“I think it best that our partnership should cease and I find lodging elsewhere. You will understand my reasons. Dolly comes first with me, that’s all. It may have been your error; I can’t think it was your willful fault; but that she would have refused you without some good reason I can’t believe. Your manner seems to point to the suspicion that somehow her happiness is threatened. I may be wrong, but I intend to set myself to find out; and until some explanation is forthcoming, I think it best that we should live apart. I shall call here to-morrow during the dinner hour and arrange about having my things moved and settle matters as far as I am concerned. Your friend,Duke Straw.”
“I think it best that our partnership should cease and I find lodging elsewhere. You will understand my reasons. Dolly comes first with me, that’s all. It may have been your error; I can’t think it was your willful fault; but that she would have refused you without some good reason I can’t believe. Your manner seems to point to the suspicion that somehow her happiness is threatened. I may be wrong, but I intend to set myself to find out; and until some explanation is forthcoming, I think it best that we should live apart. I shall call here to-morrow during the dinner hour and arrange about having my things moved and settle matters as far as I am concerned. Your friend,
Duke Straw.”
I stood long with the letter in my hand.
“Well, it’s best,” I muttered at last, “and I thought he would do it. He’s my friend still, thank heaven, for he says so. But, oh, Jason, your debt is accumulating!”
The week that followed was a sad and lonely one to me. My romance was ended—my friend parted from me—my heart ever wincing under the torture of self-reproach.
As to the first, it would seem that I should have no great reason for insuperable regret. The situation had been made for, not by me; I was free to let my thoughts revert unhampered to the object of my first and only true love.
That was all so; yet I know I brooded over my loss for the time being, as if it were the greatest that could have befallen me. Such is human inconsistency. So he who, vainly seeking some large reward, condescends half-disdainfully to a smaller, is altogether disproportionately vexed if the latter is unexpectedly denied him.
I went about my work in a hopeless, mechanical manner that only scarcely concealed the bitter ache my heart endured. Occasionally, at rare intervals, I came across Dolly, but formally only and never to exchange a word. Furtively glancing at her when this happened, I noticed that she looked pale, and, I thought, not happy, but this may have been nothing but fancy, for my hasty view was generally limited to half-profile. Of me she took no heed, desiring, apparently, the absolute close of our old intercourse, and mere pride precluded me from making any further effort toward an explanation.
Would that even then I had been wise or noble enough to force the barrier of reserve. God knows but I might have been in time to save her. Yet maybe my attitude was not altogether unjustified. To put me on the footing of a formal stranger was heavy punishment for a fault committed under motives that were anything, at least, but base.
With Duke my intercourse was confined to the office and to matters of business. He showed no unfriendly spirit toward me there and no desire for a resumption of our old terms. He never, in public or private, touched upon the subject that was nearest both our hearts, or alluded to it in any way. If I was conscious of any melancholy shadow towering between us it was not because he sought to lend to its features the gloom that must be enwrapping his own soul.
At last the week ended, and the silence, that had lain black and ominous as a snake along it, was awakened and reared itself, poisonous for a spring. Yet its voice spoke up musical at first.
It was Saturday afternoon, and I was walking home toward my lodgings in a very depressed frame of mind, when a step came behind me and Duke fell into step alongside.
“Renny,” he said, “I think it right to tell you. I have taken the privilege of an old friend and spoken to Dolly on a certain subject.”
I nodded. The mere fact was a relief to me.
“We could only exchange a few words, but she has promised to come out with me to-morrow; and then, I hope, I shall learn more. What time will you be at home?”
I told him all day, if there was a chance of his turning up.
“Very well,” he said; “then I will call in upon you some time or other. Good-by.”
He seemed to be on the point of going, but to alter his mind, and he suddenly took my hand and pressed it hard.
“Are you lonely, old fellow?”
“Very, Duke—and I deserve to be.”
“It’s for the best? You agree with me?”
“Quite.”
He looked sorrowfully in my face, wrung my hand a second time and walked off rapidly.
It was the expression of his I ever after remembered with most pathetic heart-sickness and love. I never saw it in his eyes again—never again.
I rose upon the Sunday morning restless still and unrefreshed. An undefinable feeling of ominous expectancy would not let me sit quiet or read or do anything but lend my mind to extravagant speculations and pace the room up and down in nervous irritability.
At last, thoroughly tired out, I threw myself into an easy-chair and dozed off from sheer exhaustion. I could not have slept many minutes, when a clap in my ears awoke me. It might have been an explosive burst of thunder, so loudly it slammed upon my senses. Yet it was nothing more than the closing of the room door.
Then I struggled to my feet, for Duke stood before me, and I saw that his face was white and menacing as death’s own.
“Get up!” he cried, in a harsh, stern voice. “I want to ask you something.”
I faced him and my heart seemed to suddenly swerve down with a sickly sensation.
“What is it?” I muttered.
“She’s gone—that’s all!”
“Gone?”
“She never met me this morning as she promised. I waited an hour—more. Then I grew frightened and went to her lodgings. She had left the evening before, saying she wasn’t coming back. A man came to fetch her and she went away with him. Do you understand?—with him!”
“With whom?” I asked, in a confused, reeling manner; yet I knew.
“I want you to tell me.”
“How can I, Duke?”
“I want you to say what you have done with your trust? There has been something going on of late—some secret kept from me. Where is that brother of yours?”
“I know no more than you do.”
“I shall find out before long. The cunning doesn’t exist that could keep him hidden from me if—if he is a party to this. Why are you silent? I can read it in your eyes. They have met, and it must have been through you.”
“Before God, it wasn’t!”
“Then they have!” He put his hand to his face and staggered as if he had been struck there.
“Oh!” he gasped; “the horror of what I dreaded!”
Then he came closer and snarled at me:
“Here’s a friend, out of all the world! So patronizing to accept the poor little treasure of my life and soul, and so royal to roll it in the mud! Was this a put-up affair between you?”
“You are hateful and unjust!” I cried, stung beyond endurance. “He forced himself upon us last Sunday. I was brutal, almost, in my efforts to get rid of him. But for some reason or other, Dolly—Miss Mellison—took his side. When I found so, I left them in a huff and repented almost immediately. But, though I sought far and near, I never came across them again till evening.”
He listened with a black, gloomy impatience.
“You acted well, by your own confession,” said he. “You played the part of a true friend and lover by leaving her alone for a moment only in the company of that paragon.”
“I oughtn’t to, I know.”
He gave a high, grating laugh.
“But, putting me on one side,” I began, when he took me up with the most intense acrid bitterness.
“Why can’t I, indeed—you and all your precious kith and kin? Why did I ever save you from being knocked on the head in that thieves’ garden? I was happy before—God knows I might have been happy in another way now. You’ve proved the viper on my hearth with a vengeance. Put you on one side? Ah, I dare say that would suit you well—to shirk the responsibility of your own act and leave the suffering to others.”
“I have suffered, Duke, and always shall. I won’t gainsay you—but this hurts me perhaps only one degree less than it does you. Why put the worst construction on it?”
He gave another cruel laugh.
“Let’s have your theory of her vanishing without a word to me,” he said.
“At least you can’t be certain that it—it was my brother.”
“How perspicacious of you! You don’t think so yourself, do you? Or that I should have meekly accepted that woman’s statement without some inquiry as to the appearance of the interesting stranger?”
He dropped his cruelly bantering manner for one hard as iron and ferocious.
“Let’s stop this double-faced foolery. I want his address of you.”
“I haven’t got it, you know.”
“You can’t guess at it?”
“Not possibly. What would you do if you had it?”
“What do you think? Call and offer my congratulations, of course.”
“Don’t be a madman. You know nothing for certain. Wait and see if she doesn’t turn up at the office as usual to-morrow.”
He seemed to think a moment, and then he threw up his hands with a loud, wailing moan.
“Lost!” he cried. “In my heart I know it.”
Did I not in mine? It had rung in my ears all night. I took a step toward him, greatly moved by his despairing, broken tone, but he waved me back fiercely.
“I curse the day,” he cried in bitter grief, “that ever I came across you. I would have let you rob me—that was nothing to her happiness; but now——”
“Let him look to himself,” he went on after a pause, in which he had mastered his emotion. “After to-morrow—I will wait till then—but afterward—the world isn’t wide enough to keep us apart. Better for him to run from an uncubbed tigress than this twisted cripple!”
He tossed one arm aloft with a wild, savage gesture and strode heavily from the room.
Dolly never came to work the next morning, but there arrived a little letter from her to Mr. Ripley, giving notice, that was all, with no address or clew to her whereabouts, and an intimation that it was understood she sacrificed her position—pitiful heaven, for what?
My employer tossed the note to me indifferently, asking me to see about the engagement of a fresh hand, if necessary. He little guessed what those few simple words meant to two of his staff, or foresaw the tragedy to which they were the prelude.
When the dinner hour came I followed Duke out and put the scrap of paper into his hand without a word. He was not unprepared for it, for he already knew, of course, that his worst apprehensions were realized by the non-appearance of the girl at her usual place in the office.
He read it in silence, and in silence handed it back to me. His face in twenty-four hours seemed to have grown to be the face of an old man. All its once half-sad, half-humorous thoughtfulness was set into a single hard expression of some dark resolve.
“Well,” he said, suddenly, stopping in his walk and facing me, for I still kept pace with him.
“What do you intend doing, Duke?”
“I have one mission in life, Mr. Trender. Good-afternoon to you.”
I fell back and watched him go from me. Maimed as I was myself, how could I in any way help him to cure his crueler hurt?
But now began a curious somber struggle of cross purposes. To find out where Jason had sunk his burrow and hidden the spoils of his ugly false sport—there we worked in harness. It was only when the quarry should be run down that we must necessarily disagree as to the terms of its disposition.
For myself: A new despairing trouble had been woven into my life by the hand that had already wrought me such evil. Its very touch had, however, made wreck of an impression that had been in a certain sense an embarrassment, and my movements became in consequence less trammeled. Let me explain more definitely, if indeed I can do so and not appear heartless.
Dolly, innocent, bewitching and desirable, had so confused my moral ideas as to imbue them with a certain sweet sophistry of love that half-deceived me into a belief in its fundamental soundness. That was done with. Dolly dethroned, earthly, enamored of a brazen idol could be no rival to Zyp. My heart might yearn to her with pity and a deep remorse that it was I who had been the weak, responsible minister of her perversion, but the old feeling was dead, never to be revived. I longed to find her; to rescue her from the black gulf into which I feared she had leaped; to face the villain who had bruised her heart and wrench atonement from him by the throat, as it were. Not less it was my duty to warn him; stand between him, worthless as he was, and the deadly pursuit alert for his destruction.
For Duke: I must judge him as he revealed himself to me, and baffle, if possible, the terrible spirit of what I dared not name to myself. Think only that at one wicked blow he was deprived of that whole structure of gentle romance that had saved his moral life from starvation!
Therefore it was that during the after hours of work I became for long a restless, flitting ghost haunted by a ghost. By street and rail and river, aimless apparently, but with one object through all, we went wandering through the dark mazes of the night and of the city, always hoping to light upon that we sought and always baffled. Theaters, restaurants, music halls, night shows and exhibitions of every description—any place that was calculated to attract in the least a nature responsive to the foppery of glitter or an appeal to the senses—we visited and explored, without result. Gambling dens—such as we could obtain the entree to—were a persistent lodestone to our restlessness; and here, especially, was I often conscious of that shadow of a shade—that dark ghost of my own phantom footsteps—standing silent at my elbow and watching—watching for him who never came.
Whithersoever we went the spur of the moment’s qualm goaded us. Any little experience, any chance allusion, was sufficient to suggest a possibility in the matter of the tendency of a lost and degenerate soul. Now we foregathered on the skirt of some fulsome and braying street preacher’s band; now suffered in a music hall under the skittish vapidity of a “lion comique”; now, perhaps, humbled our hot and weary pride in the luminous twilight of some old walled-in church, where evening service brought a few worshipers together.
I say “we,” yet in all this we acted independently. Only, whether in company or apart, the spirit of one common motive linked us together, and that so that I, at least, never felt alone.
So the weeks drew into months and Dolly herself was a phantom to my memory. By day the mechanism of our lives moved in the accustomed grooves; by night we were wandering birds of passage flitting dismally over waste places. More than once on a Sunday had I taken train to Epping, driven by the thought that some half-forgotten sentiment might by chance move other than me to the scene of old pleasant experiences. But she never came. Her “seasick weary bark” was nearing the rocks, and the breakers of eternity were already sounding in her ears.
Why postpone the inevitable or delay longer over description of that pointless pursuit that was to end only in catastrophe and death?
Christmas had come and gone with me—a mockery of good will and cheer—and a bitter January set in. That month the very demon of the east wind flew uncontrolled, and his steely sting was of a length and shrewdness to pierce thickest cloth and coverlet, frame and lung and heart itself.
One evening I had swallowed my supper and was preparing for my nightly prowl. Duke had remained at the office overtime, and my tramp was like to be unhaunted of its familiar. I had actually blown out the lamp, when his rapid footstep—I knew it well—came up the stairs, and in a moment the door was thrown open with a crash and I heard him breathing in the room.
“He’s gone!” he ejaculated in a quick, panting voice.
“No; I’m here, Duke!”
“My God! Renny—do you hear? Come—come at once. No—light the lamp; I’ve something to show you.”
I struck a match, with shaking hand, and put it to the wick. As the dull flame sputtered and rose I turned and looked at my friend. The expression of his face I shall never forget till I die. It was bloodless—spectral—inhuman; the face of one to whom a great dread had been realized—a last hope denied.
He held out to me a little soiled and crumpled sheet of paper. I took it, with a spasm of the heart and breath that seemed to suffocate me. My eyes turned from and were fascinated by it at once.
“You had better read,” he said. “It’s the last chapter of your own pretty romance. Make haste—I want to get to business.”
It was from her, as I had foreseen—a few sad words to the old good friend who had so loved and protected her:
“I must let you know before I go to die. I couldn’t meet you that morning—what a time ago it seems! He wouldn’t let me, though I cried and begged him to. I don’t know now what made me do it all; how he upset my faith in Renny and turned my love to himself in a moment. I think he has a dreadful influence that made me follow him and obey him. It doesn’t matter now. I went to him, that’s enough; and he’s broken my heart. Please ask Renny to forgive me. Perhaps if he had had a little more patience with me I might have acted different—but I can’t be certain even of that. I’m going to kill myself, Duke, dear, and before I do it I just want to say this: I know now you loved poor Dolly all the time. How I know it I don’t understand, but somehow it’s quite clear. Oh, what have I thrown away, when I might have been so happy! You were always good to me, and I thank you with my last breath. Don’t hurt him, Duke; I don’t think he understands the difference to me. But he always promised to be a faithful lover—and yesterday I found that he’s married already. That’s why I’m going to do it.”
“I must let you know before I go to die. I couldn’t meet you that morning—what a time ago it seems! He wouldn’t let me, though I cried and begged him to. I don’t know now what made me do it all; how he upset my faith in Renny and turned my love to himself in a moment. I think he has a dreadful influence that made me follow him and obey him. It doesn’t matter now. I went to him, that’s enough; and he’s broken my heart. Please ask Renny to forgive me. Perhaps if he had had a little more patience with me I might have acted different—but I can’t be certain even of that. I’m going to kill myself, Duke, dear, and before I do it I just want to say this: I know now you loved poor Dolly all the time. How I know it I don’t understand, but somehow it’s quite clear. Oh, what have I thrown away, when I might have been so happy! You were always good to me, and I thank you with my last breath. Don’t hurt him, Duke; I don’t think he understands the difference to me. But he always promised to be a faithful lover—and yesterday I found that he’s married already. That’s why I’m going to do it.”
The paper dropped from my hand. Duke picked it up with an evil laugh and thrust it into his breast pocket.
“Married!” I muttered.
“Oh!” he cried; “it’s all one for that! That’s a family matter. The question here goes beyond—into the heart of this—this death warrant.”
He struck savagely where the letter lay and stood staring at me with gloating eyes.
“Duke—are you going to murder him?”
“I’m going to find her. Let that do for the present—and you’ve got to help me.”
“Where are we to look? Did the letter give an address?”
“No. She kept her secret to the last. It was a noble one, I swear. There’s a postmark, though, and that’s my clew. Hurry, will you?”
I seized my hat and stick.
“Duke—for the love of heaven, why must it be too late even now?”
“Because I know it is. Doesn’t that satisfy you? I loved her—do you understand it now for the first time? The fiend tread on your heels. Aren’t you ever coming?”
I hurried after him into the street. A clap of wind struck and staggered us as if it had been water. Beating through the night, its icy fury clutched at us, stinging and buffeting our faces, until it seemed as though we were fighting through an endless thicket of brambles. Struggling and panting onward—silent with the silence of the lost—we made our way by slow degrees to the low ground about Chelsea, and presently came out into a freer air and the black vision of the river sliding before us from night into night.
“Duke,” I whispered, awfully—“is this what you fear?”
“Follow!” he cried. “I fear nothing! It’s past that!”
By lowering factory and grimy wall; by squalid streets peeled of uncleanliness in the teeth of the bitter blast; by low-browed taverns, that gushed red on us a moment and were gone, he sped with crooked paces, and I followed.
Then he stopped so suddenly that I almost stumbled against him, and we were standing at the mouth of a shadowy court, and overhead a hiccoughing gas jet made a gibbering terror of his white face.
“Where are we?” I said, and he answered:
“Where we naturally take up the clew—outside a police station.”
Into a dull, gusty room, barren of everything but the necessities of its office, we walked and stopped.
Distempered walls; a high desk, a railed dock, where creatures were put to the first question like an experimental torture; black windows high in the wall and barred with network of wire, as if to break into fragments the sunshine of hope; a double gas bracket on an arm hanging from the ceiling, grimly suggestive of a gallows; a fireplace whose warmth was ruthlessly boxed in—such was the place we found ourselves in. Its ministers figured in the persons of a half-dozen constables sitting officially yawning on benches against the walls, and looking perplexingly human shorn of their helmets; and in the presence of a high priest, or inspector, and his clerk who sat respectively at the desk and a table placed alongside of it.
The latter rose upon our entrance and asked our business.
“It’s plain enough,” said Duke. “I have received, by post, an hour ago, a letter from a young woman threatening suicide. I don’t know her address, but the postmark is this district.”
The officer motioned us to the higher authority at the desk.
“May I see it?” said the latter.
My companion produced the letter and handed it over. Throughout his bearing and behavior were completely collected and formal—passionless altogether in their studied unemotionalism.
The inspector went through the poor little scrawl attentively from first word to last. No doubt he was a kindly family man in private. Officially these pitiful warrants of heartbreaks were mere items in his day’s business.
When he had finished he raised his eyes, but not his head.
“Sweetheart?” he said.
“No,” answered Duke, “but an old friend.”
“Renny?” asked the inspector, pointing a pen at me.
“Yes.”
“She ran away?”
“Yes.”
“Who with?”
“This man’s brother.”
“How long ago?”
“Three months, about.”
“And you have never seen her since?”
“No.”
“Nor him?”
“No.”
“And don’t know where they lived?”
“No—or I shouldn’t be here.”
The inspector caressed his short red beard, looked thoughtfully again at the letter a moment or two, placed it gently on the desk and leaned forward.
“You’d better take a man and hunt up the waterside. She hasn’t come ashore here.”
“You think she means it?”
“I think—yes; you’d better go and look.”
“By water, I mean?”
“Yes—by water. That’s my opinion.”
He called to one of the seated men and gave him certain directions. A minute later we were all three in the street outside.
What happened or whither we went during that long night remains only in my memory the ghastly shadow of a dream. I can recall the white plate of the moon, and still the icy wind and the spectral march onward. This seemed the fitting outcome of our monotonous weeks of wandering—this aimless corpse-search on the part of two passionate fools who had failed in their pursuit of the living woman. To my sick fancy it seemed the monstrous parody of chase—an objectless struggle toward a goal that shifted with every step toward any determined point.
Still we never stopped, but flitted hopelessly from station to station, only to find ourselves baffled and urged forward afresh. I became familiar with rooms such as that we had left—rooms varying slightly in detail, but all furnished to the same pattern. Grewsomer places knew us, too—hideous cellars for the dead, where clothes were lifted from stiff yellow faces and from limbs stuck out in distorted burlesque of the rest that is called everlasting.
Once, I remember, it came upon us with a quivering shock that our mission was fulfilled; a body had been brought in—I forget where—the body of a young woman. But when we came to view it it was not that that we sought.
Pitiful heaven, was our tragedy, then, but a common fashion of the dreadful waterway we groped our passage along? How was it possible in all that harvest of death to find the one awn for our particular gleaning?
But here—though I was little conscious of it at the time—an impression took life in me that was to bear strange fruit by and by.
Dawn was in the air, menacing, most chill and gloomy, when we came out once more upon the riverside at a point where an old rotting bridge of timber sprawled across the stream like a wrecked dam. All its neighborhood seemed waste ground or lonely deserted tenements standing black and crookedly against a wan sweep of sky.
In the moment of our issuing, as if it were a smaller splinter detached from the wreck, a little boat glided out from under the bridge and made for a flight of dank and spongy steps that led up from the water not ten yards from where we stood.
Something in the action of the dim figure that pulled, or the other that hung over the stern sheets of the phantom craft, moved our unwearying guide to motion us with his arm to watchfulness and an immediate pause. In the same instant he hollowed his hand to his mouth and hailed:
“Any luck, mate?”
The man who was rowing slowed down at once and paddled gingerly to within a few yards of the steps.
“Who be you?” he growled, like a dog.
Our friend gave his authority.
“Oh,” said the fellow. “Yes; we’ve found one.”
“What sex, my man?”
“Gurl!”
I could have cried out. Something found my heart and seized it in a suffocating grip.
“Where was it?”
“Caught yonder in the timbers.”
I reeled and clutched at Duke, but he shook me off sternly. I knew as surely as that the night was done with that here our search ended.
That I stood quaking and shivering as nerveless as a haunted drunkard; that I dared not follow them when they moved to the steps; that Duke’s face was set like a dying man’s as he walked stiffly from me and stood looking down upon the boat with a dreadful smile—all this comes to me from the grim shadows of the past. Then I only knew a huddled group—a weighted chamber of shapes with something heavy and sodden swung among them—a pause of hours—of years—of a lifetime—and suddenly a hideous scream that cleft like a madman’s into the waste silence of the dawn.
He was down upon his knees by it—groveling, moaning—tearing tufts of dead wintry grass with his hands in ecstasy of pain—tossing his wild arms to the sky in impotent agony of search for some least grain of hope or comfort.
I hurried to him; I called upon his name and hers. I saw the sweet white face lying like a stone among the grass.
Wiser than I, the accustomed ministers of scenes such as this stood watchful by and waited for the fit to pass. When its fury was spent, they quietly took up their burden once more and moved away.
I had no need then to bid my comrade command himself. He rose on the instant from the ground, where he had lain writhing, and fiercely rejecting all offer of assistance on my part, followed in the wake of the ghastly procession.
They bore it to the nearest station and there claimed their reward. Think of it! We, who would have given our all to save the living woman, were outbidden by these carrion crows who staked upon the dead!
Again at this point a lapse comes into my memory. Out of it grows a figure, that of Duke, that stands before me and speaks with the horrible smile again on its lips.
“You had better go home,” it says.
“Duke—why? What comes next? What are you going to do?”
“What does it matter? You had better go home.”
“I must know. Was there anything upon the—upon the body? Duke—was there?”
“There was a letter.”
“Who from?”
“Go home, I tell you.”
“I can’t—I won’t—I must save you from yourself! I—Duke——”
He strikes at me—hits me, so that I stagger back—and, with an oath, he speeds from me and is gone.
I recover myself and am on the point of giving mad chase, when a thought strikes me and I rush into the building I have been all this time standing outside the door of.
Tearing up the steps, I almost fell into the arms of our guide of the long, hideous night.
“Can I see it?” I cried.
“Steady, sir,” he said, staying and supporting me with a hand. “What’s up now?”
“I want to see it—there was a letter—I——”
“All property found on the body is took possession of.”
“He saw it, I tell you.”
“Your friend, there? So he did—but he gave it over.”
“I’ll give it over. I don’t want to keep it, man. There was an address on it—there must have been, I swear; and if you don’t let me know it, there’ll be murder—do you understand?—murder!”
No doubt he did understand. In such matters a policeman’s mind is intuitive.
“Come along, then,” he said; “I’ll see what can be done,” and, holding me along the elbow in the professional manner, he led me through the building to a sort of outhouse that stood in a gloomy yard to the rear.
Pushing open a door, he bid me enter and wait while he went and communicated with the inspector.
The room I found myself in was like nothing so much as a ghastly species of scullery; built with a formal view to cleanliness and ventilation. All down its middle ran a long zinc-covered table, troughed slightly at the side and sloping gently like a fishmonger’s slab. Its purpose was evident in the drenched form that lay on it covered with a cloth.
And to this sordid pass had come she, the loving and playful, with whom I had wandered a few short weeks ago among the green glades of the old forest. Now more than the solemnity of death pronounced us apart.
I shivered and drew back, and then was aware of a man washing his hands at a sink that stood to one end of the room.
He turned his head as he washed and looked at me.
“Now, my man, what is it?” he said.
He was lean, formal-faced and spectacled—a doctor by every uninviting sign of the profession.
I told him my business and referred shrinkingly to the thing lying hidden there.
“There isn’t, I suppose, any—any hope whatever?”
“Oh, dear, no; not the least.”
He came toward me pruning and trimming his cold finger-nails.
“She has been in the water, I should say, quite eight hours, or possibly nine.”
He pulled the cloth down slightly, with a speculative motion of his hand, so as to expose the white, rigid face. I had no time to stop him before its sightless eyes were looking up at me.
“Oh, Dolly! Dolly! Such a fearful little woman, and yet with the courage to bring yourself to this!”
Suddenly, through the heart of my wild pity pierced a thought that had already once before stirred unrecognized in me.
“Doctor,” I said, staring down on the poor lifeless face, “do the drowned always look like that?”
“Certainly they do, more or less.”
“But how more? Is it possible, for instance, for a person to half-drown and then seemingly recover; to be put to bed nearly himself again, and yet be found dead in the morning?”
“How can I say? In such a case there must be gross carelessness or quite unexpected complications.”
“But if I tell you I once heard of this happening—was witness, indeed, of the fact?”
The doctor lifted his shoulder, adjusted his spectacles and shrugged himself with an awkward posture of skepticism.
“How did he look?” he said.
“Dreadful—swollen, horribly distorted. His face was black—his hands clenched. He seemed to have died in great pain.”
He gave a little scornful sniff.
“Do you want my opinion on that?” he cried. “Well—here it is: It was a case for the police. No drowned man ever looked after that fashion.”
“Then you think he must have come to his death by other means, and after he was put to bed?”
“I haven’t the least doubt about it whatsoever, if it was all as you say.”
I gave a thin, sudden cry. I couldn’t help it—it was forced from me. Then, of my own act, I pulled the cloth once more over the dead face. It had spoken to me in such a manner as its love had never expressed in life.
“You have vindicated me, my sweetheart of the old days,” I murmured. “Good-by, Dolly, till I may witness your love that is undying in another world.”
I think the doctor fancied that the trouble of the night had turned my brain. What did it matter what he thought—what anybody thought now? I stood acquitted at the bar of my own conscience. In my first knowledge of that stupendous relief I could find no place for one other sentiment but crazy gratitude.
As I stood, half-stunned in the shock of emotion, the officer I awaited entered the room bearing in his hand a slip of paper.
“The letter’s detained,” he said, “but this here’s the address it’s wrote from, and you’d better act upon it without delay.”
With a tremendous effort I swept together my scattered faculties and took it from him.
It was not much information that the paper contained—an address only from a certain “Nelson terrace” in Battersea—but such as it was I held it in common with Duke, whose sole advantage was a brief start of me.
Calling back my thanks to the friendly constable, I hurried into the street and so off and away in wild pursuit.
Still as I ran a phantom voice went with me, crying: “You did not kill him—your brother Modred.”
The rapture of it kept time to my hurrying footsteps; it flew over and with me, like the albatross of hope, and brought the breeze of a healthfuler promise on its wings; it spoke from the faces of people I passed, as if they wished me to know as I swept by that I was no longer in their eyes a man of blood.
“You did not kill him!” it sung in my brain—“you did not kill him—you did not kill him”—then all in a moment, with a dying shock: “Who did?”
I stopped, as if I had run against a wall. I swear, till then no shadowy thought of this side of the question had darkened my heart in passing.
Still, impelled to an awful haste, I beat the whole horror resolutely to one side and rushed on my way. “Presently—presently,” I muttered, “I will sit down and rest and think it over from beginning to end.”
By that time I was in a street of ugly cockney houses stretching monotonously on either side. I was speeding down it, seeking its name, and convinced from my inquiries that I could not be far from my destination, when something standing crouched against a low front garden wall, where it met the angle of a tall brick gate post, caught the tail of my eye and stopped me with a jerk. It was Duke, and I had run him down.
He spat a curse from his drawn, white lips, as I faced him, and bade me begone as I valued my life.
“Duke,” I panted, watchful of him, “I do value it now—never mind why. I value it far above his you have come to take. But he is my brother—and you were once my friend.”
“No longer—I swear it,” he cried, blazing out on me dreadfully. “Will you go while there’s time?”
Then he assumed a mockery more bitter than his rage.
“Harkee!” he whispered. “This isn’t the place. I came here to be out of the way and rest. I’ll go home by and by.”
“Will you come with me now?”
“With you? Haven’t I had enough of you Trenders? I put it to you as a reasonable man.”
As he spoke the wail of a young child came through the window of an upper room of the house adjoining. At the sound he seized my wrists in one of his hands with the grip of iron forceps.
“Listen there!” he muttered. “That’s his child, do you hear? He perpetuates his wicked race without a scruple. Wouldn’t it be a good thing now to cut down the poisonous weed root and branch?”
I stared at him in horror. Hardly till this moment had the fact of Jason’s being married recurred to me since I first heard of it the night before.
“His child?” I echoed.
“What’s the fool gaping at? Would his pretty deception be complete without a wife and baby in the background to spur his fancy?”
The door of the adjoining house was opened and a light footfall came down the steps. I saw a devil leap into Duke’s eyes, and on the instant sprung at him.
He had me down directly, for his strength was fearful, but I clutched him frantically as I fell, and he couldn’t shake me off.
Struggling—sobbing—warding my head as best I could from his battering blows—I yet could find voice to cry from the ground—“Jason, in God’s name, run! He’s going to murder you!”
Up and down on the pavement—bruised, bleeding, wrenched this way and that, but never letting go my hold, I felt my strength, already exhausted by the long toiling of the night, ebbing surely from me. Then in the moment of its final collapse the dreadful incubus was snatched from me, and I rose half-blinded to my feet to see Duke in the grasp of a couple of stalwart navvies, who on their way to work had come to my assistance.
Trapped and overcome, he made no further struggle, but submitted quietly to his captors, his chest rising and falling convulsively.
“Don’t let him go!” I panted; “he means murder!”
“We’ve got him fast enough,” said one burly fellow. “Any bones broke, master?”
“No,” said I; “I’m only a bit bruised.”
“Renny,” said the prisoner, in a low, broken voice, “have you ever known me lie?”
“Never. What then?”
“Tell them to take their hands off and I’ll go.”
“That won’t do. You may come back.”
“Not till the inquest’s over. Is that a fair offer? I can do nothing here now. I only ask one thing—that I may speak a word, standing at the gate, to that skulking coward yonder. I swear I won’t touch him or pass inside the gate.”
I turned to the two men.
“I’ll answer for him now,” I said. “He never says what he doesn’t mean. You can let him go.”
They did so reluctantly, remonstrating a little and ready to pounce on him at once did he show sign of breaking his parole.
He picked up his hat and walked straight to the gate. Jason, who had been standing on the upmost step of the flight that led to the open door, regarding the strange struggle beneath him with starting eyes, moved a pace or two nearer shelter, with his head slewed backward in a hangdog fashion.
“Mr. Trender,” said Duke, in a hideous, mocking voice, “Miss Dolly Mellison sends her compliments and she drowned herself last night.”
I could see my brother stagger where he stood, and his face grow pale as a sheet.
“I won’t discuss the matter further just now,” went on the cripple, “as I am under promise to these gentlemen. After the inquest I may, perhaps, have something to say to you.”
He swept him a grotesque, ironical bow, another to us, and walked off down the street.
When he was out of sight, I turned to the men, thanked them warmly for their assistance, recompensed them to the best of my ability and ran up the steps to the house.
I found my brother inside, leaning white and shaky against the wall.
I shut the door and addressed myself to him roughly.
“Come,” I said. “There’s a necessity for action here. Where can we talk together?”
“How did you find me?” he said, faintly. “It isn’t true, is it?—no—not there”—for I was turning to the door of a back room that seemed to promise privacy.
“Where, then?” I said, impatiently. “Hurry, man! This is no time for dallying.”
He tried to pull himself together. For the moment he seemed utterly unnerved.
“Jason,” cried a voice from the very room I had approached.
I dropped my stick with a crash on the floor.
“Who’s that?” I said, in a loud, wavering voice.
The handle turned. He came weakly from his corner to put himself before me. It was too late, for the door had opened and a woman, with a baby in her arms, was standing on the threshold.
And the woman was Zyp.
In the first shock of the vision I did not realize to its full extent the profoundness of my brother’s villainy or of my own loss. Indeed, for the moment I was so numbed with amazement as to find place for no darker sentiment in my breast.
“Why, it’s Renny!” said Zyp, and my heart actually rose with a brief exultation to hear my name on her lips once more.
The game once taken out of his hands, Jason, with characteristic sang froid, withdrew into the background, prepared to let the waters of destiny thunder over his head.
The very complication of the situation reacted upon him in such manner, I think, as to brace him up to a single defiance of fate. From the moment Zyp appeared he was almost his brazen self again.
“Zyp,” I muttered, “what are you doing here?”
“What a wife generally does in her husband’s house, old fellow—getting in the way.”
It was my brother who spoke, and in a moment the truth burst upon me.
“You are married?” I said.
“Yes,” said Zyp; “this is our baby.”
“You dog!” I cried—— I turned upon him madly. “You hound! You dog!”
Zyp threw herself upon her knees on the threshold of the room.
“Yes,” she cried, “he is, and I never knew it till two nights ago, when the girl found her way here. She didn’t know he had a wife and it broke her heart. I can understand that now. But you mustn’t hurt him, Renny.”
“The girl has drowned herself, Zyp.”
“And not for you, Renny? He said it was you she loved and that he was the mediator. Was that a lie?”
“It was a lie!”
“I thought then it was. I never believed him as I believed you. But tell me you won’t hurt him—he’s my husband. Swear on this, Renny.”
With an infinitely pathetic action she held toward me the little bundle she had clasped all through in her arms. It woke and wailed as she lifted it up.
“It cries to you, too,” she said; “my little Zyp, that pleads for her daddy.”
Jason gave a short, ironical laugh.
Sick at heart, I motioned the young mother to rise.
“Not till you swear,” she said.
“I swear, Zyp.”
She got up then and led the way into the little dingy sitting-room from which she had issued. A cradle stood by the fire and an empty feeding bottle lay on the table. How strange it seemed that Zyp should own them!
Jason followed as far as the door, where he stood leaning.
Then in the cold light of morning I saw how wan was the face of the changeling of old days; how piercing were her eyes; how sadly had the mere animal beauty shrunk to make way for the soul.
“You are brown, Renny,” she said, with a pitiful attempt at gayety. “You look old and wise to us poor butterflies of existence.”
“Oh,” said Jason. “I see you are set for confidences and that I’m in the way. I’ll go out for a walk.”
“Stop!” I cried, turning on him once more. “Go, as far as I am concerned, and God grant I may never see your face again. But understand one thing. Keep out of the way of the man I fought with just now for your sake. He promised, but even the promises of good and just men may fail under temptation. Keep out of his way, I warn you—now and always.”
“I’m obliged to you,” he answered, in a high-strung voice; “it seems to be a choice of evils. I prefer evil anyway in the open air.”
I said not a word more and he left us, and I heard the front door close on him. Then I turned to Zyp with an agony I could not control, and she was crooning over her baby.
“Zyp, I oughtn’t to say it, I know. But—oh, Zyp! I thought all these years you might be waiting for me.”
“Hush, Renny! You wrote so seldom, and—and I was a changeling, you know, and longed for light and pleasure. And he seemed to promise them—he was so beautiful, and so loving when he chose.”
“And you married him?”
“Dad wouldn’t hear of it. Sometimes I think, Renny, he was your champion—dad, I mean—and wanted to keep me for you; and the very suspicion made me rebellious. And in the end, we were married at a registrar’s office, there in Winton, unknown to anybody.”
“How long ago was that?”
“It was last February and sometime in August dad found it out and there was a scene. So Jason brought me to London.”
“Why, what was he doing to keep a wife?”
“I know nothing about that. Such things never enter my head, I think. He always seemed to have money. Perhaps dad gave it to him. He was afraid of Jason, I’m sure.”
“Zyp, why didn’t you ever—why did none of you ever write to me about this?”
“Why, dad wrote, Renny! I know he did, the day we left. He wanted you to come home again, now he was alone.”
“To come home? I never got the letter.”
“But he wrote, I’m certain, and didn’t Jason tell you?”
“He told me nothing—I didn’t even know he was married till yesterday.”
I bent over the young wife as she sat rocking her baby.
“Zyp, I must go. My heart is very full of misery and confusion. I must walk it off or sleep it off, or I think perhaps I shall go mad.”
“Did you love that girl, Renny?”
“No, Zyp. I have never had but one love in my life; and that I must say no more about. I have to speak to you, however, about one who did—a fierce, strong man, and utterly reckless when goaded to revenge. He is a fellow-workman of mine—he used to be my best friend—and, Zyp, his whole unselfish heart was given to this poor girl. But it was her happiness he strove after, and when he fancied that was centered in me—not him—he sacrificed himself and urged me to win. And I should have tried, for I was very lonely in the world, but that Jason—you know the truth already, Zyp—Jason came and took her from me; that was three months ago, and last night she drowned herself.”
Zyp looked up at me. Her eyes were swimming in tears.
“I suppose a better woman would leave such a husband,” she said, with a pitiful sigh, “but I think of the little baby, Renny.”
“A true woman, dear, would remain with him, as you will in his dark hour. That is coming now; that is what I want to warn you about in all terrible earnestness. Zyp, this fierce man I told you about came here this morning to kill your husband. I was in time to keep him back, but that was only once. A promise was forced from him that he would do nothing more until the inquest is over. That promise, unless he is dreadfully tempted, he will keep, I am sure. But afterward Jason won’t be safe for an hour. You must get him to leave here at once, Zyp.”
She had risen and was staring at me with frightened eyes. I could not help but act upon her terror.
“Don’t delay. Move now—this day, if possible, and go secretly and hide yourselves where he can’t find you. I don’t think Jason will be wanted at the inquest. In any case he mustn’t be found. I say this with all the earnestness I am capable of. I know the man and his nature, and the hideous wrong he has suffered.”
I wrote down my address and gave it to her.
“Remember,” I said, “if you ever want me to seek me there. But come quietly and excite the least observation you can.”
Then gently I lifted the flannel from the tiny waxen face lying on her arm, and, kissing the pink lips for her mother’s sake, walked steadily from the room and shut the door behind me.
As I gained the hall, Jason, returning, let himself in by the front door. He looked nervous and flustered. For all his bravado he had found, I suppose, a very brief ordeal of the streets sufficient.
“I should like a word with you,” I said, “before I go.”
“Well,” he answered, “the atmosphere seems all mystery and righteousness. Come in here.”
He preceded me into the front room and closed the door upon us. Then I looked him full in the face.
“Who killed Modred?” I said.
He gave a great start; then a laugh.
“You’re the one to answer that,” he said.
“You lie, as you always do. My eyes have been opened at last—at last, do you hear? Modred was never drowned. He recovered and was killed by other means during the night.”
His affectation of merriment stopped, cut through at a blow. A curious spasm twitched his face.
“Well,” he muttered, looking down, away from me, “that may be true and you none the less guilty.”
“A hateful answer and quite worthy of you,” I said, quietly. “Nevertheless, you know it, as well as I do, to be a brutal falsehood.”
I seized him by the shoulder and forced him to lift his hangdog face.
“My God!” I whispered, awfully, “I believe you killed him yourself.”
It burst upon me with a shock. Why should he not have done it? His resentment over Zyp’s preference was as much of a motive with him as with me—ten thousand times more so, taking his nature into account and the immunity from risk my deed had opened to him. I remembered the scene by the river, when Zyp was drowning, and my hand shook as I held him.
He sprung from me.
“I didn’t—I didn’t!” he shrieked. “How dare you say such a thing?”
“Oh,” I groaned, “shall I hand you over to Duke Straw, when the time comes, and be quit of you forever?”
“Don’t be a cruel brute!” he answered, almost whimpering. “I didn’t do it, I tell you. But perhaps he didn’t die of drowning, and I may have had my suspicions.”
“Of me?”
“No, no—not really of you, upon my oath; but some one else.”
“And yet all these years you have held the horror over my head and have made wicked capital out of it.”
“I wanted the changeling—that was why.”
I threw him from me, so that he staggered against the wall.
“You are such a despicable beast,” I said, “that I’ll pollute my hands with you no longer. Answer me one thing more. Where’s the letter my father wrote to me when you were leaving Winton?”
“It went to your old lodgings. The man handed it to me to give to you when I called there.”
“And you tore it up?”
“Yes. I didn’t want you to know Zyp and I were married.”
“Now, I’ve done with you. For Zyp’s sake I give you the chance of escaping from the dreadful fate that awaits you if you get in that other’s way. I warn you—nothing further. For the rest, never come near me again, or look to me to hold out a finger of help to you. Beyond that, if you breathe one more note of the hideous slander with which you have pursued me for years, I go heart and soul with Duke in destroying you. You may be guilty of Modred’s death, as you are in God’s sight the murderer of that unhappy child who has gone to His judgment.”
“I didn’t kill him,” he muttered again; and with that, without another word or look, I left him.
The inquest was over; the jury had returned a merciful verdict; the mortal perishing part of poor, weak and lovable Dolly was put gently out of sight for the daisies to grow over by and by.
Jason had been called, but, not responding, and his presumed evidence being judged not necessarily material to the inquiry, had escaped the responsibility of an examination and, as I knew, for the time being at least, a deadlier risk. Mention of his name left an ugly stain on the proceedings, and that was all.
Now, night after night, alone with myself and my despair, I sat brooding over the wreck and ruin of my life. Zyp, so far as this life was concerned, could never now be mine; and full realization of this had burst upon me only at the moment when the moral barrier that had divided me from her was broken down. That wound must forevermore eat like a cancer within me.
Then, in the worst writhing moments of my anguish, a new savage lust of sleuth began to prickle and crawl over me like a leprosy. If all else were taken from me I still had that interest to cheer me through life—the hounding of my brother’s murderer. This feeling was curiously intermingled with a revival in my heart of loyalty to Modred. He had been my friend—at least inextricably kin to me in a common cause against the world. When I turned to the vile figure of the brother who survived, the dead boy’s near-forgotten personality showed up in a light almost lovably humorous and pathetic. My fevered soul bathed itself in the memory of his whimsicalities, till very tenderness begot an oath that I would never rest till I had tracked down his destroyer.
And was Jason that? If it were so, I could afford to stand aside for the present and leave him to the mercy of a deadlier Nemesis he had summoned to his own undoing.
Set coldly, at the same time, on a justice that should be passionless, I bore in mind my brother’s hint of a suspicion that involved some other person whom he left nameless. This might be—probably was—a mere ruse to throw me off the scent. In any case I should refuse to hold him acquitted in the absence of directer evidence.
Still I could not stay a certain speculative wandering of my thoughts. If not Jason—who then? There were in the house that night but the usual family circle and Dr. Crackenthorpe. What possible temptation could induce any one of them to a deed so horrible? Jason alone of them had the temptation and the interest, and, above all, the nature to act upon a hideous impulse. On Jason must lie the suspicion till he could prove himself innocent.
It was not until about the third night of my gloomy pondering that the sudden resolution was formed in me to leave everything and return to my father. The fact of Zyp’s reference to the letter he had sent me had been so completely absorbed in the tense excitement of the last few days that when in a moment it recurred to me I leaped to my feet and began pacing the room like a caged animal that scents freedom.
So the old man in his loneliness desired me back again. Why not go? The accustomed life here seemed impossible to me any longer. The notoriety attaching to these pitiful proceedings was already making my regular attendance at the office a sore trial. Duke had sent in his resignation the very morning of his attack on me before Jason’s house. All old ties were rent and done with. I was, in a modest way, financially independent, for Ripley’s generous acknowledgment of my services, coupled with my own frugal manner of life, had enabled me to put into certain investments sufficient to produce an interest that would keep me, at least, from starvation.
And, in addition, how could I prosecute my secret inquiries better than on the very scene of the deed? I would go. My decision was sudden and final. I would go.
Then and there I sat down and wrote a brief letter to my father.
“I have only within the last few days,” I said, “learned of the letter you wrote me three months ago. Jason destroyed it lest I should find out he was married to Zyp. I now tell you that I am ready to do as you wish—to return and live with you, if you still desire it. In any case, I can endure my present life here no longer. Upon receipt of a word from you I will come.”
As I wrote, the wind, bringing clouds of rain with it, was booming and thundering against the window. Soft weather had succeeded to the ice-breathing blasts of a few days back, and I thought of a lonely grave out there in the night of London, and of how just now the water must be gushing in veins and runnels over its clayey barrow.
Dolly—Dolly! May it wash clean your poor wounded heart. “After life’s fitful fever” you sleep well; while we—oh, shamed and fallen child! Which of us who walks straightly before our fellows would not forego passion and revenge, and all the hot raptures of this blood-red world, to lie down with you deep in the cool, sweet earth and rest and forget?
I went out and posted my letter. The streets were swept clean of their human refuse. Only a few belated vehicles trundled it out against the downpour, setting their polished roofs as shields against the myriad-pointed darts of the storm.
Feeling nervous and upset, I was approaching my own door, when a figure started from a dark angle of the wall close by and stood before me.
“Duke!” I cried.
He was drenched with rain and mud—his dark clothes splashed and saturated from boot to collar. His face in the drowned lamplight was white as wax, but his eyes burned in rings of shadow. I was shocked beyond expression at his dreadful appearance.
“What have you been doing with yourself?” I cried. “Duke! Come in, for pity’s sake, and rest, and let us talk.”
“With you?” he muttered, in a mad, grating voice. “With any Trender? I came to ask you where he’s in hiding—that’s all.”
“I know no more than you do.”
“You lie! You’re keeping his secret for him. What were her claims compared to family ties—devil’s ties—such as yours? You know, but you won’t give him up to me.”
“I don’t know.”
He raised and ground his hands together in exquisite passion.
“They drive me to madness,” he cried, “but in the end—in the end I shall have him! To hold him down and torture the life out of him inch by inch, with the terror in his eyes all the time! Why, I could kill him by that alone—by only looking at him.”
He gloated over the picture called up in his soul. If ever demon’s eyes looked from a human face, they looked from his that night.
“Duke,” I whispered in horror, “you have terrible cause for hate, I know; but oh, think of how one grain of forgiveness on your part would stand you with—with God, Duke.”
He gave a wretched, sickening laugh.
“By and by,” he cried. “But tell me first where he’s hiding!”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Duke——” and I held out a yearning hand to him.
At that he struck at me savagely and, running crookedly into the night, was lost in the rainy darkness.
So much of strange incident had crowded with action the long years of my life in London, that, as I walked from the station down into the old cathedral town, a feeling of wonder was on me that the hand of time had dealt so gently with the landmarks of my youth. Here were the same old gates and churches and houses I had known, unaltered unless for an additional film of the fragrant lichen of age. The very ruins of the ancient castle and palace were stone by stone such as I remembered them.
There was frost in the air, too; so that sometimes, as I moved dreamily onward, a sense as if all that gap of vivid life were a vanished vision and unreality moved strongly in me. Then it seemed that presently I should saunter into the old mill to find my father and Zyp and Jason sitting down as usual to the midday meal.
My appearance was so changed that none of all who would formerly have somewhat sourly acknowledged my passing with a nod now recognized me.
Suddenly I caught sight of Dr. Crackenthorpe, moving on in front of me in company with another man. The doctor was no more altered than his surroundings, judged at least by his back view. This presented the same long rusty coat of a chocolate color—relic of a bygone generation, I always thought—cut after a slightly sporting fashion, which he wore in all my memory of him throughout the winter; half-Wellington boots, into which the ends of his trousers were tucked, and a flat-topped, hard felt hat, under the brim of which his lank tails of brick-colored hair fell in dry, thin tassels.
The man he walked with seemed old and bent, and he moved with a spiritless, hesitating step that appeared to cause the other some impatience.
I was so far from claiming knowledge of this second person that, when he turned his head aside a moment to gaze upon something as I came near, it was with a most painful shock that I discovered it to be my father.
I hurried up, calling to him. He gave a great start—they both did—and turned round to meet me.
Then I was terribly taken aback to see the change that had come over him. He, whom four years ago I had left hale, self-reliant, powerful in body and intellect, was to all appearance a halting and decrepit old man, in whom the worst sign was the senile indecision of his eyes.
He came at me, holding out both his hands in welcome with trembling eagerness, and I was much moved to see some glint of tears furrowing his cheeks.
“Renalt, my boy—Renalt, my boy!” he cried in a gladsome, thin voice, and that was all; for he could find words for no more, but stood looking up in my face—I topped him now—with a half-searching, half-deprecating earnestness of perusal.
“Well, dad,” I answered, cheerfully—for I would give no hint of surprise before the other—“you said ‘come,’ and here I am.”
“A brave fellow—a brown, strong man!” He was feeling me over as he spoke—running his thumb down the sinews of my hands—pinching the firm arm in my sleeve.
“A strong man, my boy,” he said. “I bred him—he’s my son—I was the same myself once.”
“You find your father altered—eh, Mr. Bookbinder?”
“If he is at all, doctor, it’s nothing that won’t improve on a little management and wholesome company.”
“Well, he’s had plenty of mine.”
“Then his state’s accounted for,” I said.
The long man looked at me with an expression not pleasant.
“Ay,” he said. “There’s the old spirit forward again. We’ve done very well without it since the last of the fry took themselves off.”
“It’s not company you batten on, doctor,” I said. “But loneliness breeds other evils than coin-collecting.”
He stared at me a moment, then took off his hat with an ironical sweep.
“I mustn’t forget my manners to a London rattle,” he said. “No doubt you pride yourself on a very pretty wit, sir. But while you talk my lunch grows cold; so I’ll even take the liberty of wishing you good-morning.”
He walked off, snapping his fingers on either side of him.
When he was gone, I took my father’s arm and passed it through mine.
“Strong boy,” he said, affectionately—then whispered in my ear: “That’s a terrible man, Renalt! Be careful before you offend him.”
I looked at him in startled wonder. This was not how he was used to speak.
“I hold him as cheap as any other dog,” said I.
He patted my hand with a little sigh of comfortable admiration.