "but I was sure--" He stopped, and the two looked
+kindly at each other.
+
+Millner averted his gaze first, almost fearful of its betraying the
+added sense of his own strength and dexterity which he drew from the
+contrast of the other's frailness.
+
+"Sure? How could any one be sure? I don't believe in it yet!" he laughed
+out in the irony of his triumph.
+
+The boy's words did not sound like a mere civility--Millner felt in them
+an homage to his power.
+
+"Oh, yes: I was sure," young Draper repeated. "Sure as soon as I saw
+you, I mean."
+
+Millner tingled again with this tribute to his physical straightness and
+bloom. Yes, he looked his part, hang it--he looked it!
+
+But his companion still lingered, a shy sociability in his eye.
+
+"If you're walking, then, can I go along a little way?" And he nodded
+southward down the shabby gaudy avenue.
+
+That, again, was part of the high comedy of the hour--that Millner
+should descend the Spence steps at young Spence's side, and stroll down
+Fifth Avenue with him at the proudest moment of the afternoon; O. G.
+Spence's secretary walking abroad with O. G. Spence's heir! He had the
+scientific detachment to pull out his watch and furtively note the hour.
+Yes--it was exactly forty minutes since he had rung the Spence door-bell
+and handed his card to a gelid footman, who, openly sceptical of his
+claim to be received, had left him unceremoniously planted on the cold
+tessellations of the vestibule.
+
+"Some day," Miller grinned to himself, "I think I'll take that footman
+as furnace-man--or to do the boots." And he pictured his marble palace
+rising from the earth to form the mausoleum of a footman's pride.
+
+Only forty minutes ago! And now he had his opportunity fast! And he
+never meant to let it go! It was incredible, what had happened in the
+interval. He had gone up the Spence steps an unknown young man, out of a
+job, and with no substantial hope of getting into one: a needy young
+man with a mother and two limp sisters to be helped, and a lengthening
+figure of debt that stood by his bed through the anxious nights. And he
+went down the steps with his present assured, and his future lit by the
+hues of the rainbow above the pot of gold. Certainly a fellow who made
+his way at that rate had it "in him," and could afford to trust his
+star.
+
+Descending from this joyous flight he stooped his ear to the discourse
+of young Spence.
+
+"My father'll work you rather hard, you know: but you look as if you
+wouldn't mind that."
+
+Millner pulled up his inches with the self-consciousness of the man who
+had none to waste. "Oh, no, I shan't mind that: I don't mind any amount
+of work if it leads to something."
+
+"Just so," Draper Spence assented eagerly. "That's what I feel. And
+you'll find that whatever my father undertakes leads to such awfully
+fine things."
+
+Millner tightened his lips on a grin. He was thinking only of where the
+work would lead him, not in the least of where it might land the eminent
+Orlando G. Spence. But he looked at his companion sympathetically.
+
+"You're a philanthropist like your father, I see?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know." They had paused at a crossing, and young Draper,
+with a dubious air, stood striking his agate-headed stick against the
+curb-stone. "I believe in a purpose, don't you?" he asked, lifting his
+blue eyes suddenly to Millner's face.
+
+"A purpose? I should rather say so! I believe in nothing else," cried
+Millner, feeling as if his were something he could grip in his hand and
+swing like a club.
+
+Young Spence seemed relieved. "Yes--I tie up to that. There _is_ a
+Purpose. And so, after all, even if I don't agree with my father on
+minor points ..." He coloured quickly, and looked again at Millner. "I
+should like to talk to you about this some day."
+
+Millner smothered another smile. "We'll have lots of talks, I hope."
+
+"Oh, if you can spare the time--!" said Draper, almost humbly.
+
+"Why, I shall be there on tap!"
+
+"For father, not me." Draper hesitated, with another self-confessing
+smile. "Father thinks I talk too much--that I keep going in and out of
+things. He doesn't believe in analyzing: he thinks it's destructive.
+But it hasn't destroyed my ideals." He looked wistfully up and down the
+clanging street. "And that's the main thing, isn't it? I mean, that
+one should have an Ideal." He turned back almost gaily to Millner. "I
+suspect you're a revolutionist too!"
+
+"Revolutionist? Rather! I belong to the Red Syndicate and the Black
+Hand!" Millner joyfully assented.
+
+Young Draper chuckled at the enormity of the joke. "First rate! We'll
+have incendiary meetings!" He pulled an elaborately armorial watch from
+his enfolding furs. "I'm so sorry, but I must say good-bye--this is my
+street," he explained. Millner, with a faint twinge of envy, glanced
+across at the colonnaded marble edifice in the farther corner. "Going to
+the club?" he said carelessly.
+
+His companion looked surprised. "Oh, no: I never go _there_. It's too
+boring." And he brought out, after one of the pauses in which he seemed
+rather breathlessly to measure the chances of his listener's indulgence:
+"I'm just going over to a little Bible Class I have in Tenth Avenue."
+
+Millner, for a moment or two, stood watching the slim figure wind its
+way through the mass of vehicles to the opposite corner; then he pursued
+his own course down Fifth Avenue, measuring his steps to the rhythmic
+refrain: "It's too easy--it's too easy--it's too easy!"
+
+His own destination being the small shabby flat off University Place
+where three tender females awaited the result of his mission, he had
+time, on the way home, after abandoning himself to a general sense
+of triumph, to dwell specifically on the various aspects of his
+achievement. Viewed materially and practically, it was a thing to be
+proud of; yet it was chiefly on aesthetic grounds--because he had done
+so exactly what he had set out to do--that he glowed with pride at the
+afternoon's work. For, after all, any young man with the proper "pull"
+might have applied to Orlando G. Spence for the post of secretary, and
+even have penetrated as far as the great man's study; but that he, Hugh
+Millner, should not only have forced his way to this fastness, but
+have established, within a short half hour, his right to remain there
+permanently: well, this, if it proved anything, proved that the first
+rule of success was to know how to live up to one's principles.
+
+"One must have a plan--one must have a plan," the young man murmured,
+looking with pity at the vague faces which the crowd bore past him, and
+feeling almost impelled to detain them and expound his doctrine. But the
+planlessness of average human nature was of course the measure of his
+opportunity; and he smiled to think that every purposeless face he met
+was a guarantee of his own advancement, a rung in the ladder he meant to
+climb.
+
+Yes, the whole secret of success was to know what one wanted to do, and
+not to be afraid to do it. His own history was proving that already.
+He had not been afraid to give up his small but safe position in
+a real-estate office for the precarious adventure of a private
+secretaryship; and his first glimpse of his new employer had convinced
+him that he had not mistaken his calling. When one has a "way" with
+one--as, in all modesty, Millner knew he had--not to utilize it is a
+stupid waste of force. And when he had learned that Orlando G. Spence
+was in search of a private secretary who should be able to give him
+intelligent assistance in the execution of his philanthropic schemes,
+the young man felt that his hour had come. It was no part of his plan
+to associate himself with one of the masters of finance: he had a notion
+that minnows who go to a whale to learn how to grow bigger are likely to
+be swallowed in the process. The opportunity of a clever young man
+with a cool head and no prejudices (this again was drawn from life) lay
+rather in making himself indispensable to one of the beneficent rich,
+and in using the timidities and conformities of his patron as the means
+of his scruples about formulating these principles to himself. It
+was not for nothing that, in his college days, he had hunted the
+hypothetical "moral sense" to its lair, and dragged from their
+concealment the various self-advancing sentiments dissembled under its
+edifying guise. His strength lay in his precocious insight into the
+springs of action, and in his refusal to classify them according to the
+accepted moral and social sanctions. He had to the full the courage of
+his lack of convictions.
+
+To a young man so untrammelled by prejudice it was self-evident that
+helpless philanthropists like Orlando G. Spence were just as much the
+natural diet of the strong as the lamb is of the wolf. It was pleasanter
+to eat than to be eaten, in a world where, as yet, there seemed to be no
+third alternative; and any scruples one might feel as to the temporary
+discomfort of one's victim were speedily dispelled by that larger
+scientific view which took into account the social destructiveness
+of the benevolent. Millner was persuaded that every individual woe
+mitigated by the philanthropy of Orlando G. Spence added just so much
+to the sum-total of human inefficiency, and it was one of his favourite
+subjects of speculation to picture the innumerable social evils that may
+follow upon the rescue of one infant from Mount Taygetus.
+
+"We're all born to prey on each other, and pity for suffering is one of
+the most elementary stages of egotism. Until one has passed beyond, and
+acquired a taste for the more complex forms of the instinct--"
+
+He stopped suddenly, checked in his advance by a sallow wisp of a dog
+which had plunged through the press of vehicles to hurl itself between
+his legs. Millner did not dislike animals, though he preferred that they
+should be healthy and handsome. The dog under his feet was neither. Its
+cringing contour showed an injudicious mingling of races, and its
+meagre coat betrayed the deplorable habit of sleeping in coal-holes
+and subsisting on an innutritious diet. In addition to these physical
+disadvantages, its shrinking and inconsequent movements revealed a
+congenital weakness of character which, even under more favourable
+conditions, would hardly have qualified it to become a useful member of
+society; and Millner was not sorry to notice that it moved with a limp
+of the hind leg that probably doomed it to speedy extinction.
+
+The absurdity of such an animal's attempting to cross Fifth Avenue at
+the most crowded hour of the afternoon struck him as only less great
+than the irony of its having been permitted to achieve the feat; and
+he stood a moment looking at it, and wondering what had moved it to
+the attempt. It was really a perfect type of the human derelict
+which Orlando G. Spence and his kind were devoting their millions to
+perpetuate, and he reflected how much better Nature knew her business in
+dealing with the superfluous quadruped.
+
+An elderly lady advancing in the opposite direction evidently took
+a less dispassionate view of the case, for she paused to remark
+emotionally: "Oh, you poor thing!" while she stooped to caress
+the object of her sympathy. The dog, with characteristic lack of
+discrimination, viewed her gesture with suspicion, and met it with a
+snarl. The lady turned pale and shrank away, a chivalrous male repelled
+the animal with his umbrella, and two idle boys backed his action by a
+vigorous "Hi!" The object of these hostile demonstrations, apparently
+attributing them not to its own unsocial conduct, but merely to the
+chronic animosity of the universe, dashed wildly around the corner into
+a side street, and as it did so Millner noticed that the lame leg left
+a little trail of blood. Irresistibly, he turned the corner to see what
+would happen next. It was deplorably clear that the animal itself had
+no plan; but after several inconsequent and contradictory movements
+it plunged down an area, where it backed up against the iron gate,
+forlornly and foolishly at bay.
+
+Millner, still following, looked down at it, and wondered. Then he
+whistled, just to see if it would come; but this only caused it to start
+up on its quivering legs, with desperate turns of the head that measured
+the chances of escape.
+
+"Oh, hang it, you poor devil, stay there if you like!" the young man
+murmured, walking away.
+
+A few yards off he looked back, and saw that the dog had made a rush
+out of the area and was limping furtively down the street. The idle
+boys were in the offing, and he disliked the thought of leaving them in
+control of the situation. Softly, with infinite precautions, he began to
+follow the dog. He did not know why he was doing it, but the impulse was
+overmastering. For a moment he seemed to be gaining upon his quarry,
+but with a cunning sense of his approach it suddenly turned and hobbled
+across the frozen grass-plot adjoining a shuttered house. Against the
+wall at the back of the plot it cowered down in a dirty snow-drift, as
+if disheartened by the struggle. Millner stood outside the railings and
+looked at it. He reflected that under the shelter of the winter dusk it
+might have the luck to remain there unmolested, and that in the morning
+it would probably be dead of cold. This was so obviously the best
+solution that he began to move away again; but as he did so the idle
+boys confronted him.
+
+"Ketch yer dog for yer, boss?" they grinned.
+
+Millner consigned them to the devil, and stood sternly watching them
+till the first stage of the journey had carried them around the nearest
+corner; then, after pausing to look once more up and down the empty
+street, laid his hand on the railing, and vaulted over it into the
+grass-plot. As he did so, he reflected that, since pity for suffering
+was one of the most elementary forms of egotism, he ought to have
+remembered that it was necessarily one of the most tenacious.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"My chief aim in life?" Orlando G. Spence repeated. He threw himself
+back in his chair, straightened the tortoise-shell _pince-nez_, on his
+short blunt nose, and beamed down the luncheon table at the two young
+men who shared his repast.
+
+His glance rested on his son Draper, seated opposite him behind a
+barrier of Georgian silver and orchids; but his words were addressed to
+his secretary who, stylograph in hand, had turned from the seductions
+of a mushroom _souffle_ in order to jot down, for the Sunday
+_Investigator_, an outline of his employer's views and intentions
+respecting the newly endowed Orlando G. Spence College for Missionaries.
+It was Mr. Spence's practice to receive in person the journalists
+privileged to impart his opinions to a waiting world; but during the
+last few months--and especially since the vast project of the Missionary
+College had been in process of development--the pressure of business
+and beneficence had necessitated Millner's frequent intervention,
+and compelled the secretary to snatch the sense of his patron's
+elucubrations between the courses of their hasty meals.
+
+Young Millner had a healthy appetite, and it was not one of his least
+sacrifices to be so often obliged to curb it in the interest of his
+advancement; but whenever he waved aside one of the triumphs of Mr.
+Spence's _chef_ he was conscious of rising a step in his employer's
+favour. Mr. Spence did not despise the pleasures of the table, though
+he appeared to regard them as the reward of success rather than as the
+alleviation of effort; and it increased his sense of his secretary's
+merit to note how keenly the young man enjoyed the fare which he was
+so frequently obliged to deny himself. Draper, having subsisted since
+infancy on a diet of truffles and terrapin, consumed such delicacies
+with the insensibility of a traveller swallowing a railway sandwich; but
+Millner never made the mistake of concealing from Mr. Spence his sense
+of what he was losing when duty constrained him to exchange the fork for
+the pen.
+
+"My chief aim in life!" Mr. Spence repeated, removing his eye-glass and
+swinging it thoughtfully on his finger. ("I'm sorry you should miss this
+_souffle_, Millner: it's worth while.) Why, I suppose I might say that
+my chief aim in life is to leave the world better than I found it. Yes:
+I don't know that I could put it better than that. To leave the world
+better than I found it. It wouldn't be a bad idea to use that as a
+head-line. _'Wants to leave the world better than he found it.'_ It's
+exactly the point I should like to make in this talk about the College."
+
+Mr. Spence paused, and his glance once more reverted to his son, who,
+having pushed aside his plate, sat watching Millner with a dreamy
+intensity.
+
+"And it's the point I want to make with you, too, Draper," his father
+continued genially, while he turned over with a critical fork the plump
+and perfectly matched asparagus which a footman was presenting to his
+notice. "I want to make you feel that nothing else counts in comparison
+with that--no amount of literary success or intellectual celebrity."
+
+"Oh, I _do_ feel that," Draper murmured, with one of his quick blushes,
+and a glance that wavered between his father and Millner. The secretary
+kept his eyes on his notes, and young Spence continued, after a pause:
+"Only the thing is--isn't it?--to try and find out just what _does_ make
+the world better?"
+
+"To _try_ to find out?" his father echoed compassionately. "It's not
+necessary to try very hard. Goodness is what makes the world better."
+
+"Yes, yes, of course," his son nervously interposed; "but the question
+is, what _is_ good--"
+
+Mr. Spence, with a darkening brow, brought his fist down emphatically on
+the damask. "I'll thank you not to blaspheme, my son!"
+
+Draper's head reared itself a trifle higher on his thin neck. "I was not
+going to blaspheme; only there may be different ways--"
+
+"There's where you're mistaken, Draper. There's only one way: there's my
+way," said Mr. Spence in a tone of unshaken conviction.
+
+"I know, father; I see what you mean. But don't you see that even your
+way wouldn't be the right way for you if you ceased to believe that it
+was?"
+
+His father looked at him with mingled bewilderment and reprobation. "Do
+you mean to say that the fact of goodness depends on my conception of
+it, and not on God Almighty's?"
+
+"I do ... yes ... in a specific sense ..." young Draper falteringly
+maintained; and Mr. Spence turned with a discouraged gesture toward his
+secretary's suspended pen.
+
+"I don't understand your scientific jargon, Draper; and I don't want
+to.--What's the next point, Millner? (No; no _savarin_. Bring the
+fruit--and the coffee with it.)"
+
+Millner, keenly aware that an aromatic _savarin au rhum_ was describing
+an arc behind his head previous to being rushed back to the pantry under
+young Draper's indifferent eye, stiffened himself against this last
+assault of the enemy, and read out firmly: "_ What relation do you
+consider that a man's business conduct should bear to his religious and
+domestic life?_"
+
+Mr. Spence mused a moment. "Why, that's a stupid question. It goes
+over the same ground as the other one. A man ought to do good with his
+money--that's all. Go on."
+
+At this point the butler's murmur in his ear caused him to push back his
+chair, and to arrest Millner's interrogatory by a rapid gesture.
+"Yes; I'm coming. Hold the wire." Mr. Spence rose and plunged into
+the adjoining "office," where a telephone and a Remington divided the
+attention of a young lady in spectacles who was preparing for Zenana
+work in the East.
+
+As the door closed, the butler, having placed the coffee and liqueurs on
+the table, withdrew in the rear of his battalion, and the two young men
+were left alone beneath the Rembrandts and Hobbemas on the dining-room
+walls.
+
+There was a moment's silence between them; then young Spence, leaning
+across the table, said in the lowered tone of intimacy: "Why do you
+suppose he dodged that last question?"
+
+Millner, who had rapidly taken an opulent purple fig from the fruit-dish
+nearest him, paused in surprise in the act of hurrying it to his lips.
+
+"I mean," Draper hastened on, "the question as to the relation between
+business and private morality. It's such an interesting one, and he's
+just the person who ought to tackle it."
+
+Millner, despatching the fig, glanced down at his notes. "I don't think
+your father meant to dodge the question."
+
+Young Draper continued to look at him intently. "You think he imagined
+that his answer really covers the ground?"
+
+"As much as it needs to be covered."
+
+The son of the house glanced away with a sigh. "You know things about
+him that I don't," he said wistfully, but without a tinge of resentment
+in his tone.
+
+"Oh, as to that--(may I give myself some coffee?)" Millner, in his walk
+around the table to fill his cup, paused a moment to lay an affectionate
+hand on Draper's shoulder. "Perhaps I know him _better_, in a sense:
+outsiders often get a more accurate focus."
+
+Draper considered this. "And your idea is that he acts on principles he
+has never thought of testing or defining?"
+
+Millner looked up quickly, and for an instant their glances crossed.
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"I mean: that he's an inconscient instrument of goodness, as it were?
+A--a sort of blindly beneficent force?"
+
+The other smiled. "That's not a bad definition. I know one thing about
+him, at any rate: he's awfully upset at your having chucked your Bible
+Class."
+
+A shadow fell on young Spence's candid brow. "I know. But what can I do
+about it? That's what I was thinking of when I tried to show him that
+goodness, in a certain sense, is purely subjective: that one can't do
+good against one's principles." Again his glance appealed to Millner. "_
+You_ understand me, don't you?"
+
+Millner stirred his coffee in a silence not unclouded by perplexity.
+"Theoretically, perhaps. It's a pretty question, certainly. But I also
+understand your father's feeling that it hasn't much to do with real
+life: especially now that he's got to make a speech in connection with
+the founding of this Missionary College. He may think that any hint of
+internecine strife will weaken his prestige. Mightn't you have waited a
+little longer?"
+
+"How could I, when I might have been expected to take a part in this
+performance? To talk, and say things I didn't mean? That was exactly
+what made me decide not to wait."
+
+The door opened and Mr. Spence re-entered the room. As he did so his son
+rose abruptly as if to leave it.
+
+"Where are you off to, Draper?" the banker asked.
+
+"I'm in rather a hurry, sir--"
+
+Mr. Spence looked at his watch. "You can't be in more of a hurry than I
+am; and I've got seven minutes and a half." He seated himself behind the
+coffee--tray, lit a cigar, laid his watch on the table, and signed
+to Draper to resume his place. "No, Millner, don't you go; I want you
+both." He turned to the secretary. "You know that Draper's given up his
+Bible Class? I understand it's not from the pressure of engagements--"
+Mr. Spence's narrow lips took an ironic curve under the straight-clipped
+stubble of his moustache--"it's on principle, he tells me. He's
+_principled_ against doing good!"
+
+Draper lifted a protesting hand. "It's not exactly that, father--"
+
+"I know: you'll tell me it's some scientific quibble that I
+don't understand. I've never had time to go in for intellectual
+hair-splitting. I've found too many people down in the mire who needed a
+hand to pull them out. A busy man has to take his choice between helping
+his fellow-men and theorizing about them. I've preferred to help. (You
+might take that down for the _Investigator_, Millner.) And I thank
+God I've never stopped to ask what made me want to do good. I've just
+yielded to the impulse--that's all." Mr. Spence turned back to his son.
+"Better men than either of us have been satisfied with that creed, my
+son."
+
+Draper was silent, and Mr. Spence once more addressed himself to his
+secretary. "Millner, you're a reader: I've caught you at it. And I know
+this boy talks to you. What have you got to say? Do you suppose a Bible
+Class ever _hurt_ anybody?"
+
+Millner paused a moment, feeling all through his nervous system the
+fateful tremor of the balance. "That's what I was just trying to tell
+him, sir--"
+
+"Ah; you were? That's good. Then I'll only say one thing more. Your
+doing what you've done at this particular moment hurts me more, Draper,
+than your teaching the gospel of Jesus could possibly have hurt those
+young men over in Tenth Avenue." Mr. Spence arose and restored his watch
+to his pocket. "I shall want you in twenty minutes, Millner."
+
+The door closed on him, and for a while the two young men sat silent
+behind their cigar fumes. Then Draper Spence broke out, with a catch
+in his throat: "That's what I can't bear, Millner, what I simply
+can't _bear:_ to hurt him, to hurt his faith in _me!_ It's an awful
+responsibility, isn't it, to tamper with anybody's faith in anything?"
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THE twenty minutes prolonged themselves to forty, the forty to fifty,
+and the fifty to an hour; and still Millner waited for Mr. Spence's
+summons.
+
+During the two years of his secretaryship the young man had learned the
+significance of such postponements. Mr. Spence's days were organized
+like a railway time-table, and a delay of an hour implied a casualty
+as far-reaching as the breaking down of an express. Of the cause of the
+present derangement Hugh Millner was ignorant; and the experience of the
+last months allowed him to fluctuate between conflicting conjectures.
+All were based on the indisputable fact that Mr. Spence was
+"bothered"--had for some time past been "bothered." And it was one of
+Millner's discoveries that an extremely parsimonious use of the emotions
+underlay Mr. Spence's expansive manner and fraternal phraseology, and
+that he did not throw away his feelings any more than (for all his
+philanthropy) he threw away his money. If he was bothered, then, it
+could be only because a careful survey of his situation had forced on
+him some unpleasant fact with which he was not immediately prepared to
+deal; and any unpreparedness on Mr. Spence's part was also a significant
+symptom.
+
+Obviously, Millner's original conception of his employer's character had
+suffered extensive modification; but no final outline had replaced the
+first conjectural image. The two years spent in Mr. Spence's service
+had produced too many contradictory impressions to be fitted into any
+definite pattern; and the chief lesson Millner had learned from them
+was that life was less of an exact science, and character a more
+incalculable element, than he had been taught in the schools. In the
+light of this revised impression, his own footing seemed less secure
+than he had imagined, and the rungs of the ladder he was climbing
+more slippery than they had looked from below. He was not without
+the reassuring sense of having made himself, in certain small ways,
+necessary to Mr. Spence; and this conviction was confirmed by Draper's
+reiterated assurance of his father's appreciation. But Millner had begun
+to suspect that one might be necessary to Mr. Spence one day, and
+a superfluity, if not an obstacle, the next; and that it would take
+superhuman astuteness to foresee how and when the change would occur.
+Every fluctuation of the great man's mood was therefore anxiously noted
+by the young meteorologist in his service; and this observer's vigilance
+was now strained to the utmost by the little cloud, no bigger than a
+man's hand, adumbrated by the banker's unpunctuality.
+
+When Mr. Spence finally appeared, his aspect did not tend to dissipate
+the cloud. He wore what Millner had learned to call his "back-door
+face": a blank barred countenance, in which only an occasional twitch of
+the lids behind his glasses suggested that some one was on the watch.
+In this mood Mr. Spence usually seemed unconscious of his secretary's
+presence, or aware of it only as an arm terminating in a pen. Millner,
+accustomed on such occasions to exist merely as a function, sat waiting
+for the click of the spring that should set him in action; but the
+pressure not being applied, he finally hazarded: "Are we to go on with
+the _Investigator_, sir?"
+
+Mr. Spence, who had been pacing up and down between the desk and the
+fireplace, threw himself into his usual seat at Millner's elbow.
+
+"I don't understand this new notion of Draper's," he said abruptly.
+"Where's he got it from? No one ever learned irreligion in my
+household."
+
+He turned his eyes on Millner, who had the sense of being scrutinized
+through a ground-glass window which left him visible while it concealed
+his observer. The young man let his pen describe two or three vague
+patterns on the blank sheet before him.
+
+"Draper has ideas--" he risked at last.
+
+Mr. Spence looked hard at him. "That's all right," he said. "I want
+my son to have everything. But what's the point of mixing up ideas and
+principles? I've seen fellows who did that, and they were generally
+trying to borrow five dollars to get away from the sheriff. What's all
+this talk about goodness? Goodness isn't an idea. It's a fact. It's as
+solid as a business proposition. And it's Draper's duty, as the son of a
+wealthy man, and the prospective steward of a great fortune, to elevate
+the standards of other young men--of young men who haven't had his
+opportunities. The rich ought to preach contentment, and to set the
+example themselves. We have our cares, but we ought to conceal them. We
+ought to be cheerful, and accept things as they are--not go about sowing
+dissent and restlessness. What has Draper got to give these boys in his
+Bible Class, that's so much better than what he wants to take from them?
+That's the question I'd like to have answered?"
+
+Mr. Spence, carried away by his own eloquence, had removed his
+_pince-nez_ and was twirling it about his extended fore-finger with the
+gesture habitual to him when he spoke in public. After a pause, he went
+on, with a drop to the level of private intercourse: "I tell you this
+because I know you have a good deal of influence with Draper. He has a
+high opinion of your brains. But you're a practical fellow, and you must
+see what I mean. Try to make Draper see it. Make him understand how it
+looks to have him drop his Bible Class just at this particular time.
+It was his own choice to take up religious teaching among young men. He
+began with our office-boys, and then the work spread and was blessed.
+I was almost alarmed, at one time, at the way it took hold of him: when
+the papers began to talk about him as a formative influence I was afraid
+he'd lose his head and go into the church. Luckily he tried University
+Settlement first; but just as I thought he was settling down to that, he
+took to worrying about the Higher Criticism, and saying he couldn't go
+on teaching fairy-tales as history. I can't see that any good ever came
+of criticizing what our parents believed, and it's a queer time for
+Draper to criticize _my_ belief just as I'm backing it to the extent of
+five millions."
+
+Millner remained silent; and, as though his silence were an argument,
+Mr. Spence continued combatively: "Draper's always talking about some
+distinction between religion and morality. I don't understand what he
+means. I got my morals out of the Bible, and I guess there's enough left
+in it for Draper. If religion won't make a man moral, I don't see why
+irreligion should. And he talks about using his mind--well, can't he use
+that in Wall Street? A man can get a good deal farther in life watching
+the market than picking holes in Genesis; and he can do more good too.
+There's a time for everything; and Draper seems to me to have mixed up
+week-days with Sunday."
+
+Mr. Spence replaced his eye-glasses, and stretching his hand to the
+silver box at his elbow, extracted from it one of the long cigars
+sheathed in gold-leaf which were reserved for his private consumption.
+The secretary hastened to tender him a match, and for a moment he puffed
+in silence. When he spoke again it was in a different note.
+
+"I've got about all the bother I can handle just now, without this
+nonsense of Draper's. That was one of the Trustees of the College with
+me. It seems the _Flashlight_ has been trying to stir up a fuss--" Mr.
+Spence paused, and turned his _pince-nez_ on his secretary. "You haven't
+heard from them?" he asked.
+
+"From the _Flashlight?_ No." Millner's surprise was genuine.
+
+He detected a gleam of relief behind Mr. Spence's glasses. "It may be
+just malicious talk. That's the worst of good works; they bring out all
+the meanness in human nature. And then there are always women mixed up
+in them, and there never was a woman yet who understood the difference
+between philanthropy and business." He drew again at his cigar, and
+then, with an unwonted movement, leaned forward and mechanically pushed
+the box toward Millner. "Help yourself," he said.
+
+Millner, as mechanically, took one of the virginally cinctured cigars,
+and began to undo its wrappings. It was the first time he had ever been
+privileged to detach that golden girdle, and nothing could have given
+him a better measure of the importance of the situation, and of the
+degree to which he was apparently involved in it. "You remember that
+San Pablo rubber business? That's what they've been raking up," said Mr.
+Spence abruptly.
+
+Millner paused in the act of striking a match. Then, with an appreciable
+effort of the will, he completed the gesture, applied the flame to his
+cigar, and took a long inhalation. The cigar was certainly delicious.
+
+Mr. Spence, drawing a little closer, leaned forward and touched him on
+the arm. The touch caused Millner to turn his head, and for an instant
+the glance of the two men crossed at short range. Millner was conscious,
+first, of a nearer view than he had ever had of his employer's face,
+and of its vaguely suggesting a seamed sandstone head, the kind of thing
+that lies in a corner in the court of a museum, and in which only the
+round enamelled eyes have resisted the wear of time. His next feeling
+was that he had now reached the moment to which the offer of the cigar
+had been a prelude. He had always known that, sooner or later, such a
+moment would come; all his life, in a sense, had been a preparation for
+it. But in entering Mr. Spence's service he had not foreseen that it
+would present itself in this form. He had seen himself consciously
+guiding that gentleman up to the moment, rather than being thrust into
+it by a stronger hand. And his first act of reflection was the resolve
+that, in the end, his hand should prove the stronger of the two. This
+was followed, almost immediately, by the idea that to be stronger than
+Mr. Spence's it would have to be very strong indeed. It was odd that he
+should feel this, since--as far as verbal communication went--it was Mr.
+Spence who was asking for his support. In a theoretical statement of the
+case the banker would have figured as being at Millner's mercy; but one
+of the queerest things about experience was the way it made light
+of theory. Millner felt now as though he were being crushed by some
+inexorable engine of which he had been playing with the lever. ...
+
+He had always been intensely interested in observing his own reactions,
+and had regarded this faculty of self-detachment as of immense advantage
+in such a career as he had planned. He felt this still, even in the act
+of noting his own bewilderment--felt it the more in contrast to the odd
+unconsciousness of Mr. Spence's attitude, of the incredible candour of
+his self-abasement and self-abandonment. It was clear that Mr. Spence
+was not troubled by the repercussion of his actions in the consciousness
+of others; and this looked like a weakness--unless it were, instead, a
+great strength. ...
+
+Through the hum of these swarming thoughts Mr. Spence's voice was going
+on. "That's the only rag of proof they've got; and they got it by one
+of those nasty accidents that nobody can guard against. I don't care
+how conscientiously a man attends to business, he can't always protect
+himself against meddlesome people. I don't pretend to know how the
+letter came into their hands; but they've got it; and they mean to use
+it--and they mean to say that you wrote it for me, and that you knew
+what it was about when you wrote it. ... They'll probably be after you
+tomorrow--"
+
+Mr. Spence, restoring his cigar to his lips, puffed at it slowly. In
+the pause that followed there was an instant during which the universe
+seemed to Hugh Millner like a sounding-board bent above his single
+consciousness. If he spoke, what thunders would be sent back to him from
+that intently listening vastness?
+
+"You see?" said Mr. Spence.
+
+The universal ear bent closer, as if to catch the least articulation
+of Millner's narrowed lips; but when he opened them it was merely to
+re-insert his cigar, and for a short space nothing passed between the
+two men but an exchange of smoke-rings.
+
+"What do you mean to do? There's the point," Mr. Spence at length sent
+through the rings.
+
+Oh, yes, the point was there, as distinctly before Millner as the tip of
+his expensive cigar: he had seen it coming quite as soon as Mr. Spence.
+He knew that fate was handing him an ultimatum; but the sense of the
+formidable echo which his least answer would rouse kept him doggedly,
+and almost helplessly, silent. To let Mr. Spence talk on as long as
+possible was no doubt the best way of gaining time; but Millner knew
+that his silence was really due to his dread of the echo. Suddenly,
+however, in a reaction of impatience at his own indecision, he began to
+speak.
+
+The sound of his voice cleared his mind and strengthened his resolve.
+It was odd how the word seemed to shape the act, though one knew how
+ancillary it really was. As he talked, it was as if the globe had
+swung around, and he himself were upright on its axis, with Mr. Spence
+underneath, on his head. Through the ensuing interchange of concise and
+rapid speech there sounded in Millner's ears the refrain to which he had
+walked down Fifth Avenue after his first talk with Mr. Spence: "It's too
+easy--it's too easy--it's too easy." Yes, it was even easier than he
+had expected. His sensation was that of the skilful carver who feels his
+good blade sink into a tender joint.
+
+As he went on talking, this surprised sense of mastery was like wine in
+his veins. Mr. Spence was at his mercy, after all--that was what it came
+to; but this new view of the case did not lessen Millner's sense of Mr.
+Spence's strength, it merely revealed to him his own superiority. Mr.
+Spence was even stronger than he had suspected. There could be no better
+proof of that than his faith in Millner's power to grasp the situation,
+and his tacit recognition of the young man's right to make the most of
+it. Millner felt that Mr. Spence would have despised him even more for
+not using his advantage than for not seeing it; and this homage to
+his capacity nerved him to greater alertness, and made the concluding
+moments of their talk as physically exhilarating as some hotly contested
+game.
+
+When the conclusion was reached, and Millner stood at the goal, the
+golden trophy in his grasp, his first conscious thought was one of
+regret that the struggle was over. He would have liked to prolong their
+talk for the purely aesthetic pleasure of making Mr. Spence lose time,
+and, better still, of making him forget that he was losing it. The sense
+of advantage that the situation conferred was so great that when Mr.
+Spence rose it was as if Millner were dismissing him, and when he
+reached his hand toward the cigar-box it seemed to be one of Millner's
+cigars that he was taking.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+THERE had been only one condition attached to the transaction: Millner
+was to speak to Draper about the Bible Class.
+
+The condition was easy to fulfil. Millner was confident of his power to
+deflect his young friend's purpose; and he knew the opportunity would be
+given him before the day was over. His professional duties despatched,
+he had only to go up to his room to wait. Draper nearly always looked
+in on him for a moment before dinner: it was the hour most propitious to
+their elliptic interchange of words and silences.
+
+Meanwhile, the waiting was an occupation in itself. Millner looked about
+his room with new eyes. Since the first thrill of initiation into its
+complicated comforts--the shower-bath, the telephone, the many-jointed
+reading-lamp and the vast mirrored presses through which he was always
+hunting his scant outfit--Millner's room had interested him no more than
+a railway-carriage in which he might have been travelling. But now
+it had acquired a sort of historic significance as the witness of the
+astounding change in his fate. It was Corsica, it was Brienne--it was
+the kind of spot that posterity might yet mark with a tablet. Then
+he reflected that he should soon be leaving it, and the lustre of its
+monumental mahogany was veiled in pathos. Why indeed should he linger on
+in bondage? He perceived with a certain surprise that the only thing he
+should regret would be leaving Draper. ...
+
+It was odd, it was inconsequent, it was almost exasperating, that such
+a regret should obscure his triumph. Why in the world should he suddenly
+take to regretting Draper? If there were any logic in human likings,
+it should be to Mr. Spence that he inclined. Draper, dear lad, had the
+illusion of an "intellectual sympathy" between them; but that, Millner
+knew, was an affair of reading and not of character. Draper's temerities
+would always be of that kind; whereas his own--well, his own, put to the
+proof, had now definitely classed him with Mr. Spence rather than with
+Mr. Spence's son. It was a consequence of this new condition--of his
+having thus distinctly and irrevocably classed himself--that, when
+Draper at length brought upon the scene his shy shamble and his wistful
+smile, Millner, for the first time, had to steel himself against them
+instead of yielding to their charm.
+
+In the new order upon which he had entered, one principle of the old
+survived: the point of honour between allies. And Millner had promised
+Mr. Spence to speak to Draper about his Bible Class. ...
+
+Draper, thrown back in his chair, and swinging a loose leg across a
+meagre knee, listened with his habitual gravity. His downcast eyes
+seemed to pursue the vision which Millner's words evoked; and the words,
+to their speaker, took on a new sound as that candid consciousness
+refracted them.
+
+"You know, dear boy, I perfectly see your father's point. It's naturally
+distressing to him, at this particular time, to have any hint of civil
+war leak out--"
+
+Draper sat upright, laying his lank legs knee to knee.
+
+"That's it, then? I thought that was it!"
+
+Millner raised a surprised glance. "_ What's_ it?"
+
+"That it should be at this particular time--"
+
+"Why, naturally, as I say! Just as he's making, as it were, his public
+profession of faith. You know, to men like your father convictions are
+irreducible elements--they can't be split up, and differently combined.
+And your exegetical scruples seem to him to strike at the very root of
+his convictions."
+
+Draper pulled himself to his feet and shuffled across the room. Then he
+turned about, and stood before his friend.
+
+"Is it that--or is it this?" he said; and with the word he drew a letter
+from his pocket and proffered it silently to Millner.
+
+The latter, as he unfolded it, was first aware of an intense surprise at
+the young man's abruptness of tone and gesture. Usually Draper fluttered
+long about his point before making it; and his sudden movement seemed as
+mechanical as the impulsion conveyed by some strong spring. The spring,
+of course, was in the letter; and to it Millner turned his startled
+glance, feeling the while that, by some curious cleavage of perception,
+he was continuing to watch Draper while he read.
+
+"Oh, the beasts!" he cried.
+
+He and Draper were face to face across the sheet which had dropped
+between them. The youth's features were tightened by a smile that was
+like the ligature of a wound. He looked white and withered.
+
+"Ah--you knew, then?"
+
+Millner sat still, and after a moment Draper turned from him, walked
+to the hearth, and leaned against the chimney, propping his chin on his
+hands. Millner, his head thrown back, stared up at the ceiling, which
+had suddenly become to him the image of the universal sounding-board
+hanging over his consciousness.
+
+"You knew, then?" Draper repeated.
+
+Millner remained silent. He had perceived, with the surprise of a
+mathematician working out a new problem, that the lie which Mr. Spence
+had just bought of him was exactly the one gift he could give of his own
+free will to Mr. Spence's son. This discovery gave the world a strange
+new topsy-turvyness, and set Millner's theories spinning about his brain
+like the cabin furniture of a tossing ship.
+
+"You _knew_," said Draper, in a tone of quiet affirmation.
+
+Millner righted himself, and grasped the arms of his chair as if that
+too were reeling. "About this blackguardly charge?"
+
+Draper was studying him intently. "What does it matter if it's
+blackguardly?"
+
+"Matter--?" Millner stammered.
+
+"It's that, of course, in any case. But the point is whether it's true
+or not." Draper bent down, and picking up the crumpled letter, smoothed
+it out between his fingers. "The point, is, whether my father, when he
+was publicly denouncing the peonage abuses on the San Pablo plantations
+over a year ago, had actually sold out his stock, as he announced at the
+time; or whether, as they say here--how do they put it?--he had simply
+transferred it to a dummy till the scandal should blow over, and has
+meanwhile gone on drawing his forty per cent interest on five thousand
+shares? There's the point."
+
+Millner had never before heard his young friend put a case with such
+unadorned precision. His language was like that of Mr. Spence making
+a statement to a committee meeting; and the resemblance to his father
+flashed out with ironic incongruity.
+
+"You see why I've brought this letter to you--I couldn't go to _him_
+with it!" Draper's voice faltered, and the resemblance vanished as
+suddenly as it had appeared.
+
+"No; you couldn't go to him with it," said Millner slowly.
+
+"And since they say here that _you_ know: that they've got your letter
+proving it--" The muscles of Draper's face quivered as if a blinding
+light had been swept over it. "For God's sake, Millner--it's all right?"
+
+"It's all right," said Millner, rising to his feet.
+
+Draper caught him by the wrist. "You're sure--you're absolutely sure?"
+
+"Sure. They know they've got nothing to go on."
+
+Draper fell back a step and looked almost sternly at his friend. "You
+know that's not what I mean. I don't care a straw what they think
+they've got to go on. I want to know if my father's all right. If he is,
+they can say what they please."
+
+Millner, again, felt himself under the concentrated scrutiny of the
+ceiling. "Of course, of course. I understand."
+
+"You understand? Then why don't you answer?"
+
+Millner looked compassionately at the boy's struggling face. Decidedly,
+the battle was to the strong, and he was not sorry to be on the side of
+the legions. But Draper's pain was as awkward as a material obstacle, as
+something that one stumbled over in a race.
+
+"You know what I'm driving at, Millner." Again Mr. Spence's
+committee-meeting tone sounded oddly through his son's strained voice.
+"If my father's so awfully upset about my giving up my Bible Class, and
+letting it be known that I do so on conscientious grounds, is it because
+he's afraid it may be considered a criticism on something _he_ has done
+which--which won't bear the test of the doctrines he believes in?"
+
+Draper, with the last question, squared himself in front of Millner, as
+if suspecting that the latter meant to evade it by flight. But Millner
+had never felt more disposed to stand his ground than at that moment.
+
+"No--by Jove, no! It's not _that_." His relief almost escaped him in a
+cry, as he lifted his head to give back Draper's look.
+
+"On your honour?" the other passionately pressed him.
+
+"Oh, on anybody's you like--on _yours!_" Millner could hardly restrain
+a laugh of relief. It was vertiginous to find himself spared, after all,
+the need of an altruistic lie: he perceived that they were the kind he
+least liked.
+
+Draper took a deep breath. "You don't--Millner, a lot depends on
+this--you don't really think my father has any ulterior motive?"
+
+"I think he has none but his horror of seeing you go straight to
+perdition!"
+
+They looked at each other again, and Draper's tension was suddenly
+relieved by a free boyish laugh. "It's his convictions--it's just his
+funny old convictions?"
+
+"It's that, and nothing else on earth!"
+
+Draper turned back to the arm-chair he had left, and let his narrow
+figure sink down into it as into a bath. Then he looked over at Millner
+with a smile. "I can see that I've been worrying him horribly. So he
+really thinks I'm on the road to perdition? Of course you can fancy what
+a sick minute I had when I thought it might be this other reason--the
+damnable insinuation in this letter." Draper crumpled the paper in his
+hand, and leaned forward to toss it into the coals of the grate. "I
+ought to have known better, of course. I ought to have remembered that,
+as you say, my father can't conceive how conduct may be independent of
+creed. That's where I was stupid--and rather base. But that letter made
+me dizzy--I couldn't think. Even now I can't very clearly. I'm not sure
+what _my_ convictions require of me: they seem to me so much less to be
+considered than his! When I've done half the good to people that he
+has, it will be time enough to begin attacking their beliefs.
+Meanwhile--meanwhile I can't touch his. ..." Draper leaned forward,
+stretching his lank arms along his knees. His face was as clear as a
+spring sky. "I _won't_ touch them, Millner--Go and tell him so. ..."
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+In the study a half hour later Mr. Spence, watch in hand, was doling
+out his minutes again. The peril conjured, he had recovered his dominion
+over time. He turned his commanding eye-glasses on Millner.
+
+"It's all settled, then? Tell Draper I'm sorry not to see him
+again to-night--but I'm to speak at the dinner of the Legal Relief
+Association, and I'm due there in five minutes. You and he dine alone
+here, I suppose? Tell him I appreciate what he's done. Some day he'll
+see that to leave the world better than we find it is the best we can
+hope to do. (You've finished the notes for the _Investigator?_ Be sure
+you don't forget that phrase.) Well, good evening: that's all, I think."
+
+Smooth and compact in his glossy evening clothes, Mr. Spence advanced
+toward the study door; but as he reached it, his secretary stood there
+before him.
+
+"It's not quite all, Mr. Spence."
+
+Mr. Spence turned on him a look in which impatience was faintly tinged
+with apprehension. "What else is there? It's two and a half minutes to
+eight."
+
+Millner stood his ground. "It won't take longer than that. I want to
+tell you that, if you can conveniently replace me, I'd like--there are
+reasons why I shall have to leave you."
+
+Millner was conscious of reddening as he spoke. His redness deepened
+under Mr. Spence's dispassionate scrutiny. He saw at once that the
+banker was not surprised at his announcement.
+
+"Well, I suppose that's natural enough. You'll want to make a start for
+yourself now. Only, of course, for the sake of appearances--"
+
+"Oh, certainly," Millner hastily agreed.
+
+"Well, then: is that all?" Mr. Spence repeated.
+
+"Nearly." Millner paused, as if in search of an appropriate formula.
+But after a moment he gave up the search, and pulled from his pocket an
+envelope which he held out to his employer. "I merely want to give this
+back."
+
+The hand which Mr. Spence had extended dropped to his side, and his
+sand-coloured face grew chalky. "Give it back?" His voice was as thick
+as Millner's. "What's happened? Is the bargain off?"
+
+"Oh, no. I've given you my word."
+
+"Your word?" Mr. Spence lowered at him. "I'd like to know what that's
+worth!"
+
+Millner continued to hold out the envelope. "You do know, now. It's
+worth _that_. It's worth my place."
+
+Mr. Spence, standing motionless before him, hesitated for an appreciable
+space of time. His lips parted once or twice under their square-clipped
+stubble, and at last emitted: "How much more do you want?"
+
+Millner broke into a laugh. "Oh, I've got all I want--all and more!"
+
+"What--from the others? Are you crazy?"
+
+"No, you are," said Millner with a sudden recovery of composure. "But
+you're safe--you're as safe as you'll ever be. Only I don't care to take
+this for making you so."
+
+Mr. Spence slowly moistened his lips with his tongue, and removing his
+_pince-nez_, took a long hard look at Millner.
+
+"I don't understand. What other guarantee have I got?"
+
+"That I mean what I say?" Millner glanced past the banker's figure at
+his rich densely coloured background of Spanish leather and mahogany. He
+remembered that it was from this very threshold that he had first seen
+Mr. Spence's son.
+
+"What guarantee? You've got Draper!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+AFTERWARD
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Oh, there _is_ one, of course, but you'll never know it."
+
+The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June
+garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent
+significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps
+to be brought into the library.
+
+The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at
+tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which
+the library in question was the central, the pivotal "feature." Mary
+Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the
+southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England,
+carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully
+solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected,
+almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that
+she threw it out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to
+Hugo's cousins, and you can get it for a song."
+
+The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
+remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes,
+and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading in its
+favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic
+drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual
+architectural felicities.
+
+"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
+thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two,
+had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience' would make me
+think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered,
+and set up again." And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous
+precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe
+that the house their cousin recommended was _really_ Tudor till they
+learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was
+literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable
+uncertainty of the water-supply.
+
+"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued to exult
+as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but
+he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse to distrust:
+"And the ghost? You've been concealing from us the fact that there is no
+ghost!"
+
+Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh,
+being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a
+sudden flatness of tone in Alida's answering hilarity.
+
+"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."
+
+"Yes, yes; but that won't do. I don't want to have to drive ten miles
+to see somebody else's ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. _Is_
+there a ghost at Lyng?"
+
+His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had
+flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there _is_ one, of course, but you'll
+never know it."
+
+"Never know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world constitutes
+a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"
+
+"I can't say. But that's the story."
+
+"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"
+
+"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."
+
+"Till afterward?"
+
+"Not till long, long afterward."
+
+"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn't
+its _signalement_ been handed down in the family? How has it managed to
+preserve its incognito?"
+
+Alida could only shake her head. "Don't ask me. But it has."
+
+"And then suddenly--" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of
+divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self, _'That
+was_ it?'"
+
+She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question
+fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same
+surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils. "I suppose so. One just has
+to wait."
+
+"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who can
+only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than that, Mary?"
+
+But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for
+within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were
+established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point of
+planning it out in all its daily details had actually begun for them.
+
+It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded
+fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond
+the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude: it
+was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had
+endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the
+Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering
+till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious
+windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession
+of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant
+their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
+only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and
+gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the
+production of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of
+Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too
+sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge
+deep enough into the past.
+
+Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
+remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But
+to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole
+incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they put it--that
+for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went
+so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a
+difference.
+
+"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives such
+depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They've
+been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful."
+
+The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house,
+hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of
+commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large
+nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in
+its special sense--the sense of having been for centuries a deep, dim
+reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid
+order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into
+the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the
+green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence
+sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion,
+and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
+intenser memory.
+
+The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when,
+waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and
+stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after
+luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of
+late that he preferred to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and,
+in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven
+to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
+afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning's
+work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined
+it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been
+there in his engineering days. Then he had often looked fagged to the
+verge of illness, but the native demon of "worry" had never branded his
+brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her--the introduction, and
+a synopsis of the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession
+of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.
+
+The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done
+with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible
+element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then?
+But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown
+robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only within a week that she
+had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless in his
+absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were _she_ who
+had a secret to keep from him!
+
+The thought that there _was_ a secret somewhere between them struck her
+with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the
+dim, long room.
+
+"Can it be the house?" she mused.
+
+The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be
+piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of
+velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books,
+the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.
+
+"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.
+
+The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in the
+banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded
+as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the
+tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few
+rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the
+villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had apparently
+never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it,
+and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their
+profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
+good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.
+
+"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
+beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly concluded.
+
+"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so much
+that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as _the_
+ghost." And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out
+of their references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly
+unaware of the loss.
+
+Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity
+revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense gradually
+acquired through close daily contact with the scene of the lurking
+mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the
+ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own
+past; and if one could only get into close enough communion with the
+house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on
+one's own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary hours in this very
+room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband _had_
+acquired it already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of
+whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of
+the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts
+one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-breeding as to
+name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her.
+"What, after all, except for the fun of the _frisson_," she reflected,
+"would he really care for any of their old ghosts?" And thence she was
+thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's
+greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular
+bearing on the case, since, when one _did_ see a ghost at Lyng, one did
+not know it.
+
+"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned
+_had_ seen one when they first came, and had known only within the last
+week what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of the
+hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the early days of their
+tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay confusion of unpacking,
+settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote
+corners of the house as treasure after treasure of their habitation
+revealed itself to them. It was in this particular connection that she
+presently recalled a certain soft afternoon of the previous October,
+when, passing from the first rapturous flurry of exploration to a
+detailed inspection of the old house, she had pressed (like a novel
+heroine) a panel that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs
+leading to an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the roof which,
+from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
+practised feet to scale.
+
+The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down
+to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her discovery.
+She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge, he had passed
+his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-line
+of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque
+of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the
+lawn.
+
+"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about within
+his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long,
+satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled court, the squat lions
+on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the highroad under the
+downs.
+
+It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had
+felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her turn to
+glance at him.
+
+Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow
+of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following
+his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in loose, grayish
+clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering down the lime-avenue
+to the court with the tentative gait of a stranger seeking his way. Her
+short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness
+and grayness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of
+the figure or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
+enough to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash down the
+twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for the descent.
+
+A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch
+at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow him down
+more cautiously; and when she had reached the attic landing she paused
+again for a less definite reason, leaning over the oak banister to
+strain her eyes through the silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths
+below. She lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard
+the closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the
+shallow flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.
+
+The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
+hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and after
+listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she quickly crossed
+the threshold, and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers
+on his desk.
+
+He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the
+shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she
+fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.
+
+"What was it? Who was it?" she asked.
+
+"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.
+
+"The man we saw coming toward the house." Boyne shrugged his shoulders.
+"So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the interval. What do
+you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before sunset?"
+
+That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing,
+had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first
+vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing
+ever since they had first seen its bare spine heaving itself above the
+low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incident's
+having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept
+it stored away in the unconscious fold of association from which it now
+emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment
+there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash
+himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the
+period when they were always on the watch for one or the other of the
+specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for them,
+and dashing out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And
+certainly in the distance the gray figure had looked like Peters.
+
+Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's
+explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his
+face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious?
+Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with that
+authority on the subject of the stable-drains, had the failure to find
+him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one
+of these considerations had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the
+promptness with which they now marshaled themselves at her summons, she
+had a sudden sense that they must all along have been there, waiting
+their hour.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library was
+now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light
+the outer world still held.
+
+As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in
+the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper
+gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her
+heart thumped to the thought, "It's the ghost!"
+
+She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of
+whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from the roof
+was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as _not_
+having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the
+disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the ambiguous
+figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak
+sight as her husband's; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered,
+with the confession of her folly.
+
+"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold, "but I
+never _can_ remember!"
+
+"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.
+
+"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."
+
+Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response
+in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face.
+
+"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable interval.
+
+"Why, I actually took _you_ for it, my dear, in my mad determination to
+spot it!"
+
+"Me--just now?" His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a
+faint echo of her laugh. "Really, dearest, you'd better give it up, if
+that's the best you can do."
+
+"Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have _you?"_ she asked, turning round
+on him abruptly.
+
+The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light
+struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she presented.
+
+"Have _you?"_ Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared
+on her errand of illumination.
+
+"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp
+stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.
+
+"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.
+
+"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is that
+there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long afterward."
+
+He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a
+pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands,
+he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you any idea _how long?"_
+
+Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat
+she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was darkly
+projected against the circle of lamplight.
+
+"No; none. Have _you_" she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an
+added keenness of intention.
+
+Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned
+back with it toward the lamp.
+
+"Lord, no! I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of
+impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"
+
+"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impulse to add, "What makes
+you ask?" was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-maid with tea
+and a second lamp.
+
+With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic
+office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of
+something mutely imminent which had darkened her solitary afternoon. For
+a few moments she gave herself silently to the details of her task, and
+when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of bewilderment
+by the change in her husband's face. He had seated himself near the
+farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it
+something he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point
+of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The
+longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The
+lines of painful tension had vanished, and such traces of fatigue as
+lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort.
+He glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.
+
+"I'm dying for my tea, you know; and here's a letter for you," he said.
+
+She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she proffered
+him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with the languid gesture
+of the reader whose interests are all inclosed in the circle of one
+cherished presence.
+
+Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the letter
+falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her husband a long
+newspaper clipping.
+
+"Ned! What's this? What does it mean?"
+
+He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before
+she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied
+each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage, across the space
+between her chair and his desk.
+
+"What's what? You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length, moving
+toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of
+apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding,
+but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of his
+feeling himself invisibly surrounded.
+
+Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.
+
+"This article--from the 'Waukesha Sentinel'--that a man named Elwell has
+brought suit against you--that there was something wrong about the Blue
+Star Mine. I can't understand more than half."
+
+They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment,
+she saw that her words had the almost immediate effect of dissipating
+the strained watchfulness of his look.
+
+"Oh, _that_!" He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with
+the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar. "What's
+the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you'd got bad news."
+
+She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under
+the reassuring touch of his composure.
+
+"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"
+
+"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."
+
+"But what _is_ it? I don't understand. What does this man accuse you
+of?"
+
+"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar." Boyne had tossed the
+clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair near
+the fire. "Do you want to hear the story? It's not particularly
+interesting--just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star."
+
+"But who is this Elwell? I don't know the name."
+
+"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you all
+about him at the time."
+
+"I daresay. I must have forgotten." Vainly she strained back among her
+memories. "But if you helped him, why does he make this return?"
+
+"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over.
+It's all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing
+bored you."
+
+His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the
+American wife's detachment from her husband's professional interests,
+but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention
+on Boyne's report of the transactions in which his varied interests
+involved him. Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community
+where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
+efforts as arduous as her husband's professional labors, such brief
+leisure as they could command should be used as an escape from immediate
+preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once
+or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle
+about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto
+such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of
+an active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little
+to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her
+happiness was built.
+
+She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure
+of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her
+reassurance.
+
+"But doesn't this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about
+it?"
+
+He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at first
+because it _did_ worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it's all ancient
+history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of
+the 'Sentinel.'"
+
+She felt a quick thrill of relief. "You mean it's over? He's lost his
+case?"
+
+There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply. "The suit's been
+withdrawn--that's all."
+
+But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of
+being too easily put off. "Withdrawn because he saw he had no chance?"
+
+"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.
+
+She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her
+thoughts.
+
+"How long ago was it withdrawn?"
+
+He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. "I've
+just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."
+
+"Just now--in one of your letters?"
+
+"Yes; in one of my letters."
+
+She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of
+waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had placed
+himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm
+about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly,
+drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met the smiling clearness of his
+eyes.
+
+"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the flood of
+her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never was righter!" he
+laughed back at her, holding her close.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the
+next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery
+of her sense of security.
+
+It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it
+accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her
+from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the
+urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in
+some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the previous
+day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper
+article,--as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return
+upon the past,--had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting
+moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband's
+affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him
+instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith
+had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and
+suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and
+unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the cross-examination
+to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of
+her lurking doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.
+
+It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that surprised
+her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her
+daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging
+herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet
+face, where he bent, pipe in his mouth, above his papers, and now she
+had her own morning's task to perform. The task involved on such charmed
+winter days almost as much delighted loitering about the different
+quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and
+borders. There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,
+such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place,
+without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter months
+were all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her
+recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar
+zest to her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to
+the kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated
+patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about
+the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something wrong about
+the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from
+Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of
+the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses,
+among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned
+exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--she learned that the
+great man had not arrived, and the day being too rare to waste in an
+artificial atmosphere, she came out again and paced slowly along the
+springy turf of the bowling-green to the gardens behind the house. At
+their farther end rose a grass terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond
+and the yew hedges, a view of the long house-front, with its twisted
+chimney-stacks and the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in
+the pale gold moisture of the air.
+
+Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused,
+mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and hospitably smoking
+chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened
+on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had so deep a sense
+of her intimacy with it, such a conviction that its secrets were
+all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, "for one's good," so
+complete a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned's into the
+harmonious pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the
+sun.
+
+She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener,
+accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one figure was
+in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man, who, for reasons she
+could not on the spot have specified, did not remotely resemble her
+preconceived notion of an authority on hot-house boilers. The
+new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a
+gentleman--perhaps a traveler--desirous of having it immediately known
+that his intrusion is involuntary. The local fame of Lyng occasionally
+attracted the more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see
+the stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing
+it. But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she asked,
+in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his attitude: "Is
+there any one you wish to see?"
+
+"I came to see Mr. Boyne," he replied. His intonation, rather than his
+accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar note, looked
+at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his
+face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted gaze a look of
+seriousness, as of a person arriving "on business," and civilly but
+firmly aware of his rights.
+
+Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but she
+was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful of his having
+given any one the right to intrude on them.
+
+"Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?" she asked.
+
+He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.
+
+"Not exactly an appointment," he replied.
+
+"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't receive you
+now. Will you give me a message, or come back later?"
+
+The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would come
+back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of the house. As
+his figure receded down the walk between the yew hedges, Mary saw him
+pause and look up an instant at the peaceful house-front bathed in faint
+winter sunshine; and it struck her, with a tardy touch of compunction,
+that it would have been more humane to ask if he had come from a
+distance, and to offer, in that case, to inquire if her husband could
+receive him. But as the thought occurred to her he passed out of
+sight behind a pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was
+distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the bearded
+pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from Dorchester.
+
+The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues that
+they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his train, and
+beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed
+confabulation among the greenhouses. She was startled to find, when the
+colloquy ended, that it was nearly luncheon-time, and she half expected,
+as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to meet
+her. But she found no one in the court but an under-gardener raking
+the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she
+guessed Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.
+
+Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there,
+at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay
+to which the morning's conference had committed her. The knowledge that
+she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and
+somehow, in contrast to the vague apprehensions of the previous days, it
+now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as
+Ned had said, things in general had never been "righter."
+
+She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
+parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously worded
+inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their
+jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a
+state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an
+absent-minded assent.
+
+She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in rebuke
+of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps sounded down the
+passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall, and went
+to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn,
+disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed
+his normal measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses,
+the esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and
+Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.
+
+Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to
+discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room;
+but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her
+that he was not in the library.
+
+She turned back to the parlor-maid.
+
+"Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready."
+
+The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obeying
+orders and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of
+the injunction laid upon her. The struggle resulted in her saying
+doubtfully, "If you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne's not up-stairs."
+
+"Not in his room? Are you sure?"
+
+"I'm sure, Madam."
+
+Mary consulted the clock. "Where is he, then?"
+
+"He's gone out," Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has
+respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have
+first propounded.
+
+Mary's previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to
+the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that
+he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round
+to the court. She crossed the hall to the glass portal opening directly
+on the yew garden, but the parlor-maid, after another moment of inner
+conflict, decided to bring out recklessly, "Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne
+didn't go that way."
+
+Mary turned back. "Where _did_ he go? And when?"
+
+"He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam." It was a matter of
+principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.
+
+"Up the drive? At this hour?" Mary went to the door herself, and
+glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare limes. But
+its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering the
+house.
+
+"Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?" she asked.
+
+Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces
+of chaos.
+
+"No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman."
+
+"The gentleman? What gentleman?" Mary wheeled about, as if to front this
+new factor.
+
+"The gentleman who called, Madam," said Trimmle, resignedly.
+
+"When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!"
+
+Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult
+her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so
+unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached
+enough to note in Trimmle's eye the dawning defiance of the respectful
+subordinate who has been pressed too hard.
+
+"I couldn't exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn't let the
+gentleman in," she replied, with the air of magnanimously ignoring the
+irregularity of her mistress's course.
+
+"You didn't let him in?"
+
+"No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--"
+
+"Go and ask Agnes, then," Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her
+look of patient magnanimity. "Agnes would not know, Madam, for she had
+unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of the new lamp from
+town--" Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new
+lamp--"and so Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead."
+
+Mary looked again at the clock. "It's after two! Go and ask the
+kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word."
+
+She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought
+her there the kitchen-maid's statement that the gentleman had called
+about one o'clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with him without leaving
+any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller's name, for
+he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to
+her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.
+
+Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over,
+and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had
+deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne
+to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the
+difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had apparently
+obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne's
+experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and
+compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic
+acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne's withdrawal from business he
+had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the
+dispersed and agitated years, with their "stand-up" lunches and dinners
+rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he cultivated the last
+refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife's fancy
+for the unexpected; and declaring that to a delicate taste there were
+infinite gradations of pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.
+
+Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen,
+it was evident that all Boyne's precautions would sooner or later prove
+unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit
+by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him
+for part of the way.
+
+This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she went
+out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she
+walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she
+turned toward home, the early twilight was setting in.
+
+She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile,
+had probably returned from the station by the highroad, there was little
+likelihood of their meeting on the way. She felt sure, however, of his
+having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it
+herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly
+for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted
+precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the papers on
+her husband's desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in
+to call him to luncheon.
+
+Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had
+closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the
+long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound,
+to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her
+short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual
+presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from
+that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope
+and gave it a desperate pull.
+
+The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a
+lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the
+usual.
+
+"You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in," she said, to justify her ring.
+
+"Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in," said Trimmle, putting down
+the lamp.
+
+"Not in? You mean he's come back and gone out again?"
+
+"No, Madam. He's never been back."
+
+The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.
+
+"Not since he went out with--the gentleman?"
+
+"Not since he went out with the gentleman."
+
+"But who _was_ the gentleman?" Mary gasped out, with the sharp note of
+some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless noises.
+
+"That I couldn't say, Madam." Trimmle, standing there by the lamp,
+seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the
+same creeping shade of apprehension.
+
+"But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn't it the kitchen-maid who let him in?"
+
+"She doesn't know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded
+paper."
+
+Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating
+the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional
+formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of
+custom. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the
+folded paper.
+
+"But he must have a name! Where is the paper?"
+
+She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered documents
+that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an unfinished letter
+in her husband's hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped
+there at a sudden summons.
+
+"My dear Parvis,"--who was Parvis?--"I have just received your letter
+announcing Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is now no farther
+risk of trouble, it might be safer--"
+
+She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded
+paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript which
+had been swept together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a hurried or a
+startled gesture.
+
+"But the kitchen-maid _saw_ him. Send her here," she commanded,
+wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a
+solution.
+
+Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out
+of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling,
+Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her questions pat.
+
+The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood. But what had he
+said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was
+easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so
+little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling something on a
+bit of paper, had requested that it should at once be carried in to him.
+
+"Then you don't know what he wrote? You're not sure it _was_ his name?"
+
+The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written
+it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.
+
+"And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?"
+
+The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but she
+could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was
+opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her
+into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen
+together.
+
+"But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they
+went out of the house?"
+
+This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness,
+from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious
+circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the
+hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her, and had
+seen them go out of the front door together.
+
+"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what
+he looked like."
+
+But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became
+clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had been reached.
+The obligation of going to the front door to "show in" a visitor was
+in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had
+thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer
+out, after various panting efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was
+different-like, as you might say--"
+
+"Different? How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in
+the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, but
+temporarily lost under layers of subsequent impressions.
+
+"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a youngish
+face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation.
+But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge,
+it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own
+convictions. The stranger--the stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not
+thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he
+who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he,
+and why had Boyne obeyed his call?
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they
+had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly hard place to
+get lost in."
+
+_A confoundedly hard place to get lost in!_ That had been her husband's
+phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation
+sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing
+straits; now, with Boyne's name blazing from the walls of every town
+and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the
+country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact,
+populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself
+as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his
+wife's anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something
+they would never know!
+
+In the fortnight since Boyne's disappearance there had been no word of
+him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that
+raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one
+but the bewildered kitchen-maid had seen him leave the house, and no one
+else had seen "the gentleman" who accompanied him. All inquiries in the
+neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger's presence that
+day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either
+alone or in company, in any of the neighboring villages, or on the road
+across the downs, or at either of the local railway-stations. The sunny
+English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into
+Cimmerian night.
+
+Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its
+highest pressure, had ransacked her husband's papers for any trace of
+antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to
+her, that might throw a faint ray into the darkness. But if any such
+had existed in the background of Boyne's life, they had disappeared as
+completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his
+name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except--if it were
+indeed an exception--the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the
+act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter,
+read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded
+little enough for conjecture to feed on.
+
+"I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is now
+no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--" That was all. The "risk
+of trouble" was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which had
+apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his
+associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information
+conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote
+it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he
+had assured his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter
+itself declared that the plaintiff was dead. It took several weeks
+of exhaustive cabling to fix the identity of the "Parvis" to whom the
+fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these inquiries
+had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the
+Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern
+in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely as an
+acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable
+to divine with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.
+
+This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's feverish
+search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed.
+Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she
+had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of
+time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck
+from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as
+the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal
+gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No
+doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew
+less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded
+out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually
+bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.
+
+Even Mary Boyne's consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of
+velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture;
+but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were moments
+of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which
+leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself
+domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of
+the fixed conditions of life.
+
+These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a
+phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of life
+with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of
+civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard
+herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its
+motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat,
+an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and
+tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of
+the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of
+"change." Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by
+the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which
+he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary
+state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of
+anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was
+sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight
+as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold.
+She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his
+disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and her
+own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these
+alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was
+gone.
+
+No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would ever know.
+But the house _knew_; the library in which she spent her long, lonely
+evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted,
+here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused
+Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the
+books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the
+intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out
+into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation
+never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the
+garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its
+very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the
+incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary
+Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the
+futility of seeking to break it by any human means.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+"I don't say it _wasn't_ straight, yet don't say it _was_ straight. It
+was business."
+
+Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at
+the speaker.
+
+When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" on it had been
+brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been
+a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of
+Boyne's unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a
+small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it
+sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person to
+whom her husband's last known thought had been directed.
+
+Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a man who
+has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of his visit.
+He had "run over" to England on business, and finding himself in the
+neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying
+his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if the occasion offered,
+what she meant to do about Bob Elwell's family.
+
+The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's bosom.
+Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished
+phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at
+once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject.
+Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?
+
+"I know nothing--you must tell me," she faltered out; and her visitor
+thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused
+perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the
+whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money
+in that brilliant speculation at the cost of "getting ahead" of some one
+less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young
+Robert Elwell, who had "put him on" to the Blue Star scheme.
+
+Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance
+through his impartial glasses.
+
+"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he might
+have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It's the kind of thing
+that happens every day in business. I guess it's what the scientists
+call the survival of the fittest," said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased
+with the aptness of his analogy.
+
+Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to
+frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated
+her.
+
+"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?"
+
+Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. "Oh, no, I don't.
+I don't even say it wasn't straight." He glanced up and down the long
+lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the
+definition he sought. "I don't say it _wasn't_ straight, and yet I don't
+say it _was_ straight. It was business." After all, no definition in his
+category could be more comprehensive than that.
+
+Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the
+indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.
+
+"But Mr. Elwell's lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I
+suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice."
+
+"Oh, yes, they knew he hadn't a leg to stand on, technically. It was
+when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You
+see, he'd borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he
+was up a tree. That's why he shot himself when they told him he had no
+show."
+
+The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.
+
+"He shot himself? He killed himself because of _that?_"
+
+"Well, he didn't kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before
+he died." Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone
+grinding out its "record."
+
+"You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?"
+
+"Oh, he didn't have to try again," said Parvis, grimly.
+
+They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glass
+thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along
+her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.
+
+"But if you knew all this," she began at length, hardly able to force
+her voice above a whisper, "how is it that when I wrote you at the
+time of my husband's disappearance you said you didn't understand his
+letter?"
+
+Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. "Why, I didn't
+understand it--strictly speaking. And it wasn't the time to talk
+about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was
+withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find
+your husband."
+
+Mary continued to scrutinize him. "Then why are you telling me now?"
+
+Still Parvis did not hesitate. "Well, to begin with, I supposed you
+knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances of Elwell's
+death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter's been
+raked up again. And I thought, if you didn't know, you ought to."
+
+She remained silent, and he continued: "You see, it's only come out
+lately what a bad state Elwell's affairs were in. His wife's a proud
+woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and
+taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--something with the heart,
+I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after, and the
+children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help.
+That attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a
+subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most
+of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people
+began to wonder why--"
+
+Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. "Here," he continued,
+"here's an account of the whole thing from the 'Sentinel'--a little
+sensational, of course. But I guess you'd better look it over."
+
+He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering,
+as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of
+a clipping from the "Sentinel" had first shaken the depths of her
+security.
+
+As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring
+head-lines, "Widow of Boyne's Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid," ran down
+the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was
+her husband's, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to
+England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that
+stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the
+photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was
+said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.
+
+"I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--" she heard
+Parvis continue.
+
+She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait.
+It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with
+features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where
+had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart
+hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a cry.
+
+"This is the man--the man who came for my husband!"
+
+She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had
+slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending
+above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself, and
+reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.
+
+"It's the man! I should know him anywhere!" she cried in a voice that
+sounded in her own ears like a scream.
+
+Parvis's voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,
+fog-muffled windings.
+
+"Mrs. Boyne, you're not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a
+glass of water?"
+
+"No, no, no!" She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically
+clenching the newspaper. "I tell you, it's the man! I _know_ him! He
+spoke to me in the garden!"
+
+Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait.
+"It can't be, Mrs. Boyne. It's Robert Elwell."
+
+"Robert Elwell?" Her white stare seemed to travel into space. "Then it
+was Robert Elwell who came for him."
+
+"Came for Boyne? The day he went away?" Parvis's voice dropped as hers
+rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her
+gently back into her seat. "Why, Elwell was dead! Don't you remember?"
+
+Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was
+saying.
+
+"Don't you remember Boyne's unfinished letter to me--the one you found
+on his desk that day? It was written just after he'd heard of Elwell's
+death." She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's unemotional voice. "Surely
+you remember that!" he urged her.
+
+Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had
+died the day before her husband's disappearance; and this was Elwell's
+portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in
+the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The
+library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the
+man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter.
+Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom
+of half-forgotten words--words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at
+Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or
+had imagined that they might one day live there.
+
+"This was the man who spoke to me," she repeated.
+
+She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance
+under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration;
+but the edges of his lips were blue. "He thinks me mad; but I'm not
+mad," she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of
+justifying her strange affirmation.
+
+She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she
+could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking
+straight at Parvis: "Will you answer me one question, please? When was
+it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?"
+
+"When--when?" Parvis stammered.
+
+"Yes; the date. Please try to remember."
+
+She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. "I have a reason,"
+she insisted gently.
+
+"Yes, yes. Only I can't remember. About two months before, I should
+say."
+
+"I want the date," she repeated.
+
+Parvis picked up the newspaper. "We might see here," he said, still
+humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. "Here it is. Last
+October--the--"
+
+She caught the words from him. "The 20th, wasn't it?" With a sharp look
+at her, he verified. "Yes, the 20th. Then you _did_ know?"
+
+"I know now." Her white stare continued to travel past him. "Sunday, the
+20th--that was the day he came first."
+
+Parvis's voice was almost inaudible. "Came _here_ first?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You saw him twice, then?"
+
+"Yes, twice." She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. "He came first
+on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day
+we went up Meldon Steep for the first time." She felt a faint gasp
+of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have
+forgotten.
+
+Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.
+
+"We saw him from the roof," she went on. "He came down the lime-avenue
+toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My
+husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but
+there was no one there. He had vanished."
+
+"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.
+
+"Yes." Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. "I couldn't
+think what had happened. I see now. He _tried_ to come then; but he
+wasn't dead enough--he couldn't reach us. He had to wait for two months;
+and then he came back again--and Ned went with him."
+
+She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has
+successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her
+hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.
+
+"Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent him to
+this room!" she screamed out.
+
+She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling
+ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins,
+crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his
+touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard
+but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at
+Pangbourne.
+
+"You won't know till afterward," it said. "You won't know till long,
+long afterward."
+
+
+
+
+THE LETTERS
+
+
+I
+
+
+UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed in
+the cold spring sunshine. As she breasted the incline, she noticed the
+first waves of wistaria over courtyard railings and the high lights of
+new foliage against the walls of ivy-matted gardens; and she thought
+again, as she had thought a hundred times before, that she had never
+seen so beautiful a spring.
+
+She was on her way to the Deerings' house, in a street near the hilltop;
+and every step was dear and familiar to her. She went there five times
+a week to teach little Juliet Deering, the daughter of Mr. Vincent
+Deering, the distinguished American artist. Juliet had been her pupil
+for two years, and day after day, during that time, Lizzie West had
+mounted the hill in all weathers; sometimes with her umbrella bent
+against a driving rain, sometimes with her frail cotton parasol unfurled
+beneath a fiery sun, sometimes with the snow soaking through her patched
+boots or a bitter wind piercing her thin jacket, sometimes with the dust
+whirling about her and bleaching the flowers of the poor little hat that
+_had_ to "carry her through" till next summer.
+
+At first the ascent had seemed tedious enough, as dull as the trudge to
+her other lessons. Lizzie was not a heaven-sent teacher; she had no born
+zeal for her calling, and though she dealt kindly and dutifully with her
+pupils, she did not fly to them on winged feet. But one day something
+had happened to change the face of life, and since then the climb to the
+Deering house had seemed like a dream-flight up a heavenly stairway.
+
+Her heart beat faster as she remembered it--no longer in a tumult of
+fright and self-reproach, but softly, peacefully, as if brooding over a
+possession that none could take from her.
+
+It was on a day of the previous October that she had stopped, after
+Juliet's lesson, to ask if she might speak to Juliet's papa. One had
+always to apply to Mr. Deering if there was anything to be said about
+the lessons. Mrs. Deering lay on her lounge up-stairs, reading greasy
+relays of dog-eared novels, the choice of which she left to the cook
+and the nurse, who were always fetching them for her from the _cabinet
+de lecture;_ and it was understood in the house that she was not to be
+"bothered" about Juliet. Mr. Deering's interest in his daughter was
+fitful rather than consecutive; but at least he was approachable, and
+listened sympathetically, if a little absently, stroking his long, fair
+mustache, while Lizzie stated her difficulty or put in her plea for maps
+or copy-books.
+
+"Yes, yes--of course--whatever you think right," he would always assent,
+sometimes drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it
+carelessly on the table, or oftener saying, with his charming smile:
+"Get what you please, and just put it on your account, you know."
+
+But this time Lizzie had not come to ask for maps or copy-books, or
+even to hint, in crimson misery,--as once, poor soul! she had had
+to do,--that Mr. Deering had overlooked her last little account had
+probably not noticed that she had left it, some two months earlier, on
+a corner of his littered writing-table. That hour had been bad enough,
+though he had done his best to make it easy to carry it off gallantly
+and gaily; but this was infinitely worse. For she had come to complain
+of her pupil; to say that, much as she loved little Juliet, it was
+useless, unless Mr. Deering could "do something," to go on with the
+lessons.
+
+"It wouldn't be honest--I should be robbing you; I'm not sure that I
+haven't already," she half laughed, through mounting tears, as she
+put her case. Little Juliet would not work, would not obey. Her poor,
+little, drifting existence floated aimlessly between the kitchen and the
+_lingerie_, and all the groping tendrils of her curiosity were fastened
+about the doings of the backstairs.
+
+It was the same kind of curiosity that Mrs. Deering, overhead in her
+drug-scented room, lavished on her dog-eared novels and on the "society
+notes" of the morning paper; but since Juliet's horizon was not yet wide
+enough to embrace these loftier objects, her interest was centered in
+the anecdotes that Celeste and Suzanne brought back from the market
+and the library. That these were not always of an edifying nature the
+child's artless prattle too often betrayed; but unhappily they occupied
+her fancy to the complete exclusion of such nourishing items as dates
+and dynasties, and the sources of the principal European rivers.
+
+At length the crisis became so acute that poor Lizzie felt herself bound
+to resign her charge or ask Mr. Deering's intervention; and for Juliet's
+sake she chose the harder alternative. It _was_ hard to speak to him not
+only because one hated still more to ascribe it to such vulgar causes,
+but because one blushed to bring them to the notice of a spirit engaged
+with higher things. Mr. Deering was very busy at that moment: he had a
+new picture "on." And Lizzie entered the studio with the flutter of one
+profanely intruding on some sacred rite; she almost heard the rustle of
+retreating wings as she approached.
+
+And then--and then--how differently it had all turned out! Perhaps it
+wouldn't have, if she hadn't been such a goose--she who so seldom cried,
+so prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering cageful of
+"feelings." But if she had cried, it was because he had looked at her so
+kindly, so softly, and because she had nevertheless felt him so pained
+and shamed by what she said. The pain, of course, lay for both in the
+implication behind her words--in the one word they left unspoken.
+If little Juliet was as she was, it was because of the mother
+up-stairs--the mother who had given her child her futile impulses, and
+grudged her the care that might have guided them. The wretched case so
+obviously revolved in its own vicious circle that when Mr. Deering had
+murmured, "Of course if my wife were not an invalid," they both turned
+with a simultaneous spring to the flagrant "bad example" of Celeste and
+Suzanne, fastening on that with a mutual insistence that ended in his
+crying out, "All the more, then, how can you leave her to them?"
+
+"But if I do her no good?" Lizzie wailed; and it was then that,--when he
+took her hand and assured her gently, "But you do, you do!"--it was then
+that, in the traditional phrase, she "broke down," and her conventional
+protest quivered off into tears.
+
+"You do _me_ good, at any rate--you make the house seem less like a
+desert," she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself drawn
+to him, and they kissed each other through her weeping.
+
+They kissed each other--there was the new fact. One does not, if one is
+a poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin's Pension Suisse at Passy,
+and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out trustfully to
+other eyes--one does not, under these common but defenseless
+conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without being now and then
+kissed,--waylaid once by a noisy student between two doors, surprised
+once by one's gray-bearded professor as one bent over the "theme" he was
+correcting,--but these episodes, if they tarnish the surface, do not
+reach the heart: it is not the kiss endured, but the kiss returned, that
+lives. And Lizzie West's first kiss was for Vincent Deering.
+
+As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her--something deeper
+than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of Mrs. Deering.
+A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and started out blindly
+to seek the sun.
+
+She might have felt differently, perhaps,--the shame and penitence might
+have prevailed,--had she not known him so kind and tender, and guessed
+him so baffled, poor, and disappointed. She knew the failure of his
+married life, and she divined a corresponding failure in his artistic
+career. Lizzie, who had made her own faltering snatch at the same
+laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency to bear on the question of his
+pictures, which she judged to be extremely brilliant, but suspected of
+having somehow failed to affirm their merit publicly. She understood
+that he had tasted an earlier moment of success: a mention, a medal,
+something official and tangible; then the tide of publicity had somehow
+set the other way, and left him stranded in a noble isolation. It was
+extraordinary and unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and
+exceptional should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities
+that governed her own life, should have known poverty and obscurity and
+indifference. But she gathered that this had been the case, and felt
+that it formed the miraculous link between them. For through what
+medium less revealing than that of shared misfortune would he ever have
+perceived so inconspicuous an object as herself? And she recalled now
+how gently his eyes had rested on her from the first--the gray eyes that
+might have seemed mocking if they had not been so gentle.
+
+She remembered how he had met her the first day, when Mrs. Deering's
+inevitable headache had prevented her from receiving the new teacher,
+and how his few questions had at once revealed his interest in the
+little stranded, compatriot, doomed to earn a precarious living so far
+from her native shore. Sweet as the moment of unburdening had been,
+she wondered afterward what had determined it: how she, so shy and
+sequestered, had found herself letting slip her whole poverty-stricken
+story, even to the avowal of the ineffectual "artistic" tendencies that
+had drawn her to Paris, and had then left her there to the dry task of
+tuition. She wondered at first, but she understood now; she understood
+everything after he had kissed her. It was simply because he was as kind
+as he was great.
+
+She thought of this now as she mounted the hill in the spring sunshine,
+and she thought of all that had happened since. The intervening months,
+as she looked back at them, were merged in a vast golden haze, through
+which here and there rose the outline of a shining island. The haze was
+the general enveloping sense of his love, and the shining islands were
+the days they had spent together. They had never kissed again under his
+own roof. Lizzie's professional honor had a keen edge, but she had been
+spared the vulgar necessity of making him feel it. It was of the essence
+of her fatality that he always "understood" when his failing to do so
+might have imperiled his hold on her.
+
+But her Thursdays and Sundays were free, and it soon became a habit to
+give them to him. She knew, for her peace of mind, only too much about
+pictures, and galleries and churches had been the one bright outlet from
+the grayness of her personal atmosphere. For poetry, too, and the other
+imaginative forms of literature, she had always felt more than she had
+hitherto had occasion to betray; and now all these folded sympathies
+shot out their tendrils to the light. Mr. Deering knew how to express
+with unmatched clearness and competence the thoughts that trembled
+in her mind: to talk with him was to soar up into the azure on
+the outspread wings of his intelligence, and look down dizzily yet
+distinctly, on all the wonders and glories of the world. She was a
+little ashamed, sometimes, to find how few definite impressions she
+brought back from these flights; but that was doubtless because her
+heart beat so fast when he was near, and his smile made his words like
+a long quiver of light. Afterward, in quieter hours, fragments of
+their talk emerged in her memory with wondrous precision, every syllable
+as minutely chiseled as some of the delicate objects in crystal or
+ivory that he pointed out in the museums they frequented. It was always
+a puzzle to Lizzie that some of their hours should be so blurred and
+others so vivid.
+
+On the morning in question she was reliving all these memories with
+unusual distinctness, for it was a fortnight since she had seen her
+friend. Mrs. Deering, some six weeks previously, had gone to visit a
+relation at St.-Raphael; and, after she had been a month absent, her
+husband and the little girl had joined her. Lizzie's adieux to Deering
+had been made on a rainy afternoon in the damp corridors of the Aquarium
+at the Trocadero. She could not receive him at her own _pension_. That a
+teacher should be visited by the father of a pupil, especially when that
+father was still, as Madame Clopin said, _si bien_, was against that
+lady's austere Helvetian code. From Deering's first tentative hint of
+another solution Lizzie had recoiled in a wild unreasoned flurry of all
+her scruples, he took her "No, no, _no!_" as he took all her twists and
+turns of conscience, with eyes half-tender and half-mocking, and an
+instant acquiescence which was the finest homage to the "lady" she felt
+he divined and honored in her.
+
+So they continued to meet in museums and galleries, or to extend, on
+fine days, their explorations to the suburbs, where now and then, in
+the solitude of grove or garden, the kiss renewed itself, fleeting,
+isolated, or prolonged in a shy, silent pressure of the hand. But on
+the day of his leave-taking the rain kept them under cover; and as they
+threaded the subterranean windings of the Aquarium, and Lizzie looked
+unseeingly at the monstrous faces glaring at her through walls of glass,
+she felt like a poor drowned wretch at the bottom of the sea, with all
+her glancing, sunlit memories rolling over her like the waves of its
+surface.
+
+"You'll never see him again--never see him again," the waves boomed in
+her ears through his last words; and when she had said good-by to him
+at the corner, and had scrambled, wet and shivering, into the Passy
+omnibus, its great, grinding wheels took up the derisive burden--"Never
+see him, never see him again."
+
+All that was only two weeks ago, and here she was, as happy as a lark,
+mounting the hill to his door in the spring sunshine. So weak a heart
+did not deserve such a radiant fate; and Lizzie said to herself that she
+would never again distrust her star.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+THE cracked bell tinkled sweetly through her heart as she stood
+listening for the scamper of Juliet's feet. Juliet, anticipating the
+laggard Suzanne, almost always opened the door for her governess, not
+from any unnatural zeal to hasten the hour of her studies, but from the
+irrepressible desire to see what was going on in the street. But on this
+occasion Lizzie listened vainly for a step, and at length gave the bell
+another twitch. Doubtless some unusually absorbing incident had detained
+the child below-stairs; thus only could her absence be explained.
+
+A third ring produced no response, and Lizzie, full of dawning fears,
+drew back to look up at the shabby, blistered house. She saw that the
+studio shutters stood wide, and then noticed, without surprise, that
+Mrs. Deering's were still unopened. No doubt Mrs. Deering was resting
+after the fatigue of the journey. Instinctively Lizzie's eyes turned
+again to the studio; and as she looked, she saw Deering at the window.
+He caught sight of her, and an instant later came to the door. He looked
+paler than usual, and she noticed that he wore a black coat.
+
+"I rang and rang--where is Juliet?"
+
+He looked at her gravely, almost solemnly; then, without answering, he
+led her down the passage to the studio, and closed the door when she had
+entered.
+
+"My wife is dead--she died suddenly ten days ago. Didn't you see it in
+the papers?"
+
+Lizzie, with a little cry, sank down on the rickety divan. She seldom
+saw a newspaper, since she could not afford one for her own perusal, and
+those supplied to the Pension Clopin were usually in the hands of its
+more privileged lodgers till long after the hour when she set out on her
+morning round.
+
+"No; I didn't see it," she stammered.
+
+Deering was silent. He stood a little way off, twisting an unlit
+cigarette in his hand, and looking down at her with a gaze that was both
+hesitating and constrained.
+
+She, too, felt the constraint of the situation, the impossibility of
+finding words that, after what had passed between them, should seem
+neither false nor heartless; and at last she exclaimed, standing up:
+"Poor little Juliet! Can't I go to her?"
+
+"Juliet is not here. I left her at St.-Raphael with the relations with
+whom my wife was staying."
+
+"Oh," Lizzie murmured, feeling vaguely that this added to the difficulty
+of the moment. How differently she had pictured their meeting!
+
+"I'm so--so sorry for her!" she faltered out.
+
+Deering made no reply, but, turning on his heel, walked the length of
+the studio, and then halted vaguely before the picture on the easel. It
+was the landscape he had begun the previous autumn, with the
+intention of sending it to the Salon that spring. But it was still
+unfinished--seemed, indeed, hardly more advanced than on the fateful
+October day when Lizzie, standing before it for the first time, had
+confessed her inability to deal with Juliet. Perhaps the same thought
+struck its creator, for he broke into a dry laugh, and turned from the
+easel with a shrug.
+
+Under his protracted silence Lizzie roused herself to the fact that,
+since her pupil was absent, there was no reason for her remaining any
+longer; and as Deering again moved toward her she said with an effort:
+"I'll go, then. You'll send for me when she comes back?"
+
+Deering still hesitated, tormenting the cigarette between his fingers.
+
+"She's not coming back--not at present."
+
+Lizzie heard him with a drop of the heart. Was everything to be changed
+in their lives? But of course; how could she have dreamed it would be
+otherwise? She could only stupidly repeat: "Not coming back? Not this
+spring?"
+
+"Probably not, since are friends are so good as to keep her. The fact
+is, I've got to go to America. My wife left a little property, a few
+pennies, that I must go and see to--for the child."
+
+Lizzie stood before him, a cold knife in her breast. "I see--I see,"
+she reiterated, feeling all the while that she strained her eyes into
+impenetrable blackness.
+
+"It's a nuisance, having to pull up stakes," he went on, with a fretful
+glance about the studio.
+
+She lifted her eyes slowly to his face. "Shall you be gone long?" she
+took courage to ask.
+
+"There again--I can't tell. It's all so frightfully mixed up." He met
+her look for an incredibly long, strange moment. "I hate to go!" he
+murmured as if to himself.
+
+Lizzie felt a rush of moisture to her lashes, and the old, familiar
+wave of weakness at her heart. She raised her hand to her face with an
+instinctive gesture, and as she did so he held out his arms.
+
+"Come here, Lizzie!" he said.
+
+And she went--went with a sweet, wild throb of liberation, with the
+sense that at last the house was his, that _she_ was his, if he wanted
+her; that never again would that silent, rebuking presence in the room
+above constrain and shame her rapture.
+
+He pushed back her veil and covered her face with kisses. "Don't cry,
+you little goose!" he said.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+THAT they must see each other again before his departure, in someplace
+less exposed than their usual haunts, was as clear to Lizzie as it
+appeared to be to Deering. His expressing the wish seemed, indeed, the
+sweetest testimony to the quality of his feeling, since, in the first
+weeks of the most perfunctory widowerhood, a man of his stamp is
+presumed to abstain from light adventures. If, then, at such a moment,
+he wished so much to be quietly and gravely with her, it could be only
+for reasons she did not call by name, but of which she felt the sacred
+tremor in her heart; and it would have seemed incredibly vain and vulgar
+to put forward, at such a crisis, the conventional objections by means
+of which such little-exposed existences defend the treasure of their
+freshness.
+
+In such a mood as this one may descend from the Passy omnibus at the
+corner of the Pont de la Concorde (she had not let him fetch her in a
+cab) with a sense of dedication almost solemn, and may advance to meet
+one's fate, in the shape of a gentleman of melancholy elegance, with an
+auto-taxi at his call, as one has advanced to the altar-steps in some
+girlish bridal vision.
+
+Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper room of the
+quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest
+for seclusion to be based on sentimental motives, so soberly did Deering
+give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at his side.
+She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure their hour
+together: she was already learning that Deering shrank from sadness.
+He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face their coming
+separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this completer nearness;
+but she waited, as always, for him to strike the opening note.
+
+Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the hour.
+Her heart was unversed in happiness, but he had found the tone to lull
+her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any golden wonder.
+Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something tacit and confirmed
+between them, as if his tenderness were a habit of the heart hardly
+needing the support of outward proof.
+
+Such proof as he offered came, therefore, as a kind of crowning
+luxury, the flower of a profoundly rooted sentiment; and here again the
+instinctive reserves and defenses would have seemed to vulgarize what
+his trust ennobled. But if all the tender casuistries of her heart were
+at his service, he took no grave advantage of them. Even when they sat
+alone after dinner, with the lights of the river trembling through their
+one low window, and the vast rumor of Paris inclosing them in a heart
+of silence, he seemed, as much as herself, under the spell of
+hallowing influences. She felt it most of all as she yielded to the arm
+he presently put about her, to the long caress he laid on her lips and
+eyes: not a word or gesture missed the note of quiet union, or cast a
+doubt, in retrospect, on the pact they sealed with their last look.
+
+That pact, as she reviewed it through a sleepless night, seemed to have
+consisted mainly, on his part, in pleadings for full and frequent news
+of her, on hers in the assurance that it should be given as often as
+he asked it. She had felt an intense desire not to betray any undue
+eagerness, any crude desire to affirm and define her hold on him. Her
+life had given her a certain acquaintance with the arts of defense:
+girls in her situation were commonly supposed to know them all, and
+to use them as occasion called. But Lizzie's very need of them had
+intensified her disdain. Just because she was so poor, and had always,
+materially, so to count her change and calculate her margin, she would
+at least know the joy of emotional prodigality, would give her heart
+as recklessly as the rich their millions. She was sure now that Deering
+loved her, and if he had seized the occasion of their farewell to give
+her some definitely worded sign of his feeling--if, more plainly, he
+had asked her to marry him,--his doing so would have seemed less like
+a proof of his sincerity than of his suspecting in her the need of a
+verbal warrant. That he had abstained seemed to show that he trusted
+her as she trusted him, and that they were one most of all in this deep
+security of understanding.
+
+She had tried to make him divine all this in the chariness of her
+promise to write. She would write; of course she would. But he would be
+busy, preoccupied, on the move: it was for him to let her know when he
+wished a word, to spare her the embarrassment of ill-timed intrusions.
+
+"Intrusions?" He had smiled the word away. "You can't well intrude, my
+darling, on a heart where you're already established, to the complete
+exclusion of other lodgers." And then, taking her hands, and looking up
+from them into her happy, dizzy eyes: "You don't know much about being
+in love, do you, Lizzie?" he laughingly ended.
+
+It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she
+wondered afterward if she had not deserved it. Was she really cold and
+conventional, and did other women give more richly and recklessly? She
+found that it was possible to turn about every one of her reserves
+and delicacies so that they looked like selfish scruples and petty
+pruderies, and at this game she came in time to exhaust all the
+resources of an over-abundant casuistry.
+
+Meanwhile the first days after Deering's departure wore a soft,
+refracted light like the radiance lingering after sunset. _He_, at any
+rate, was taxable with no reserves, no calculations, and his letters
+of farewell, from train and steamer, filled her with long murmurs and
+echoes of his presence. How he loved her, how he loved her--and how he
+knew how to tell her so!
+
+She was not sure of possessing the same aptitude. Unused to the
+expression of personal emotion, she fluctuated between the impulse to
+pour out all she felt and the fear lest her extravagance should amuse or
+even bore him. She never lost the sense that what was to her the central
+crisis of experience must be a mere episode in a life so predestined as
+his to romantic accidents. All that she felt and said would be subjected
+to the test of comparison with what others had already given him: from
+all quarters of the globe she saw passionate missives winging their way
+toward Deering, for whom her poor little swallow-flight of devotion could
+certainly not make a summer. But such moments were succeeded by others
+in which she raised her head and dared inwardly to affirm her conviction
+that no woman had ever loved him just as she had, and that none,
+therefore, had probably found just such things to say to him. And this
+conviction strengthened the other less solidly based belief that
+_he_ also, for the same reason, had found new accents to express his
+tenderness, and that the three letters she wore all day in her shabby
+blouse, and hid all night beneath her pillow, surpassed not only in
+beauty, but in quality, all he had ever penned for other eyes.
+
+They gave her, at any rate, during the weeks that she wore them on her
+heart, sensations even more complex and delicate than Deering's actual
+presence had ever occasioned. To be with him was always like breasting
+a bright, rough sea, that blinded while it buoyed her: but his letters
+formed a still pool of contemplation, above which she could bend, and
+see the reflection of the sky, and the myriad movements of life
+that flitted and gleamed below the surface. The wealth of his hidden
+life--that was what most surprised her! It was incredible to her now
+that she had had no inkling of it, but had kept on blindly along the
+narrow track of habit, like a traveler climbing a road in a fog, who
+suddenly finds himself on a sunlit crag between blue leagues of sky and
+dizzy depths of valley. And the odd thing was that all the people about
+her--the whole world of the Passy pension--were still plodding along the
+same dull path, preoccupied with the pebbles underfoot, and unconscious
+of the glory beyond the fog!
+
+There were wild hours when she longed to cry out to them what one saw
+from the summit--and hours of tremulous abasement when she asked herself
+why _her_ happy feet had been guided there, while others, no doubt as
+worthy, stumbled and blundered in obscurity. She felt, in particular,
+a sudden urgent pity for the two or three other girls at Mme.
+Clopin's--girls older, duller, less alive than she, and by that very
+token more appealingly flung upon her sympathy. Would they ever know?
+Had they ever known?--those were the questions that haunted her as she
+crossed her companions on the stairs, faced them at the dinner-table,
+and listened to their poor, pining talk in the dim-lit slippery-seated
+_salon_. One of the girls was Swiss, the other English; the third, Andora
+Macy, was a young lady from the Southern States who was studying French
+with the ultimate object of imparting it to the inmates of a girls'
+school at Macon, Georgia.
+
+Andora Macy was pale, faded, immature. She had a drooping Southern
+accent, and a manner which fluctuated between arch audacity and fits of
+panicky hauteur. She yearned to be admired, and feared to be insulted;
+and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined to miss both
+these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at second hand in the
+experiences of her more privileged friends.
+
+It was perhaps for this reason that she took a wistful interest in
+Lizzie, who had shrunk from her at first, as the depressing image of her
+own probable future, but to whom she had now suddenly become an object
+of sentimental pity.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+MISS MACY's room was next to Miss West's, and the Southerner's knock
+often appealed to Lizzie's hospitality when Mme. Clopin's early curfew
+had driven her boarders from the _salon_. It sounded thus one evening
+just as Lizzie, tired from an unusually long day of tuition, was in the
+act of removing her dress. She was in too indulgent a mood to withhold
+her "Come in," and as Miss Macy crossed the threshold, Lizzie felt that
+Vincent Deering's first letter--the letter from the train--had slipped
+from her loosened bodice to the floor.
+
+Miss Macy, as promptly noting the fact, darted forward to recover the
+letter. Lizzie stooped also, fiercely jealous of her touch; but the
+other reached the precious paper first, and as she seized it, Lizzie knew
+that she had seen whence it fell, and was weaving round the incident a
+rapid web of romance.
+
+Lizzie blushed with annoyance. "It's too stupid, having no pockets! If
+one gets a letter as she is going out in the morning, she has to carry
+it in her blouse all day."
+
+Miss Macy looked at her with swimming eyes. "It's warm from your heart!"
+she breathed, reluctantly yielding up the missive.
+
+Lizzie laughed, for she knew better: she knew it was the letter that had
+warmed her heart. Poor Andora Macy! _She_ would never know. Her bleak
+bosom would never take fire from such a contact. Lizzie looked at her
+with kind eyes, secretly chafing at the injustice of fate.
+
+The next evening, on her return home, she found Andora hovering in the
+entrance hall.
+
+"I thought you'd like me to put this in your own hand," Miss Macy
+whispered significantly, pressing a letter upon Lizzie. "I couldn't
+_bear_ to see it lying on the table with the others."
+
+It was Deering's letter from the steamer. Lizzie blushed to the forehead,
+but without resenting Andora's divination. She could not have breathed
+a word of her bliss, but she was not altogether sorry to have it guessed,
+and pity for Andora's destitution yielded to the pleasure of using it
+as a mirror for her own abundance. DEERING wrote again on reaching New
+York, a long, fond, dissatisfied letter, vague in its indication of his
+own projects, specific in the expression of his love. Lizzie brooded
+over every syllable of it till they formed the undercurrent of all
+her waking thoughts, and murmured through her midnight dreams; but
+she would have been happier if they had shed some definite light on the
+future.
+
+That would come, no doubt, when he had had time to look about and
+get his bearings. She counted up the days that must elapse before she
+received his next letter, and stole down early to peep at the papers,
+and learn when the next American mail was due. At length the happy date
+arrived, and she hurried distractedly through the day's work, trying to
+conceal her impatience by the endearments she bestowed upon her pupils.
+It was easier, in her present mood, to kiss them than to keep them at
+their grammars.
+
+That evening, on Mme. Clopin's threshold, her heart beat so wildly that
+she had to lean a moment against the door-post before entering. But on
+the hall table, where the letters lay, there was none for her.
+
+She went over them with a feverish hand, her heart dropping down
+and down, as she had sometimes fallen down an endless stairway in a
+dream--the very same stairway up which she had seemed to fly when she
+climbed the long hill to Deering's door. Then it suddenly struck her
+that Andora might have found and secreted her letter, and with a spring
+she was on the actual stairs and rattling Miss Macy's door-handle.
+
+"You've a letter for me, haven't you?" she panted.
+
+Miss Macy, turning from the toilet-table, inclosed her in attenuated
+arms. "Oh, darling, did you expect one to-day?"
+
+"Do give it to me!" Lizzie pleaded with burning eyes.
+
+"But I haven't any! There hasn't been a sign of a letter for you."
+
+"I know there is. There _must_ be," Lizzie persisted, stamping her foot.
+
+"But, dearest, I've _watched_ for you, and there's been nothing,
+absolutely nothing."
+
+Day after day, for the ensuing weeks, the same scene reenacted itself
+with endless variations. Lizzie, after the first sharp spasm of
+disappointment, made no effort to conceal her anxiety from Miss Macy,
+and the fond Andora was charged to keep a vigilant eye upon the postman's
+coming, and to spy on the _bonne_ for possible negligence or perfidy.
+But these elaborate precautions remained fruitless, and no letter from
+Deering came.
+
+During the first fortnight of silence Lizzie exhausted all the
+ingenuities of explanation. She marveled afterward at the reasons she
+had found for Deering's silence: there were moments when she almost
+argued herself into thinking it more natural than his continuing to
+write. There was only one reason which her intelligence consistently
+rejected, and that was the possibility that he had forgotten her, that
+the whole episode had faded from his mind like a breath from a mirror.
+From that she resolutely turned her thoughts, aware that if she suffered
+herself to contemplate it, the motive power of life would fail, and she
+would no longer understand why she rose up in the morning and laydown at
+night.
+
+If she had had leisure to indulge her anguish she might have been unable
+to keep such speculations at bay. But she had to be up and working: the
+_blanchisseuse_ had to be paid, and Mme. Clopin's weekly bill, and all
+the little "extras" that even her frugal habits had to reckon with.
+And in the depths of her thought dwelt the dogging fear of illness and
+incapacity, goading her to work while she could. She hardly remembered
+the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now,
+and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed. In
+the blankness of her misery she felt no dread of death; but the horror of
+being ill and "dependent" was in her blood.
+
+In the first weeks of silence she wrote again and again to Deering,
+entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she
+had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in
+her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been
+too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his
+fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers had
+not been light enough. She should have kept to the character of the
+"little friend," the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may
+find an escape from its complexities; and instead, she had dramatized
+their relation, exaggerated her own part in it, presumed, forsooth, to
+share the front of the stage with him, instead of being content to serve
+as scenery or chorus.
+
+But though to herself she admitted, and even insisted on, the episodical
+nature of the experience, on the fact that for Deering it could be no
+more than an incident, she was still convinced that his sentiment for
+her, however fugitive, had been genuine.
+
+His had not been the attitude of the unscrupulous male seeking a vulgar
+"advantage." For a moment he had really needed her, and if he was silent
+now, it was perhaps because he feared that she had mistaken the nature
+of the need and built vain hopes on its possible duration.
+
+It was of the very essence of Lizzie's devotion that it sought
+instinctively the larger freedom of its object; she could not conceive
+of love under any form of exaction or compulsion. To make this clear
+to Deering became an overwhelming need, and in a last short letter
+she explicitly freed him from whatever sentimental obligation its
+predecessors might have seemed to impose. In this studied communication
+she playfully accused herself of having unwittingly sentimentalized
+their relation, affirming, in self-defense, a retrospective astuteness,
+a sense of the impermanence of the tenderer sentiments, that almost
+put Deering in the fatuous position of having mistaken coquetry for
+surrender. And she ended gracefully with a plea for the continuance of
+the friendly regard which she had "always understood" to be the basis of
+their sympathy. The document, when completed, seemed to her worthy of
+what she conceived to be Deering's conception of a woman of the world,
+and she found a spectral satisfaction in the thought of making her final
+appearance before him in that distinguished character. But she was never
+destined to learn what effect the appearance produced; for the letter,
+like those it sought to excuse, remained unanswered.
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+THE fresh spring sunshine which had so often attended Lizzie Weston
+her dusty climb up the hill of St.-Cloud beamed on her, some two years
+later, in a scene and a situation of altered import.
+
+The horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysees filtered its rays through
+the symmetrical umbrage inclosing the graveled space about Daurent's
+restaurant, and Miss West, seated at a table within that privileged
+circle, presented to the light a hat much better able to sustain its
+scrutiny than those which had sheltered the brow of Juliet Deering's
+instructress.
+
+Her dress was in keeping with the hat, and both belonged to a situation
+rich in such possibilities as the act of a leisurely luncheon at
+Daurent's in the opening week of the Salon. Her companions, of both
+sexes, confirmed and emphasized this impression by an elaborateness of
+garb and an ease of attitude implying the largest range of selection
+between the forms of Parisian idleness; and even Andora Macy, seated
+opposite, as in the place of co-hostess or companion, reflected, in coy
+grays and mauves, the festal note of the occasion.
+
+This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary gentleman
+straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedged in the remotest
+corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the occurrence did not
+rise above the usual. For nearly a year she had been acquiring the habit
+of such situations, and the act of offering a luncheon at Daurent's
+to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of Providence, and their friend Mr.
+Jackson Benn, produced in her no emotion beyond the languid glow which
+Mr. Benn's presence was beginning to impart to such scenes.
+
+"It's frightful, the way you've got used to it," Andora Macy had wailed
+in the first days of her friend's transfigured fortune, when Lizzie
+West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an old
+and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her
+earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own
+improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to
+the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including
+them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American
+convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin. It
+was by a mere genealogical accident that Lizzie, falling just within
+the golden circle, found herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to
+release her from the prospect of a long gray future in Mme. Clopin's
+pension.
+
+The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presently found that
+it had destroyed her former world without giving her anew one. On the
+ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that had ever
+sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease, and the
+removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed existence
+blossomed with no compensating joys. She had hoped great things from the
+opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her, above all, in
+various artful feminine ways, to be "nice" to the companions of her less
+privileged state; but such widenings of scope left her, as it were, but
+the more conscious of the empty margin of personal life beyond them. It
+was not till she woke to the leisure of her new days that she had the
+full sense of what was gone from them.
+
+Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient
+sensations: she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with
+random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in "on approval."
+It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson Benn had fixed
+her attention, and the languid effort of her imagination to adjust him
+to her requirements was seconded by the fond complicity of Andora and
+the smiling approval of her cousins. Lizzie did not discourage these
+demonstrations: she suffered serenely Andora's allusions to Mr. Benn's
+infatuation, and Mrs. Mears's casual boast of his business standing.
+All the better if they could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and
+round unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment: Lizzie
+looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.
+
+"I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare! Doesn't it
+make you nervous, Lizzie?" Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling her
+feather boa about an outraged bosom. Mrs. Mears was still in that stage
+of development when her countrywomen taste to the full the peril of
+being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.
+
+Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn's round baby
+cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular collar. "Is
+some one staring at me?" she asked with a smile.
+
+"Don't turn round, whatever you do! There--just over there, between the
+rhododendrons--the tall fair man alone at that table. Really, Harvey,
+I think you ought to speak to the head-waiter, or something; though I
+suppose in one of these places they'd only laugh at you," Mrs. Mears
+shudderingly concluded.
+
+Her husband, as if inclining to this probability, continued the
+undisturbed dissection of his chicken wing; but Mr. Benn, perhaps
+aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude, sternly
+revolved upon the parapet of his high collar in the direction of Mrs.
+Mears's glance.
+
+"What, that fellow all alone over there? Why, _he's_ not French; he's an
+American," he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the facial
+muscles.
+
+"Oh!" murmured Mrs. Mears, as perceptibly disappointed, and Mr. Benn
+continued carelessly: "He came over on the steamer with me. He's some
+kind of an artist--a fellow named Deering. He was staring at _me_, I
+guess: wondering whether I was going to remember him. Why, how d' 'e do?
+How are you? Why, yes, of course; with pleasure--my friends, Mrs. Harvey
+Mears--Mr. Mears; my friends Miss Macy and Miss West."
+
+"I have the pleasure of knowing Miss West," said Vincent Deering with a
+smile.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+EVEN through his smile Lizzie had seen, in the first moment, how changed
+he was; and the impression of the change deepened to the point of pain
+when, a few days later, in reply to his brief note, she accorded him a
+private hour.
+
+That the first sight of his writing--the first answer to
+his letters--should have come, after three long years, in the shape of
+this impersonal line, too curt to be called humble, yet confessing to a
+consciousness of the past by the studied avoidance of its language! As
+she read, her mind flashed back over what she had dreamed his letters
+would be, over the exquisite answers she had composed above his name.
+There was nothing exquisite in the conventional lines before her; but
+dormant nerves began to throb again at the mere touch of the paper he
+had touched, and she threw the little note into the fire before she
+dared to reply to it.
+
+Now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the one
+live spot in her consciousness. Once more her tormented throbbing self
+sank back passive and numb, but now with all its power of suffering
+mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at
+the opposite corner of her hearth. She was still Lizzie West, and he was
+still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled between them, and she saw his
+face through its fog. It was his face, really, rather than his words,
+that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and
+slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines. She kept
+afterward no precise memory of the actual details of his narrative: the
+pain it evidently cost him to impart it was so much the sharpest fact
+in her new vision of him. Confusedly, however, she gathered that
+on reaching America he had found his wife's small property gravely
+impaired; and that, while lingering on to secure what remained of it,
+he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief
+moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio.
+But inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and
+a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his
+small advantage. There followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely
+pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried
+his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment from
+a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers, illustrating
+magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly understood, as the
+social tout of a new hotel desirous of advertising its restaurant.
+These disjointed facts were strung on a slender thread of personal
+allusions--references to friends who had been kind (jealously, she
+guessed them to be women), and to enemies who had darkly schemed against
+him. But, true to his tradition of "correctness," he carefully avoided
+the mention of names, and left her trembling conjectures to grope dimly
+through an alien crowded world in which there seemed little room for her
+small shy presence.
+
+As she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable sense of
+his unhappiness. Nothing he had said explained or excused his conduct to
+her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had been humiliated,
+and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage, that there was no
+conceivable justification for any scheme of things in which such facts
+were possible. She could not have said why: she simply knew that it hurt
+too much to see him hurt.
+
+Gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal
+grievance was due to her having so definitely determined her own future.
+She was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to marry Jackson
+Benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her in dealing
+with the case of Vincent Deering. Her personal safety insured her the
+requisite impartiality, and justified her in dwelling as long as
+she chose on the last lines of a chapter to which her own act had
+deliberately fixed the close. Any lingering hesitations as to the
+finality of her decision were dispelled by the imminent need of making
+it known to Deering; and when her visitor paused in his reminiscences to
+say, with a sigh, "But many things have happened to you too," his words
+did not so much evoke the sense of her altered fortunes as the image of
+the protector to whom she was about to intrust them.
+
+"Yes, many things; it's three years," she answered.
+
+Deering sat leaning forward, in his sad exiled elegance, his eyes gently
+bent on hers; and at his side she saw the solid form of Mr. Jackson
+Benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of his tight
+black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby cheeks and hard
+blue chin. Then the vision faded as Deering began to speak.
+
+"Three years," he repeated, musingly taking up her words. "I've so often
+wondered what they'd brought you."
+
+She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he
+should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse into
+the blunder of becoming "personal."
+
+"You've wondered?" She smiled back bravely.
+
+"Do you suppose I haven't?" His look dwelt on her. "Yes, I daresay that
+_was_ what you thought of me."
+
+She had her answer pat--"Why, frankly, you know, I _didn't_ think of
+you." But the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it
+indignantly away. If it was his correctness to ignore, it could never be
+hers to disavow.
+
+"_ Was_ that what you thought of me?" she heard him repeat in a tone
+of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she
+resolutely answered: "How could I know what to think? I had no word from
+you."
+
+If she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer would
+create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with which he
+met it proved that she had underestimated his resources.
+
+"No, you had no word. I kept my vow," he said.
+
+"Your vow?"
+
+"That you _shouldn't_ have a word--not a syllable. Oh, I kept it through
+everything!"
+
+Lizzie's heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the
+sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the
+still small voice of reason.
+
+"What _was_ your vow? Why shouldn't I have had a syllable from you?"
+
+He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it
+almost seemed forgiving.
+
+Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in
+a chair at her side. The deliberation of his movement might have implied
+a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if thus viewing
+it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and
+his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the
+round of the small bright drawing-room. "This is charming. Yes, things
+_have_ changed for you," he said.
+
+A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of
+a vain return upon the past. It was as if all her retrospective
+tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to
+protect him from it. But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly
+she felt the inconsistent desire to hold him fast, face to face with his
+own words.
+
+Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had met her with
+another.
+
+"You _did_ think of me, then? Why are you afraid to tell me that you
+did?"
+
+The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.
+
+"Didn't my letters tell you so enough?"
+
+"Ah, your letters!" Keeping her gaze on his in a passion of unrelenting
+fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not the least quiver of a
+sensitive nerve. He only gazed back at her more sadly.
+
+"They went everywhere with me--your letters," he said.
+
+"Yet you never answered them." At last the accusation trembled to her
+lips.
+
+"Yet I never answered them."
+
+"Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?"
+
+All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them
+on him, as if to escape from their rage.
+
+Deering hardly seemed to hear her question. He merely shifted his
+attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the
+least gesture, to remind her of the privileges which such nearness had
+once implied.
+
+"There were beautiful, wonderful things in them," he said, smiling.
+
+She felt herself stiffen under his smile.
+
+"You've waited three years to tell me so!"
+
+He looked at her with grave surprise. "And do you resent my telling you
+even now?"
+
+His parries were incredible. They left her with a breathless sense of
+thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to
+drive him against the wall and pin him there.
+
+"No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the
+time--"
+
+And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting
+her squarely on her own ground.
+
+"When at the time I didn't? But how _could_ I--at the time?"
+
+"Why couldn't you? You've not yet told me?"
+
+He gave her again his look of disarming patience. "Do I need to? Hasn't
+my whole wretched story told you?"
+
+"Told me why you never answered my letters?"
+
+"Yes, since I could only answer them in one way--by protesting my love
+and my longing."
+
+There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of
+a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past. "You mean, then,
+that you didn't write because--"
+
+"Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my
+wife's money was gone, and that what I could earn--I've so little gift
+that way!--was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated. It was
+as if an iron door had been suddenly locked and barred between us."
+
+Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her
+incredulity. "You might at least have told me--have explained. Do you
+think I shouldn't have understood?"
+
+He did not hesitate. "You would have understood. It wasn't that."
+
+"What was it then?" she quavered.
+
+"It's wonderful you shouldn't see! Simply that I couldn't write you
+_that_. Anything else--not _that!_"
+
+"And so you preferred to let me suffer?"
+
+There was a shade of reproach in his eyes. "I suffered too," he said.
+
+It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it
+nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them
+trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. But even as the impulse
+rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so often in
+the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always
+failed to reckon with--the fact of the deep irreducible difference
+between his image in her mind and his actual self, the mysterious
+alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the
+look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. She had
+phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she "never
+could remember him," so completely did the sight of him supersede the
+counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. Bright and
+breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind
+at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result
+was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity
+beside which her private injury paled.
+
+"I suffered horribly," he repeated, "and all the more that I couldn't
+make a sign, couldn't cry out my misery. There was only one escape from
+it all--to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me."
+
+The blood rushed to Lizzie's forehead. "Hate you--you prayed that I
+might hate you?"
+
+He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in
+his. "Yes; because your letters showed me that, if you didn't, you'd be
+unhappier still."
+
+Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and
+her thoughts, too--her poor fluttering stormy thoughts--felt themselves
+suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.
+
+"And I meant to keep my resolve," he went on, slowly releasing his
+clasp. "I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept
+me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I felt that
+what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were
+near each other. How was it possible to see you and want you to hate me?"
+
+He had moved away, but not to resume his seat. He merely paused at
+a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, in the transient
+attitude that precedes departure.
+
+Lizzie's heart contracted. He was going, then, and this was his farewell.
+He was going, and she could find no word to detain him but the senseless
+stammer "I never hated you."
+
+He considered her with his faint grave smile. "It's not necessary, at
+any rate, that you should do so now. Time and circumstances have made me
+so harmless--that's exactly why I've dared to venture back. And I wanted
+to tell you how I rejoice in your good fortune. It's the only obstacle
+between us that I can't bring myself to wish away."
+
+Lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation
+of Mr. Jackson Benn. He stood there again, between herself and Deering,
+perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than
+before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for
+reembodiment.
+
+Deering was continuing his farewell speech. "You're rich now, you're
+free. You will marry." She vaguely saw him holding out his hand.
+
+"It's not true that I'm engaged!" she broke out. They were the last
+words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her conscious
+thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up in the
+irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her forever the
+spectral claim of Mr. Jackson Benn.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+IT was the firm conviction of Andora Macy that every object in the
+Vincent Deerings' charming little house at Neuilly had been expressly
+designed for the Deerings' son to play with.
+
+The house was full of pretty things, some not obviously applicable to
+the purpose; but Miss Macy's casuistry was equal tothe baby's appetite,
+and the baby's mother was no match for them in the art of defending her
+possessions. There were moments, in fact, when Lizzie almost fell in
+with Andora's summary division of her works of art into articles safe
+or unsafe for the baby to lick, or resisted it only to the extent of
+occasionally substituting some less precious or less perishable object
+for the particular fragility on which her son's desire was fixed. And
+it was with this intention that, on a certain fair spring morning--which
+wore the added luster of being the baby's second birthday--she had
+murmured, with her mouth in his curls, and one hand holding a bit of
+Chelsea above his dangerous clutch: "Wouldn't he rather have that
+beautiful shiny thing over there in Aunt Andorra's hand?"
+
+The two friends were together in Lizzie's little morning-room--the room
+she had chosen, on acquiring the house, because, when she sat there, she
+could hear Deering's step as he paced up and down before his easel
+in the studio she had built for him. His step had been less regularly
+audible than she had hoped, for, after three years of wedded bliss, he
+had somehow failed to settle down to the great work which was to result
+from that privileged state; but even when she did not hear him she knew
+that he was there, above her head, stretched out on the old divan from
+Passy, and smoking endless cigarettes while he skimmed the morning
+papers; and the sense of his nearness had not yet lost its first keen
+edge of bliss.
+
+Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more arduous
+task than the study of the morning's news. She had never unlearned the
+habit of orderly activity, and the trait she least understood in her
+husband's character was his way of letting the loose ends of life hang
+as they would. She had been disposed at first to ascribe this to the
+chronic incoherence of his first _menage;_ but now she knew that, though
+he basked under the rule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any
+active impulse to further its work. He liked to see things fall
+into place about him at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her
+household magic in no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and
+it was with one of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her
+friend were now dealing.
+
+Before them stood two travel-worn trunks and a distended portmanteau,
+which had shed their contents in heterogeneous heaps over Lizzie's rosy
+carpet. They represented the hostages left by her husband on his somewhat
+precipitate departure from a New York boarding-house, and indignantly
+redeemed by her on her learning, in a curt letter from his landlady,
+that the latter was not disposed to regard them as an equivalent for the
+arrears of Deering's board.
+
+Lizzie had not been shocked by the discovery that her husband had left
+America in debt. She had too sad an acquaintance with the economic
+strain to see any humiliation in such accidents; but it offended her
+sense of order that he should not have liquidated his obligation in
+the three years since their marriage. He took her remonstrance with his
+usual disarming grace, and left her to forward the liberating draft,
+though her delicacy had provided him with a bank-account which assured
+his personal independence. Lizzie had discharged the duty without
+repugnance, since she knew that his delegating it to her was the result
+of his good-humored indolence and not of any design on her exchequer.
+Deering was not dazzled by money; his altered fortunes had tempted him
+to no excesses: he was simply too lazy to draw the check, as he had been
+too lazy to remember the debt it canceled.
+
+"No, dear! No!" Lizzie lifted the Chelsea figure higher. "Can't you find
+something for him, Andora, among that rubbish over there? Where's the
+beaded bag you had in your hand just now? I don't think it could hurt
+him to lick that."
+
+Miss Macy, bag in hand, rose from her knees, and stumbled through the
+slough of frayed garments and old studio properties. Before the group of
+mother and son she fell into a raptured attitude.
+
+"Do look at him reach for it, the tyrant! Isn't he just like the young
+Napoleon?"
+
+Lizzie laughed and swung her son in air. "Dangle it before him, Andora.
+If you let him have it too quickly, he won't care for it. He's just like
+any man, I think."
+
+Andora slowly lowered the shining bag till the heir of the Deerings
+closed his masterful fist upon it. "There--my Chelsea's safe!" Lizzie
+smiled, setting her boy on the floor, and watching him stagger away with
+his booty.
+
+Andora stood beside her, watching too. "Have you any idea where that bag
+came from, Lizzie?"
+
+Mrs. Deering, bent above a pile of dis-collared shirts, shook an
+inattentive head. "I never saw such wicked washing! There isn't one
+that's fit to mend. The bag? No; I've not the least idea."
+
+Andora surveyed her dramatically. "Doesn't it make you utterly miserable
+to think that some woman may have made it for him?"
+
+Lizzie, bowed in anxious scrutiny above the shirts, broke into an
+unruffled laugh. "Really, Andora, really--six, seven, nine; no, there
+isn't even a dozen. There isn't a whole dozen of _anything_. I don't see
+how men live alone!"
+
+Andora broodingly pursued her theme. "Do you mean to tell me it doesn't
+make you jealous to handle these things of his that other women may have
+given him?"
+
+Lizzie shook her head again, and, straightening herself with a smile,
+tossed a bundle in her friend's direction. "No, it doesn't make me the
+least bit jealous. Here, count these socks for me, like a darling."
+
+Andora moaned, "Don't you feel _anything at all?_" as the socks landed in
+her hollow bosom; but Lizzie, intent upon her task, tranquilly continued
+to unfold and sort. She felt a great deal as she did so, but her
+feelings were too deep and delicate for the simplifying process of
+speech. She only knew that each article she drew from the trunks sent
+through her the long tremor of Deering's touch. It was part of her
+wonderful new life that everything belonging to him contained an
+infinitesimal fraction of himself--a fraction becoming visible in the
+warmth of her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare
+intensities of temperature. And in the case of the objects before
+her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out
+acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished
+state. His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully
+as old lace. As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and
+would have liked to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or
+bring it home with the colors "run"! And in these homely tokens of his
+well-being she saw the symbol of what her tenderness had brought him.
+He was safe in it, encompassed by it, morally and materially, and she
+defied the embattled powers of malice to reach him through the armor of
+her love. Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had one
+desired to express them: they were no more to be distinguished from the
+sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in which they
+murmur.
+
+"Oh, do _look_ at him, Lizzie! He's found out how to open the bag!"
+
+Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who sat throned on
+a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring knees.
+She thought vaguely, "Poor Andora!" and then resumed the discouraged
+inspection of a buttonless white waistcoat. The next sound she was aware
+of was a fluttered exclamation from her friend.
+
+"Why, Lizzie, do you know what he used the bag for? To keep your letters
+in!"
+
+Lizzie looked up more quickly. She was aware that Andora's pronoun had
+changed its object, and was now applied to Deering. And it struck her
+as odd, and slightly disagreeable, that a letter of hers should be found
+among the rubbish abandoned in her husband's New York lodgings.
+
+"How funny! Give it to me, please."
+
+"Give the bag to Aunt Andora, darling! Here--look inside, and see what
+else a big big boy can find there! Yes, here's another! Why, why--"
+
+Lizzie rose with a shade of impatience and crossed the floor to the
+romping group beside the other trunk.
+
+"What is it? Give me the letters, please." As she spoke, she suddenly
+recalled the day when, in Mme. Clopin's _pension_, she had addressed a
+similar behest to Andora Macy.
+
+Andora had lifted a look of startled conjecture. "Why, this one's never
+been opened! Do you suppose that awful woman could have kept it from
+him?"
+
+Lizzie laughed. Andora's imaginings were really puerile. "What awful
+woman? His landlady? Don't be such a goose, Andora. How can it have been
+kept back from him, when we've found it here among his things?"
+
+"Yes; but then why was it never opened?"
+
+Andora held out the letter, and Lizzie took it. The writing was hers; the
+envelop bore the Passy postmark; and it was unopened. She stood looking
+at it with a sudden sharp drop of the heart.
+
+"Why, so are the others--all unopened!" Andora threw out on a rising
+note; but Lizzie, stooping over, stretched out her hand.
+
+"Give them to me, please."
+
+"Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie--" Andora, still on her knees, continued to hold
+back the packet, her pale face paler with anger and compassion. "Lizzie,
+they're the letters I used to post for you--_the letters he never
+answered!_ Look!"
+
+"Give them back to me, please."
+
+The two women faced each other, Andora kneeling, Lizzie motionless
+before her, the letters in her hand. The blood had rushed to her face,
+humming in her ears, and forcing itself into the veins of her temples
+like hot lead. Then it ebbed, and she felt cold and weak.
+
+"It must have been some plot--some conspiracy!" Andora cried, so fired
+by the ecstasy of invention that for the moment she seemed lost to all
+but the esthetic aspect of the case.
+
+Lizzie turned away her eyes with an effort, and they rested on the boy,
+who sat at her feet placidly sucking the tassels of the bag. His mother
+stooped and extracted them from his rosy mouth, which a cry of wrath
+immediately filled. She lifted him in her arms, and for the first time
+no current of life ran from his body into hers. He felt heavy and clumsy,
+like some one else's child; and his screams annoyed her.
+
+"Take him away, please, Andora."
+
+"Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie!" Andora wailed.
+
+Lizzie held out the child, and Andora, struggling to her feet, received
+him.
+
+"I know just how you feel," she gasped out above the baby's head.
+
+Lizzie, in some dark hollow of herself, heard the echo of a laugh.
+Andora always thought she knew how people felt!
+
+"Tell Marthe to take him with her when she fetches Juliet home from
+school."
+
+"Yes, yes." Andora gloated over her. "If you'd only give way, my
+darling!"
+
+The baby, howling, dived over Andora's shoulder for the bag.
+
+"Oh, _take_ him!" his mother ordered.
+
+Andora, from the door, cried out: "I'll be back at once. Remember, love,
+you're not alone!"
+
+But Lizzie insisted, "Go with them--I wish you to go with them," in the
+tone to which Miss Macy had never learned the answer.
+
+The door closed on her outraged back, and Lizzie stood alone. She looked
+about the disordered room, which offered a dreary image of the havoc
+of her life. An hour or two ago everything about her had been so
+exquisitely ordered, without and within; her thoughts and emotions had
+lain outspread before her like delicate jewels laid away symmetrically
+in a collector's cabinet. Now they had been tossed down helter-skelter
+among the rubbish there on the floor, and had themselves turned to
+rubbish like the rest. Yes, there lay her life at her feet, among all
+that tarnished trash.
+
+She knelt and picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the flaps
+of the envelops. Not one had been opened--not one. As she looked, every
+word she had written fluttered to life, and every feeling prompting it
+sent a tremor through her. With vertiginous speed and microscopic vision
+she was reliving that whole period of her life, stripping bare again the
+black ruin over which the drift of three happy years had fallen.
+
+She laughed at Andora's notion of a conspiracy--of the letters having
+been "kept back." She required no extraneous aid in deciphering the
+mystery: her three years' experience of Deering shed on it all the
+light she needed. And yet a moment before she had believed herself to be
+perfectly happy! Now it was the worst part of her anguish that it did not
+really surprise her.
+
+She knew so well how it must have happened. The letters had reached him
+when he was busy, occupied with something else, and had been put aside
+to be read at some future time--a time which never came. Perhaps on his
+way to America, on the steamer, even, he had met "some one else"--the
+"some one" who lurks, veiled and ominous, in the background of every
+woman's thoughts about her lover. Or perhaps he had been merely
+forgetful. She had learned from experience that the sensations which he
+seemed to feel with the most exquisite intensity left no reverberations
+in his mind--that he did not relive either his pleasures or his pains.
+She needed no better proof of that than the lightness of his conduct
+toward his daughter. He seemed to have taken it for granted that Juliet
+would remain indefinitely with the friends who had received her
+after her mother's death, and it was at Lizzie's suggestion that the
+little girl was brought home and that they had established themselves at
+Neuilly to be near her school. But Juliet once with them, he became the
+model of a tender father, and Lizzie wondered that he had not felt
+the child's absence, since he seemed so affectionately aware of her
+presence.
+
+Lizzie had noted all this in Juliet's case, but had taken for granted
+that her own was different; that she formed, for Deering, the exception
+which every woman secretly supposes herself to form in the experience
+of the man she loves. Certainly, she had learned by this time that she
+could not modify his habits, but she imagined that she had deepened his
+sensibilities, had furnished him with an "ideal"--angelic function!
+And she now saw that the fact of her letters--her unanswered
+letters--having, on his own assurance, "meant so much" to him, had been
+the basis on which this beautiful fabric was reared.
+
+There they lay now, the letters, precisely as when they had left her
+hands. He had not had time to read them; and there had been a moment in
+her past when that discovery would have been the sharpest pang imaginable
+to her heart. She had traveled far beyond that point. She could have
+forgiven him now for having forgotten her; but she could never forgive
+him for having deceived her.
+
+She sat down, and looked again vaguely about the room. Suddenly she
+heard his step overhead, and her heart contracted. She was afraid he was
+coming down to her. She sprang up and bolted the door; then she dropped
+into the nearest chair, tremulous and exhausted, as if the pushing of
+the bolt had required an immense muscular effort. A moment later she
+heard him on the stairs, and her tremor broke into a cold fit of shaking.
+"I loathe you--I loathe you!" she cried.
+
+She listened apprehensively for his touch on the handle of the door.
+He would come in, humming a tune, to ask some idle question and lay
+a caress on her hair. But no, the door was bolted; she was safe. She
+continued to listen, and the step passed on. He had not been coming
+to her, then. He must have gone down-stairs to fetch something--another
+newspaper, perhaps. He seemed to read little else, and she sometimes
+wondered when he had found time to store the material that used to serve
+for their famous "literary" talks. The wonder shot through her again,
+barbed with a sneer. At that moment it seemed to her that everything he
+had ever done and been was a lie.
+
+She heard the house-door close, and started up. Was he going out? It was
+not his habit to leave the house in the morning.
+
+She crossed the room to the window, and saw him walking, with a quick
+decided step, between the budding lilacs to the gate. What could have
+called him forth at that unwonted hour? It was odd that he should not
+have told her. The fact that she thought it odd suddenly showed her how
+closely their lives were interwoven. She had become a habit to him, and
+he was fond of his habits. But to her it was as if a stranger had opened
+the gate and gone out. She wondered what he would feel if he knew that
+she felt _that_.
+
+"In an hour he will know," she said to herself, with a kind of fierce
+exultation; and immediately she began to dramatize the scene. As soon as
+he came in she meant to call him up to her room and hand him the letters
+without a word. For a moment she gloated on the picture; then her
+imagination recoiled from it. She was humiliated by the thought of
+humiliating him. She wanted to keep his image intact; she would not see
+him.
+
+He had lied to her about her letters--had lied to her when he found it
+to his interest to regain her favor. Yes, there was the point to hold
+fast. He had sought her out when he learned that she was rich. Perhaps
+he had come back from America on purpose to marry her; no doubt he had
+come back on purpose. It was incredible that she had not seen this
+at the time. She turned sick at the thought of her fatuity and of
+the grossness of his arts. Well, the event proved that they were all
+he needed. But why had he gone out at such an hour? She was irritated to
+find herself still preoccupied by his comings and goings.
+
+Turning from the window, she sat down again. She wondered what she meant
+to do next. No, she would not show him the letters; she would simply
+leave them on his table and go away. She would leave the house with her
+boy and Andora. It was a relief to feel a definite plan forming itself
+in her mind--something that her uprooted thoughts could fasten on. She
+would go away, of course; and meanwhile, in order not to see him, she
+would feign a headache, and remain in her room till after luncheon. Then
+she and Andora would pack a few things, and fly with the child while he
+was dawdling about up-stairs in the studio. When one's house fell, one
+fled from the ruins: nothing could be simpler, more inevitable.
+
+Her thoughts were checked by the impossibility of picturing what would
+happen next. Try as she would, she could not see herself and the child
+away from Deering. But that, of course, was because of her nervous
+weakness. She had youth, money, energy: all the trumps were on her side.
+It was much more difficult to imagine what would become of Deering. He
+was so dependent on her, and they had been so happy together! The fact
+struck her as illogical, and even immoral, and yet she knew he had been
+happy with her. It never happened like that in novels: happiness "built
+on a lie" always crumbled, and buried the presumptuous architect beneath
+the ruins. According to the laws of every novel she had ever read,
+Deering, having deceived her once, would inevitably have gone on
+deceiving her. Yet she knew he had not gone on deceiving her.
+
+She tried again to picture her new life. Her friends, of course, would
+rally about her. But the prospect left her cold; she did not want them
+to rally. She wanted only one thing--the life she had been living before
+she had given her baby the embroidered bag to play with. Oh, why had she
+given him the bag? She had been so happy, they had all been so
+happy! Every nerve in her clamored for her lost happiness, angrily,
+unreasonably, as the boy had clamored for his bag! It was horrible to
+know too much; there was always blood in the foundations. Parents "kept
+things" from children--protected them from all the dark secrets of pain
+and evil. And was any life livable unless it were thus protected? Could
+any one look in the Medusa's face and live?
+
+But why should she leave the house, since it was hers? Here, with her
+boy and Andora, she could still make for herself the semblance of a
+life. It was Deering who would have to go; he would understand that as
+soon as he saw the letters.
+
+She pictured him in the act of going--leaving the house as he had left
+it just now. She saw the gate closing on him for the last time. Now her
+vision was acute enough: she saw him as distinctly as if he were in the
+room. Ah, he would not like returning to the old life of privations and
+expedients! And yet she knew he would not plead with her.
+
+Suddenly a new thought rushed through her mind. What if Andora had
+rushed to him with the tale of the discovery of the letters--with the
+"Fly, you are discovered!" of romantic fiction? What if he _had_ left
+her for good? It would not be unlike him, after all. Under his wonderful
+gentleness he was always evasive and inscrutable. He might have said to
+himself that he would forestall her action, and place himself at once
+on the defensive. It might be that she _had_ seen him go out of the gate
+for the last time.
+
+She looked about the room again, as if this thought had given it a new
+aspect. Yes, this alone could explain her husband's going out. It was
+past twelve o'clock, their usual luncheon hour, and he was scrupulously
+punctual at meals, and gently reproachful if she kept him waiting. Only
+some unwonted event could have caused him to leave the house at such
+an hour and with such marks of haste. Well, perhaps it was better that
+Andora should have spoken. She mistrusted her own courage; she almost
+hoped the deed had been done for her. Yet her next sensation was one of
+confused resentment. She said to herself, "Why has Andora interfered?"
+She felt baffled and angry, as though her prey had escaped her. If
+Deering had been in the house, she would have gone to him instantly and
+overwhelmed him with her scorn. But he had gone out, and she did not
+know where he had gone, and oddly mingled with her anger against him was
+the latent instinct of vigilance, the solicitude of the woman accustomed
+to watch over the man she loves. It would be strange never to feel that
+solicitude again, never to hear him say, with his hand on her hair:
+"Why, you foolish child, were you worried? Am I late?"
+
+The sense of his touch was so real that she stiffened herself against
+it, flinging back her head as if to throw off his hand. The mere thought
+of his caress was hateful; yet she felt it in all her traitorous veins.
+Yes, she felt it, but with horror and repugnance. It was something she
+wanted to escape from, and the fact of struggling against it was what
+made its hold so strong. It was as though her mind were sounding her
+body to make sure of its allegiance, spying on it for any secret movement
+of revolt.
+
+To escape from the sensation, she rose and went again to the window. No
+one was in sight. But presently the gate began to swing back, and her
+heart gave a leap--she knew not whether up or down. A moment later the
+gate opened slowly to admit a perambulator, propelled by the nurse and
+flanked by Juliet and Andora. Lizzie's eyes rested on the familiar group
+as if she had never seen it before, and she stood motionless, instead of
+flying down to meet the children.
+
+Suddenly there was a step on the stairs, and she heard Andora's agitated
+knock. She unbolted the door, and was strained to her friend's emaciated
+bosom.
+
+"My darling!" Miss Macy cried. "Remember you have your child--and me!"
+
+Lizzie loosened herself gently. She looked at Andora with a feeling of
+estrangement which she could not explain.
+
+"Have you spoken to my husband?" she asked, drawing coldly back.
+
+"Spoken to him? No." Andora stared at her in genuine wonder.
+
+"Then you haven't met him since he left me?"
+
+"No, my love. Is he out? I haven't met him."
+
+Lizzie sat down with a confused sense of relief, which welled up to her
+throat and made speech difficult.
+
+Suddenly light came to Andora. "I understand, dearest. You don't feel
+able to see him yourself. You want me to go to him for you." She looked
+about her, scenting the battle. "You're right, darling. As soon as he
+comes in I'll go to him. The sooner we get it over the better."
+
+She followed Lizzie, who without answering her had turned mechanically
+back to the window. As they stood there, the gate moved again, and
+Deering entered the garden.
+
+"There he is now!" Lizzie felt Andora's fervent clutch upon her arm.
+"Where are the letters? I will go down at once. You allow me to speak
+for you? You trust my woman's heart? Oh, believe me, darling," Miss Macy
+panted, "I shall know just what to say to him!"
+
+"What to say to him?" Lizzie absently repeated.
+
+As her husband advanced up the path she had a sudden trembling vision of
+their three years together. Those years were her whole life; everything
+before them had been colorless and unconscious, like the blind life of
+the plant before it reaches the surface of the soil. They had not been
+exactly what she dreamed; but if they had taken away certain illusions,
+they had left richer realities in their stead. She understood now that
+she had gradually adjusted herself to the new image of her husband as he
+was, as he would always be. He was not the hero of her dream, but he was
+the man she loved, and who had loved her. For she saw now, in this last
+wide flash of pity and initiation, that, as a solid marble may be made
+out of worthless scraps of mortar, glass and pebbles, so out of mean
+mixed substances may be fashioned a love that will bear the stress of
+life.
+
+More urgently, she felt the pressure of Miss Macy's hand.
+
+"I shall hand him the letters without a word. You may rely, love, on my
+sense of dignity. I know everything you're feeling at this moment!"
+
+Deering had reached the door-step. Lizzie continued to watch him in
+silence till he disappeared under the glazed roof of the porch below the
+window; then she turned and looked almost compassionately at her friend.
+
+"Oh, poor Andora, you don't know anything--you don't know anything at
+all!" she said.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Tales Of Men And Ghosts, by Edith Wharton
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