Having received your solicitor's letter concerning thelegacy under Mr. Lanyon's will, I came down last evening tosee my father. In the course of conversation he revealed tome facts which have literally stunned me. I must see you orwrite to you. But as these things are best unwritten,perhaps in the utterly unprecedented circumstances you wouldbe willing to bear the pain that such an interview mightcause you, and make an appointment to meet me today. I wouldsuggest this hotel. Perhaps I have little right to do so,but, I earnestly beseech you to believe in my good faith.Roderick Usher.
Sylvester read this letter, so uncharacteristic of the man as he had known him, with a recrudescence of implacable feeling. To meet him was hateful. The agony of the journey to Ayresford a week ago came upon him. He crumpled the letter tight in his hand.
“He was to wait for an answer, sir,” hazarded the servant, after a time.
The commonplace, as it often does, brought reaction. He scribbled a line, fixing the appointment at twelve.
He found Roderick pacing up and down the stiffly furnished and somewhat dingy private sitting-room of the White Hart Hotel. The two men brought suddenly face to face remained for a while in an embarrassed silence, each looking in the eyes of the other. For the first time Sylvester realised in all its significance the blood tie that bound them. This man was his brother. Grotesque and incongruous though it seemed, the fact was driven home to him as by some mighty blow. This man's mother was his mother,—the mother who had sung him to sleep as a little child, who had listened to his boyish confidence, who had been inwoven in all his early life, whose voice whose caress, whose fragrance, lingered vividly in all his senses, whose body and soul were unalienablyhis. A horrible jealousy seized him.
Roderick, though point-device in blue serge suit and saffron-silk tie, looked aged and careworn. The lines under his eyes had deepened. He had lost flesh, and his cheeks were flabby. He was the first to break the silence.
“It may be absurd for a man of forty to talk about his mother, but if I had had your advantages in that respect, I might have been a better man.”
Then Sylvester's jealousy vanished, and he remembered the wrong that had been done.
“My father did all that a human soul could do to make atonement,” said he.
“And mine did everything in his power to prevent it. Will you sit down?”
Roderick motioned Sylvester to a chair, and sat down near him.
“I don't pretend to love my father. I never had reason to. I am a bad lot, I know, but compared to him, I am the incarnation of virtue. When I forged the cheque, I was given to understand for the first time that my father had some mysterious hold over Mr. Lanyon. But, as God hears me, I never dreamed until last night of the true nature of the case. Do you believe me?”
“Yes,” said Sylvester; “I believe you.”
“Thank you,” returned Roderick; “now I know where I am.”
He lit a cigarette, having offered his case to Sylvester, who declined.
“It is now in my power,” said he, after enjoying the first two fragrant whiffs, “to restore the money I stole from you. You observe I have the grace to use the naked expression. Will you accept it?”
“Certainly,” said Sylvester. “It is but just.”
“Did you think I would repay you?”
“Frankly speaking, no.”
“And having heard my father's story last night, do you think I'll touch a penny of your father's money?” he cried, bringing his hand with a thump on the round centre-table. “My God! I would sooner die.”
“The balance above the three thousand is yours,” said Sylvester. “I cannot accept a gift from you.”
Roderick puffed violently at his cigarette, threw it away, and rose to his feet excitedly.
“I can't touch it. I have been a damned villain, I know. I was hard put to it, and I worked upon a girl's emotions so that I could marry her for her money. Then, by Heaven, I began to love her, finished by loving her madly, with an insensate passion. To get her, I committed a cowardly crime. I broke my parole, as it were, with you. I deserve every epithet of dishonour as regards that which you like to heap upon me, but to carry on this horrible, hideous blackmail—by God, I can't do it. Last night has turned me into a moral man. I'll forswear sack and live cleanly for the rest of my life. I could vomit with disgust. It isécourant,—makes one's heart retch! Do you know what I've found out? You asked me once whether my father didn't make me an allowance. That put me on the track last night. I cross-questioned, found out that for years and years Mr. Lanyon, besides submitting to my fathers extortion, had given him £400 a year to be handed to me as an allowance; and I've never in my life received a penny of it, so help me God, never! Your father has made atonement, every atonement. I learn that he has been sucked dry, and that there is nothing left for you. It is I who now must make atonement for my father. Could blackmail be more abject than his? Consider for one ghastly moment the nature of it. In the name of charity, for the sake of what is left of my manhood, take back all this money.”
He had delivered this harangue with his old fervour and declamatory gestures, and when he had ended he flung himself into an armchair and wiped his brow with his handkerchief. Suddenly he started again to his feet and seized a folded folio document lying on the table.
“See,” said he. “I've been down to Higginson the solicitor this morning, and executed a deed of gift, making the whole thing over to you, less the legacy duty. For Heaven's sake, take it and let me feel an honest man again.”
Sylvester read through the document. Then he folded it up and put it in his pocket.
“The three thousand I'll take,” he said. “The remainder, with your permission, I'll give to the Prisoners' Aid Society; my father took a keen interest in it.”
“Anything, so long as I don't touch it,” said Roderick, lighting another cigarette. “Ha! Now I feel free, and can take up the threads of life again. By the way, when you go, think as charitably of my father as you can. I've done with him for ever and ever, but I've explained him to myself. He is a perfect type of the non-moral being, the instinctive criminal. There's a family history which you as a physician would find interesting. To me as a poor devil of an artist, it is a bogey which only walks abroad in the night of my mind. I suppose I have a share in the family taint, but as I hope never to propagate my species, it will die with me.”
He rattled on in his vehement way, and once more Sylvester fell under the spell of his exuberant personality, preferring to listen than to speak. Roderick launched out into a forecast of his future. He would forswear sack, he repeated, and live cleanly, with Art for his chaste mistress. “I got an idea for a picture, this morning, that is going to revolutionise my existence,” said he. Sylvester's acceptance of the deed of gift was like the removal of a heavy stone that had held prisoner his elvish spirit. And the more he approached the Roderick of six months ago, the more did Sylvester wonder at the nature of the man. Yet his pocket held irrefutable proof of the man's sincerity. At last he rose and held out his hand. Roderick looked at him, and looked at the hand in astonishment; then he strode a pace forward and grasped it eagerly.
“You are a good fellow to shake hands with me,” said he.
The ring of genuine feeling touched Sylvester deeply.
“Let us bury the past,” he replied.
“On my side, God knows how willingly.”
“And whether we are friends or not, we'll remember that the same mother bore us.” Roderick bowed, his quick perception divining the cost at which the words were uttered.
“I shall always remember it,” he said soberly.
He accompanied his visitor down the stairs to the front porch of the old-fashioned hotel. The men shook hands again. Roderick disappeared in the gloom of the corridor, and Sylvester turned to see, on the other side of the street, Ella, out on some small shopping errand, watching him in amazement.
He crossed the road and walked by her side.
“Your question of this morning is answered,” he said.
“Thank you, Syl,” she replied.
“Perhaps I shall be able to keep Woodlands, after all.”
“I was praying for it,” she said significantly.
Two days afterwards Ella left for the south of France with Lady Milmo, and Sylvester returned to town to prepare his gloomy house for Dorothy's reception.
Two years passed and brought with them their changes, sudden and gradual. A few months after Matthew Lanyon's death, old Ebenezer Usher died of an apoplectic fit. Ruin was staring him in the face. Of all the moneys he had extorted only a few hundreds remained. Peter Vavasour & Co. and others of their bucket-shop confraternity had sucked him dry as he had sucked Matthew. Indignation at the wickedness of mankind killed him and he went to his own place. His effects were sold, and the considerable sum that was realised—for his collections of china, postage stamps, and book plates were remarkably fine—was handed over by Roderick, still zealous to atone, to Sylvester, who paid it into the funds of the Prisoners' Aid Society. And this was the end of Ebenezer Usher. The grass grows over the grave wherein he lies, some twenty yards away from his enemy.
No tombstone marks, or ever will mark, the spot. “He is not the kind of man whose memory one cares to perpetuate,” said his son.
Miss Lanyon lived at Woodlands, where sometimes Ella and sometimes Dorothy stayed with her; and now and then for change of scene went Sylvester. He could not realise the old man's dream, and live there, devoting himself to research, but it comforted him to know that the house had not passed into alien hands. His own home in Weymouth Street was gladdened by a child's presence, and the spirit of its desolation departed. Instinctively he felt that it was too gloomy for a child, and with the pathetic helplessness of an inartistic man who had never concerned himself about such things, he took her with him to choose new wall papers, curtains, and rugs. Perhaps the result was incongruous, but at any rate it was bright, and pleased the choosers mightily.
The effect of the great revolution in Sylvester's attitude to life gradually grew more apparent. The intense humanity of his profession won to his heart now that the barriers of ice were melted. The intellectual problem which it had been his duty to solve became the hurt to a suffering creature which it was his privilege to heal. A new tenderness softened his nature. The gift of speech came to him as by the miracle of the gift of tongues. To his great wonder, the society of ordinary kindly men and women, from which in a general way he had shrunk all his life through shyness and reserve, and which in positive misanthropy he had afterwards shunned, gradually appeared to him a sweet and pleasant thing, until he recognised it as a necessity in his existence. And old feelings, sweeter, sadder, infinitely deeper than of old, were reawakened.
How it came about he knew not. When he had parted from Ella after his father's funeral, he did not love her. He had realised the irrevocable loss of a happiness that might have been, and that was all. Then on her return from the south of France late in the spring he had seen her and spoken with her, and she had been kind. A month afterwards he had seen her again, and once more six months after that,—for they rarely met. And then he knew that she was the one woman in the world for him, and that the love for which he had kissed her years ago was as moonlight unto the sunlight of his present love.
Once more they had met, and he told her.
“How can I love you when you have done so much to hurt me?” she said.
“I don't ask for your love,” he urged.
“You do,” she replied with a smile of wisdom. “Don't deceive yourself, Syl.”
“Well, then, I will make you love me.”
“Don't speak like that,” she said with a shiver. “It is horrible to make a woman love. There is no woman made to love that does not repent it in shame and misery.”
“But you once did love me.”
“You have hurt me. Life has hurt me,” she said gently. “I don't mean to say that it was not partly my own fault, nor do I want to pose as an injured woman. But the fact remains, Syl, dear; and you must let time do what it can in the way of healing. If you care for me, see me a little oftener than you have done,—it will be good for both of us,—but don't speak of this again.”
“Am I to go through a term of probation?” he asked.
“Heaven forbid!” said Ella.
There the matter remained. They met more frequently, became fast friends, and Sylvester waited. And so the two years slipped by.
It was a hot August day, and Lady Milmo sat in the verandah of the little hotel at Vitznau at the foot of the Righi, with a novel open on her lap. Her eyes were fixed idly upon a little speck of a boat on the lake by whose sides rose rhythmically tiny silver flashes.
“Why don't you comeunexpectedlyupon us here?” she had written to Sylvester, of whose arrival in Zermatt a chance-met wandering acquaintance had told her. “You will find the Righimuchmore satisfactory than that silly Jungfrau. And you will find two people quite disposed to be very kind to you.”
So Sylvester had left his ice-axes and ropes and mountaineering boots at Zermatt, and had flown on the wings of hope to Vitznau, and there he was with Ella in the little boat on the lake.
Soon an approaching steamboat from Lucerne hid the tiny speck from Lady Milmo's view,-and gradually drew near. The inmates of the hotel came on to the verandah to watch the landing of the passengers, the morning's excitement. The gangway was thrust forward from the little jetty, and the crowd streamed ashore,—fresh English girls in straw hats, substantial fathers, anxious, lonely ladies with profusion of hand-baggage, Germans girt with satchel and vasculum, pacing sultanesquely in front of their womenkind, English parsons, happy and perspiring,—all amidst a sort of tangled undergrowth of umbrellas, and straps, and sticks, and alpenstocks purchased in Lucerne with the burnt-in names of inaccessible peaks circling round them. Some proceeded at once to the tiny railway station where the grotesquely slanting train awaited them. Others poured on to the verandah and took possession of the hotel. The gong fordejeunersounded. Lady Milmo looked anxiously at her speck, which had become visible again, and then at her watch. The occupants of the boat gave no sign of returning shorewards. They would be late fortable d'hôte. Lady Milmo waved her pocket-handkerchief until she was the last person on the verandah, and then she went into thesalle-a-mangeralone, feeling somewhat injured.
Meanwhile, the two in the boat had been rowing idly over the lake. Ella lay back on the cushions of the stern with half-closed eyes, while Sylvester sculled lazily. She had been very glad to see him when he arrived the evening before, and her heart had given him a little unbidden throb of welcome. His altered attitude towards her, as well as dim gleams of revelation of some fundamental change within him, had caused her to forget, or at least look back unresentfully upon old wrongs. At times an inflection of the voice, a sudden gentleness of manner, brought his father vividly back to her. It seemed as if, by some strange metempsychosis, the old man's spirit had entered into the son, and was gradually unfolding. He was still the worthiest man she knew. She lived her old life amid the jargon of culture in her aunt's house, and it wearied her, and she longed for something nobler. In Sylvester she found at least reality. She beheld him a sane, sincere, strong man, around whose life was gathered an indeterminate pathos.
The sun shone bright from a deep blue sky flecked here and there with an infinitely distant wisp of cirrus. The tiny promontories jutted out their green into the lake. Far away rose the glittering white snow-peaks, and close at hand the mass of the Righi with white specks of habitations nestling in its sides. The water plashed pleasantly against the side of the boat. Ella murmured of the loveliness around.
“The day seems to have got into my heart,” she said. “If you looked into it, you would see everything as in a camera. I wish it would last.”
“Why shouldn't it?” asked Sylvester, leaning on his sculls.
“We are going away to-morrow.”
“There is a way in which I at least could keep this in my heart for ever,” said he.
“I would that could be a way for me too,” she murmured.
“Why not, dear? I have waited for you.”
She looked round upon the tremulous beauty of sky and lake and mountain with a wistful sense of its transience. Her heart was very womanly.
“It would be a way for me, if there were not something between us, Syl,” she answered,—“something that keeps us apart. I don't know what it is.”
“If I could remove it—?” he began.
Their eyes met. He suddenly took to his oars and began to pull with vigorous strokes.
“We are going to land,” he said.
They were silent untilThey were silent until they had reached the foot of one of the little promontories. Then, finding a convenient landing-place, he clambered out and helped her ashore.
“Let us sit down, dear,” he said, when he had made fast the boat. “I have a great deal to tell you.”
And there in the cool shade of the pine-trees, with the quivering noon-tide haze between them and the great stretch of lake, he told her all his story: of Constance and Leroux, of the awful frost that had frozen his heart, of his father and the elder Usher, of his own lack of right to the name he bore, of his father's death-bed. He spoke continuously in an earnest undertone, although their solitude was broken only by the twitter of birds and the soft whirring of summer insects. Ella, sitting a little way apart, kept silent and never stirred save to look up at him from time to time with piteous wonder in her eyes. And as the old man's tragedy was unfolded before her, the tears brimmed over and fell down her cheeks. Thus all the dark places were made light to her. The man's soul was revealed. She felt humbled, of small account, as though admitted unworthy into some holy place of sacred things, where sin and suffering were washed away by a divine pity. He ended abruptly.
“That's all the story,” said he; “you must judge us both as you think best.”
For a moment she sat silent, as her heart was too full for speech; but her hand, that had some while since found its way into his, gave him a soft sign of sympathy. At last words came.
“I understand all, Syl,—both you and him.”
“That means forgiving all.”
“Yes, all.”
“Thank God!” he whispered.
There was a silence. Their souls held communion, the barrier between them being broken down. We have passed through pain and sorrow, ran the mutual message, and our hearts have been made exceeding pitiful, and love at last dwells therein. And for a season time stood still.
Ella looked through the mist of her tears at the splendour of the day. Suddenly the mist cleared, and the splendour was eclipsed by the dawning of a newer glory. Sylvester saw it in her eyes. With a cry of passionate joy he flung his arms around her, and she gave her life to him utterly.
They rowed back across the lake, and the beauty of earth enfolded them. Once he paused, and their eyes drank deep of each other. At length she smiled.
“The world is a glorious place,” she said.