“Manuscripts which our readers pronounce on favorably I always go through myself before accepting them,” Sibley assured his visitor. “But of course, there are a good many that—er—they don’t think worth bothering me with.”
“There’s no reason for me to hope that mine willdeserve a better fate,” Denin said. “All the same it would—be a great thing for me if you should bring it out—publish it on both sides of the water. It isn’t as if I expected money for my work. I don’t. I shouldn’t evenwantmoney. On the contrary—”
Sibley cut him short with a warning. “We’re not the sort of publishers who print books that authors have to bribe us to put on the market. If a book’s worth our while to publish, it’s worth our while to pay for it.”
Denin laughed. “I wasn’t going to suggest any arrangement of that kind,” he apologized. “I’m too poor for such a luxury. I’ve just come to New York, third class, and I must ‘hustle’ to make my living. But I wrote this on shipboard, while I had the time—”
“You wrote a whole book on shipboard!” exclaimed Sibley.
Denin was taken aback by the publisher’s surprise. “Well, it was a slow boat—twelve days. And my mind was full of this story. I had to write it. I kept at it night and day. But for all I know theremayn’t be enough to make a book. That would be a bit of a blow! I’m as ignorant as a child of such things.”
“About how many thousand words does your manuscript amount to?” Sibley asked, glancing at the rather thin brown packet tied with a string.
“I haven’t the remotest idea!” Denin admitted. “It didn’t occur to me to count words.”
“H’m!” muttered the publisher. “You say it’s a story—a novel?”
“It’s a sort of a story,” its writer explained. “I may as well mention—you’re sure to guess if you glance over my work—that I’ve been fighting in France. I was pretty badly knocked out—some months ago. And you can see from the look of me that I can’t be of use as a soldier while the war lasts, if ever. Otherwise I shouldn’t be in New York now. One doesn’t chuck fighting in these days unless one’s unfit. While I was in hospital, I got to thinking how a man might feel in certain circumstances—(not like my own, of course; but one imagines things)—and—well, the idea rather took holdof me. Here it is. I don’t expect you to read the thing yourself. It’s not likely that—”
“I promise you so much,” said Sibley, with suppressed eagerness. “Iwillread it myself before handing it over to any one else.”
The scarred face flushed; and again came that sudden light as from a secret glitter of jewels. “I can’t thank you enough!” Denin almost stammered.
“Don’t thank me yet. That would be very premature!” Sibley smiled generously; but even if he had wished to do so, he couldn’t have patronized the fellow. “You mustn’t be too impatient. I’m a busy man, you know. I’ll have a go at your manuscript as soon as I can, but you mustn’t be disappointed if you don’t hear for a week or ten days. By the way, you’d better give me a card with your name and address.”
Denin laughed again, a singularly pleasant laugh, Sibley thought it. “I haven’t such a thing as a card! My name is—John Sanbourne. And if I may have a scrap of paper, I’ll write down my address. I forgot to put it on the manuscript. Imayn’t be at the same place when you’re ready to decide. But I’ll tell them to forward the letter, and then I’ll call on you. I’d rather do that than let the story go through the post. I’ve got—fond of it in a way—you see!”
Sibley did see. And the man being what he was, the fondness struck the publisher as pathetic, like the love of Picciola for his pale prison-flower. Reason told Sibley that the ten or twelve days work of an amateur (one who had lived to thirty or so, without being moved to write) would turn out mere twaddle. Yet instinct contradicted reason, as it often did with Sibley. He had a strong presentiment that he should find at least some remarkable points in the work of this scarred soldier, whose square-jawed face seemed to the secretly romantic mind of Sibley a mask of hidden passions.
Only a few times since he became head of the house had Eversedge Sibley consented to see a would-be author whose fame was all to make. The few he had received had been fascinating young women of society with influence among his friends, famousbeauties, or noted charmers; but he had never taken so deep an interest in one of them as in the poverty-stricken, steerage passenger. He went as far as the reception room in showing his guest out; and then instead of going down to his motor, which would be waiting for him, let it wait. He returned to his office, and looked again at the address which the author had laid on his parcel of manuscript.
“John Sanbourne!” Eversedge Sibley said to himself, aloud. The man’s face was as sincere as it was plain, nevertheless Sibley was somehow sure that his real name was not Sanbourne. He was sure that the inner truth of the man, if it could but be known, was a contradiction of the rough and strange outside; and he wished so intensely to get at the hidden inner side that he could not resist opening the parcel there and then.
Never had Eversedge Sibley seen such a manuscript. He was used to clearly typed pages of uniform size, as easy to read as print. This was written partly with pencil, partly with pen and ink, apparently three or four different kinds of pens, eachworse than the other. The paper, too, consisted of odds and ends. The whole thing suggested poverty and the meager condition of a steerage passenger. But this squalor, which in most circumstances would have caused Sibley to fling down the stuff in fastidious disgust, sent a thrill through him. No ordinary man with ordinary things to say could have had the courage to struggle through such difficulties, to any desired end. The longing to tell this story, whatever it was, must have been strong in the man’s soul as the urge of travail in the body of a woman.
In spite of the mean materials, the writing was clear, and suggested—it seemed to the mood of Sibley—something of the man’s strength and intense reserve.
“’The War Wedding,’” he read at the top of the first page. “Heavens, I hope it’s not going to be in blank verse!”
It was not in blank verse. He had to read only the first lines to assure himself of that.
The story began with the description of a garden. It was simply done, but it painted a picture, and—praisebe to the powers, there were no split infinitives nor gush of adjectives! Eversedge Sibley saw the garden. He was the man who walked in it, and met the girl who came down the stone steps between the blue borders of lavender. The story became his story. For an hour he forgot his office, his waiting chauffeur, and everything else that belonged to him.
So he might have gone on forgetting, if Stephen Eversedge, his junior partner and cousin, had not peeped anxiously in at the door. “They said you’d gone away and then come back. I thought I’d just ask if anything was the matter,” he excused himself to the master mind.
“The matter is, we’ve got hold of the most wonderful human document—good God, yes, andsouldocument!—that any house in this country or any other has ever published!” The words burst out from Sibley like bullets from amitrailleuse.
CHAPTER VI
Denin hardly knew what to think of the telegram which came next morning. It asked him to call at once on Mr. Sibley; but Denin, warned that the manuscript story could not be read for a week or more, did not dream that the publisher had already raced through it. His fear was that a mere glance at the first page had been enough, showing the skilled critic that the work lacked literary value; or else that the bulk was insufficient to make a book. Mr. Sibley might, in kindness, wish to end the author’s suspense, and put him out of misery.
When the message arrived, Denin was reading and marking newspaper advertisements. He meant to go without delay to several places of business that offered more or less suitable work; but he was ready to risk missing any chance, no matter how good, when the fate of his ewe lamb was at stake.He was too despondent at the thought of its rejection to plan placing it elsewhere, but he could not bear to lose time in reclaiming it.
He felt, as he was led once more into Sibley’s private office, as if he had to face a painful operation without anesthetics, so sensitive had he come to be on the subject of his story—the manuscript of his heart, written in the blood of his sacrifice. There lay the familiar pages on the desk, all ready, he did not doubt, to be wrapped up and handed back to him. He had so schooled himself to a refusal that the publisher’s first words made his head swim. He could not believe that he heard aright.
“Well, Mr. Sanbourne, I congratulate you!” Sibley said, getting up from his desk-chair and holding out a cordial hand. “We congratulate ourselves on the chance of publishing your book.”
Denin took the hand held out and moved it up and down mechanically, but did not speak. Following the publisher’s extreme graciousness his silence might have seemed boorish, but Sibley knew how to interpret it. He realized that the other wasstruck dumb, and he felt a thrill of romantic delight in the situation, in his own august power to confer benefits. He was not conducting himself as a business man in this case, but he knew by sureness of instinct that the strange amateur would take no mean advantage of his confessed enthusiasm.
“We think,” he went on, “that you have written something very original and very beautiful. Without being sentimental, it’s full of that kind of indescribable sentiment which goes straight to the heart. It will be a short book, only about fifty thousand words, or even less; but that doesn’t matter, because a word added or a word left out would make a false note. The thing’s an inspiration. You’ve got a big success before you. You ought to be a happy man, Mr. Sanbourne.”
“You make me feel as if I were in a dream,” said Denin.
“That’s the way your story has mademefeel,” said Sibley. “Really, your method has an extraordinary effect. Talking of dreams, it’s almost asif you’d written the whole story in some strange, inspired dream.”
“Perhaps I did write it so,” Denin said, more as if he spoke to himself than to another. “I had no method—consciously. The story just came.”
“One feels that, and it’s the most compelling part of its charm,” said Sibley. “Well, now I’ve paid you your due of appreciation. Sit down, and let us talk business.”
“Business?” Denin echoed, rather stupidly. But he accepted the chair his host offered, and Sibley too sat down.
“Yes, business,” the publisher cheerily repeated. “We should like to rush the book out as soon as possible. It’s too late to have it set up and given to our spring travelers to take round and show to the trade—which is one of the most valuable ways of advertising, I assure you. But in an immense country like America that means months of traveling before a book appears. Yours has a specially poignant interest at the moment, and I have so much faith in its power that I believe it can advertise itself. Ofcourse I don’t mean that we won’t give it big publicity in the newspapers. We shall spread ourselves in that way, and spend a lot of money.”
“And can you get the book out soon in England, too?” asked Denin.
“Oh, yes. We’ll produce here and there simultaneously, and do it in a record rush, if you can promise to stay on the spot and read proofs.”
“I’ll do whatever you wish,” said Denin.
“Now about the question of money,” Sibley went on, exquisitely and literally “enjoying himself.” “Some people call me hard as nails, a regular skinflint. And so I am, with those who try to squeeze me. I don’t think you’ll have any such complaint to make. Your name is unknown, but I believe in your book and I want to be generous with you. What do you say to an advance payment of three thousand dollars, with fifteen per cent. royalty for the first ten thousand sales, and twenty per cent. after that?”
“But,” stammered Denin, astounded. “I told you yesterday I didn’t want payment. That wastrue, what I said then. It would seem a kind of sacrilege to take money for such a book—a book I wrote because I wanted to—”
“I don’t see that at all,” Sibley cut in dryly. “You are the first author I—or any other publisher, I should think—ever had to urge to accept hard cash. But you’re probably an exception to a good many rules! We can’t take your book as a present, you know! So if you want it published you’ll have to come round to our terms.”
“You mean that?” asked Denin. “You won’t bring out my story if I refuse your money?”
“I do mean that, though I should hate to sacrifice the book. And I honestly believe that many people would be happier for reading it.”
“Very well then,” Denin answered. “I’ll accept the money and thank you for it. I want my book to come out, more than I want anything else—that—that can possibly happen.”
To a man who had lived from hand to mouth as John Sanbourne had since Sir John Denin died, three thousand dollars seemed something like a fortune.He had lost his old sense of proportion in life, and had almost forgotten how it felt to have all the money he wanted. Perhaps he forgot more easily than most men of his class, for he had never cared greatly for the things which money alone can buy. His tastes had always seemed to his friends ridiculously simple, so simple as to be dangerously near affectation; and as a small boy he had announced firmly that he would “rather be a gardener in a beautiful garden, than one of those millionaires who have to do their business always in towns.” Now, when he had recovered from the first shock of accepting money for the book of his heart, he began to reflect how to plan his life. The thought that he could have a garden was a real incentive, for working in a garden would save him from the unending desolation of uselessness, when the last proofs were corrected and there was no longer any work to do on his story.
Barbara and Mrs. Fay had both talked to John Denin about their old home in California, and with the knowledge that he could afford it a keen wishwas suddenly born in John Sanbourne to make some kind of a home for himself in the country where Barbara had lived. She was named, her mother had told him, after Santa Barbara. The girl had been born near Santa Barbara, and had grown up there to the age of thirteen, when her father had died and their place had been sold. After that, the mother and daughter had gone to Paris. Denin recalled with crystal clearness all the girl’s warm, eager picturing of her old home, for he remembered scenery and even descriptions of scenery with greater distinctness than he remembered faces. He had often thought (until he met Barbara, and fell in love) that he cared more for nature and places and things than he could ever care for people, except those of his very own flesh and blood. He knew differently now, but it seemed to him that he would be nearer finding peace in Barbara’s home-country than anywhere else in the world.
There was no danger that she or her mother might some day appear and meet him face to face, to the ruin of Barbara’s dream of happiness with Trevord’Arcy. Mother and daughter had said that they never wished to go back, now that the old ties were broken. When occasionally they returned to America, they spent their time in Washington and New York; but with Barbara married to Trevor d’Arcy, and mistress in her own right of Gorston Old Hall, all interests would combine to keep mother and daughter in England. John Denin’s ghost might, if it chose, safely haunt the birthplace of his lost love.
The day that the last proof-sheet of “The War Wedding” was corrected, Sanbourne said good-by to Eversedge Sibley and started for California. He could not afford to travel by the Limited or any of the fast trains, so there were many changes and waits for him, and he was nearly a week on the way; but when a man has lost or thrown over the best things in his life there is the consolation that none of its small hardships seem to matter. Besides, he had Santa Barbara to look forward to; and Denin told himself that, things being as they were, he was lucky to have anything to look forward to at all.
When he reached the end of the journey at last it was almost like coming to a place he had known in dreams, so clearly did he recognize the mountains whose lovely shapes crowded towards the sea. Barbara had all their names by heart and treasured their photographs. He remembered her stories of the islands, too, floating on the horizon like boats at anchor; and the trails of golden kelp seen through the green transparence of the waves, like the hair of sleeping mermaids. In the same way he knew the big hotel with its mile-long drive bordered with flaming geraniums; he knew the old town and—without asking—how to go from there to the Mission. Also he knew that, on the way to the Mission, he would find the place which Barbara had cared for most until she fell in love—not with him—but with Gorston Old Hall.
He limped perceptibly still, and could not walk far without pain, so he decided to be extravagant for the first time since “coming into his money” and hire a small, cheap motor-car. It was driven by its small, cheap owner, a young man with a ferociousfund of information about Santa Barbara, and every one who had ever lived there.
“Heard of the Fay place?” he echoed Denin’s first question. “Well, I should smile! Why, me and Barbie Fay are about the same age,” he plunged on, so violently that no interruption could have stopped him. “Not that we were in the sameset. Not much! But a cat can look at a king. And any boy can look at any girl, I guess. Gee! That little girl was someworthlookin’ at! Her mother thought she was too good for us plain Americans, so she took her off to Europe and clapped her in a convent, after the old man died. They’ve never been back this way since, nor won’t be now. The girl’s been married twice, I was readin’ in the papers. Once to some English lord or other who left her the same day, and got himself killed in France; and the second time, just a few weeks ago, to a cousin on her mother’s side—a Britisher, too. There was an interview with the mother in theSan Francisco Call, I saw. One of our California journalists over there in the war-zone got it—quite a good scoop. Mrs.Fay said it was an old romance between Barbie and this Captain-What’s-his-name. But we never seen him here. I guess he’s English, root and branch. Good thing for that ‘old romance’ they could make sure the other chap was killed all right, all right, wasn’t it? Some of them poor fellows gets blown to bits so you can’t tell one from t’ other, they say. But the girl’s mother mentioned to ourCallreporter, that they knew the husband’s body by a stylograph pen in a gold case, which was her own last present to him. If it hadn’t been for that little thing, found in a rag or two left of the feller’s coat, Barbie wouldn’t have dast married again, I bet. Say, that’s one of them anecdotes they put under the heading of ‘Too Strange not to be True!’ ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is strange,” Denin repeated mechanically. It was strange, too—above all strange—that he should have had to come to Barbara’s birthplace to learn this detail casually. A thousand times he had wondered how they had identified John Denin’s body with enough certainty to take it back to England and give it a funeral with military honors.Perhaps, if he had not come to Santa Barbara and in Santa Barbara happened to stumble upon this loquacious fellow with the motor-car to hire, he might have gone through all the rest of his life without knowing. And another strange thing was that he had lent the stylographic pen—Mrs. Fay’s last present—to a man who wanted to write a letter just before the battle. That man, who had been killed, was possibly still reported “missing,” while John Denin’s wife, assured of his death by a peculiarly intimate clue, had been able to take her happiness without fear. If Barbara’s mother had not given him the pen, he would not now be numbered among the dead, but would have been free to go back to his wife of an hour, and perhaps even teach her to love him in the end.
Well, all that didn’t bear thinking of now! He tried, as he had tried a hundred times—but never so poignantly—to hold in his heart the memory of flaming happiness worth all the pain of living through the burnt-out years: the happiness he had put into the pages of his “War Wedding.”
With some people who had known Barbara he would have liked to talk of her, but not with this crude youth who spouted her praises from a mouth full of chewing gum. Denin answered a pointed question of the chauffeur’s by saying that he had enquired about the Fay place because he heard it was worth seeing. He might like to buy a little property somewhere near if it could be got.
“You bet it can be got!” was the prompt answer. “That is, if you want something littleenough, you can get a bit of the old Fay property itself.”
“Really?” said Denin. “I thought it was all disposed of years ago.”
“So it was. Eight years ago and a bit. I remember because I made an errand to sneak down to the depot and see Barbie go off in the train, as pretty as a white rose, dressed in black for her pa. I was only a cub of fourteen. An old feller from the East, staying at the Potter, went crazy about the place and bought it at Mrs. Fay’s own price. (Lucky for her! They say she’d nothing else to live on!)Feller by the name of Samuel Drake. He was out in California for his bronchitis or something, and took a fancy to the country. He wanted his married son with a young bride to live with him, so he got a real bright idea. I suppose the folks who told you about the Fay place never said nothing about a kind of little playhouse called the Mirador (Spanish for view-place or look-out, I guess), built at one end of the property that fronts to the sea?”
“I—rather think they did mention something of the kind,” said Denin. The first time he had ever seen Barbara, at a dance soon after she was presented, she had happened to speak of the Mirador. It was a miniature house which her father had built for her at her favorite view point, as a birthday surprise, when she was ten. There was an “upstairs and a downstairs,” a bath, and a “tiny, tiny kitchen” where she had been supposed to do her own cooking. In the sitting-room she had had lessons with her governess. The one upstairs room, with its wonderful view of the bay and the islands, had been turned into a bedroom for her, when she had scarlet feverand had to be isolated with a nurse. She had “loved getting well there, and lying in her hammock on the balcony with curtains of roses.”
“Old man Drake had the smart notion of putting on a couple more rooms in a wing at the back, and offering it to his son and his son’s bride,” the driver of the car was explaining, over the motor’s cheap clatter. “But while the work was going on, the new beams caught fire one night (I guess some tramp could tell why) and the whole addition and a bit of the original burnt down. Just then the son changed his plans anyhow, and decided to go into business with his wife’s folks in the East. That sort of sickened the old man, so he let the Mirador fall into rack and ruin; and now he spends about three quarters of his time in Boston with the son. I guess he’s sorry he was in such a hurry to buy the Fay place. Anyways, he won’t spend money on the Mirador, but rather than it should stay the way it is, he’ll sell it in its present condition with enough ground to make a garden. The thing looks like a burnt bird’s nest—except for the flowers, and thehouse ain’t much bigger than a baby doll’s house. I suppose it wouldn’t suit you, would it?”
“Perhaps it might,” answered Denin, trying to speak calmly. But in his heart he meant to have Barbara’s Mirador if it cost him every penny he had left from his advance on “The War Wedding.” It was almost as if, to atone for taking herself out of his life, Barbara had given him this dear plaything of her childhood to remember her by.
“Well, you’ll be able to make up your mind,” said his guide, slowing down the rattletrap car. “Here we are at the Fay place, now—or the Drake place, as maybe I ought to call it—and there’s the Mirador. No wonder old Drake wants to get it fixed up again! The way it is now, it spoils the look of the whole property.”
The “Fay place” gave a first impression of having been an orange plantation transformed into a vast garden. There were acres and acres of land, Denin could not guess how many. In the midst of orange trees in fruit and blossom, and pepper trees shedding coral, and tall palm trees with long gray beardswhich were last year’s fronds, stood the big, rambling pink bungalow that had been Barbara’s home. Its tiled roof and wide loggias were just visible from the road; but the Mirador, to which the driver pointed, was in plain sight. Denin’s heart bounded. He almost expected to see a young girl with smoke-blue eyes and copper-beech hair (it had been red in those days, she’d told him) open one of the shuttered windows and look out with a smile.
Once, while she and her mother were staying at Gorston Old Hall, he had tried to teach Barbara chess. In the midst of a game which she hoped to win, she suddenly saw herself facing defeat. “Let’s begin again, and play it all over!” she had cried out, laughing.
Ah, if they could do that now: begin again, and play the game all over!
Well, the ghost of John Denin could begin to play hero with the ghost of Barbara Fay’s childhood, when he came to have his home in her old playhouse. He knew that this must and should be his home, now that he had come and seen the place andfelt its influence even more subtly than he had thought to feel it. He could not get through his shorn life anywhere else.
The Mirador was distant at least four acres from the house. It too was pink, like the parent bungalow, or it had once been pink, before the fire which destroyed the addition for servants at the back had marred the rose color of its plastered adobe walls. A roof of Spanish tiles dropped low like a visor, giving cover to the balcony of the upper story; and the floor of that balcony roofed the one below. On each of these balconies only one window—which was also a door—looked out; but it was a huge window, with green exterior shutters; and the stout, square columns of the two verandas were almost hidden with roses, passion-flower, and convolvulus which had either survived the fire or grown up since. Though the front was so nearly intact, from each side of the little house could be seen the blackened wreck of burnt beams; and to screen the parent bungalow from any possible glimpse of this eyesore, a high barrier of trellis-work had been erected about two hundredfeet distant from the Mirador. Over this barrier some quick-climbing creepers had been trained, and they had grown in such thick masses that an almost impenetrable green wall had already grown up between the big house and the tiny one.
“This will suit me exactly,” said Denin, trying to speak coolly. “We’ll drive back at once, please, to the agent who has the selling of the Mirador.”
·····
He was almost afraid to hear the price, lest his last dollar might not suffice to secure the treasure. But the agent in whose hands “old Drake” had put his business named the sum of two thousand dollars. This, he said, was a mere song for land so near Santa Barbara; and, no doubt, he was right. But it was a large slice of John Sanbourne’s capital, and left him only a small remnant for repairing the place, as he must agree to do before the contract could be signed.
The journey from New York had cost a good deal, and—he must live somehow, unless he could get work fitted for a “lame dog” to do. Mr. Sibley hadtalked vaguely of “royalties,” but it seemed impossible to Denin that many people should actually care tobuyhis book—the strange little book written for himself, and sent wandering out into the world to find Barbara. Even if people did buy it, the sales could surely never go beyond the three thousand dollars Eversedge Sibley had recklessly pressed upon him in advance! However, Denin did not hesitate for any of these reasons. “I’ll buy the Mirador and the acre and a half of ground Mr. Drake is willing to sell with it,” he said to the agent. “And I’d like to pay for it if possible and settle up everything to-day. Then I could move into the house at once.”
The agent stared. “There’s no furniture,” he said.
“I can get in enough to begin with, in an hour or two, surely,” Denin persisted. “I’m used to roughing it.”
The other could well believe that, from the look of the queer fellow! As a business man, he would certainly not accept a check, and would be inclined to ask expert opinion even on bank notes, paid by anunknown client with such scars, and such clothes, and in such a hurry!
“You could hardly live in the house while the repairs you must agree to are being made,” the agent reminded the would-be buyer. “Don’t you think you had better—”
“I can manage all right,” Denin cut short the advice. “As for the repairs, I shall make them of course. What Mr. Drake asks is for the house to be restored to its former appearance (aren’t those the words?) not enlarged. Well, I must tell you frankly that I can’t afford to pay for labor. I will guarantee to make the Mirador look just as it used to look, and do it all with my own hands. I can’t work very fast, because—you can see, I’ve been disabled. But I shall have an incentive to finish as soon as possible, if I’m actually living in the house.”
“You had a severe accident, I suppose?” the curious agent could not resist suggesting.
“It was—in a way—an accident,” said Denin, and his smile was rather grim.
When he had paid for the place, had bought materialsfor restoring the house and improving the garden, had collected a few bits of furniture and added some other necessaries, the owner of the Mirador had only seven hundred dollars left out of his fortune. Nor did he at that time know how he was to earn more dollars. Nevertheless he had come as near to be being content as he could ever hope to be in this world. He had given his own old home to Barbara, and there was no place for memories of him there. But she had given her old home to him (unconsciously, it was true; yet it seemed to be her gift) and memories of Barbara would be his companions each hour of the day. Besides, he had the task of restoring every marred feature of the little Mirador exactly as she had described it to him. He bought a ladder and plaster and paint, and did mason’s work and painter’s work with a good will. In the four rooms which were more or less intact—bedroom, sitting-room, miniature kitchen and bath—he put a few odds and ends of second-hand furniture, enough for a hermit. And when his labor of love on the house was accomplished, he set to work in the garden.Some day, he told himself, he should find in the garden the greatest solace of all.
In his deep absorption, he forgot the book for days on end. Even in his dreams he did not remember it, for in the room where Barbara had lain ill with scarlet fever, dreams lent her to him, a childish Barbara, very kind and sweet. He knew the date on which the book was to come out, but he had lost count by a day or two, therefore it was a shock of surprise to open a parcel which arrived one morning by post, and to see six purple volumes. On each cover, in gold lettering, was printed “The War Wedding: John Sanbourne.”
His hand shook a little as he opened the front page, and began to read. Strange, how poignantly real the story was in this form, more real even than when he had written it, or read it over in manuscript that first day in New York many weeks ago now. He went on and on, and could not stop. There was no servant in the Mirador to look after his wants, and so he had no food till evening; none until he had finished the book, and had walked fora long time in the garden, thinking it all over with passionate revival of interest. After that night the book again shared his dreams with Barbara. Sometimes in dreaming, he saw Barbara reading the story; but when he waked, he said to himself there were ten chances against one that she would ever hear of it.
When “The War Wedding” in volume form was about a fortnight or three weeks old, a thick envelope full of American press cuttings arrived for “Mr. John Sanbourne,” from Eversedge Sibley and Company. Every critic, even those of the most important newspapers; praised the work of the unknown author with enthusiasm. A notice signed by a famous name said, “In reading this story, told with a limpid simplicity almost unique in the annals of story-writing, one forgets the printed page and feels that one is listening to a voice: not an ordinary voice, but the voice of a disembodied soul which has forgotten nothing of this existence and has already learned much about the next: a philosopher of crystal clearness and inspiring serenity.”
Nearly all the criticisms had something in themof the same curious exaltation of mood. The writers asked: “Who is John Sanbourne, that he can work this spell upon us?” And one said, “Whoever he is, he is bound to get post-bags full of ‘appreciations’ from half the women in the world, and a good many men.”
A letter from Sibley was enclosed with the cuttings, congratulating the author. “This is only the first batch,” he wrote, “but it’s a phenomenally big one for this short time. Evidently these hardened critics shared my weakness. When they began the book they couldn’t put it down till the end, and then they had to relieve their pent-up feelings by dashing them onto paper at white heat. Many of these reviews, as you’ll see by the date, appeared on the day after publication, most of the others on that following. Such opinions by such critics in such papers have sold the book like hot cakes. Luckily we expected a huge demand, or we should already be unable to supply it. Thanks to our foresight we have a second and third big edition ready, and an immense fourth one in the press. We have heard by cable that our history over here is repeating itselfin England. The exact wording is, ‘Reviews and orders unprecedented.’ You will be getting offers from all the publishers for your next work, but we hope you’ll be true to us. I am in earnest when I speak of this, for if I am interviewed, I should like to be able to say, ‘Mr. Sanbourne has already an idea for another book which we hope to publish about a year from now.’ That will keep them remembering you! Not that they’re likely to forget for awhile. They’ll be too busy crying—the women, I mean, and I shouldn’t consider a man safe without his handkerchief. Please wire about the new book. Also whether we are at liberty to answer the numerous journalistic questions we’re getting about you, with any personal details, or whether you prefer to hide behind a veil of mystery. I’m not sure myself which is preferable.”
But Sanbourne was very sure. He left his garden work to walk to Santa Barbara and send a telegram.
“Say nothing about me to any one, please, except that I shall never write another book.”
PART II
THE LETTERS
CHAPTER VII
John Sanbourne had smiled when he read the critic’s prophecy that he was “bound to get letters of appreciation from half the women in the world,” and he had thought no more of the comic suggestion until the letters began to come. But the letters were not comic.
They were forwarded in large packets by Sibley and Company, and there were many, incredibly many of them; some from men, but mostly from women. The writers felt impelled to tell the author of “The War Wedding” what a wonderful book they thought it was, or how much good it had done them in their different states of mind. These states the readers of Sanbourne’s book described almost as penitents confessing to a priest detail their sins. And the strange confidences, or pitiful pleadings for advice and help from one who “seemed to know such glorious truths about life and death,”were desperately pathetic to Denin. He was utterly amazed and overwhelmed by this phase of his unlooked-for success, and knew not how to cope with it.
The first thousand and more letters were all from people in the United States. Then letters from Canada began drifting in. At last, when “The War Wedding” had been on sale and selling edition after edition for eight weeks, a rather smaller parcel than usual arrived from the publishers. Denin, who was in the garden, took it from the postman, at the new gate which led to the Mirador. It was in the morning, and he had been gathering late roses; for every day he decorated with her favorite blossoms the two principal rooms of the house which child-Barbara had loved. He had a big pair of scissors in his hand; and sitting down on a bench, in the cool strip of shade that ran the length of the lower balcony, he cut the string which fastened the packet. This he did, not because he was impatient to see what it contained, but because he was warm and tired after two hours of garden work and wanted an excuse torest. The letters of so many sad women who begged for counsel that he knew not how to give, were having a shattering effect upon his nerves. He had not supposed that there were so many tragic souls of women in the world, outside the war-zone, and he dreaded the details of their lives. Sometimes he was half tempted to put the letters away or destroy them, unread.
There was a vague hope in his mind that this parcel might have something other than letters in it: but as the shears bit the tightly tied string, the stout linen envelope burst open and began to disgorge its contents: letters—letters—letters!
Between his feet John Sanbourne had placed the basket of roses; and the letters, falling out of the big envelope, began to drop onto the green leaves and crêpy-crisp blooms of pink and white and cream.
“English stamps!” he said aloud—for the habit had grown upon him of talking to himself. Bending down to pick up the letters, a dark flush streamed to his forehead. There was one envelope of thesame texture, the same gray-blue tint, and the same long, narrow shape that Sir John Denin had liked and always used at Gorston Old Hall. It had fallen face downward; and as he rescued it from a fragrant bath of dew, he slowly turned it over. There was an English stamp upon this envelope also, and it was addressed to “John Sanbourne, Esq., care of Messrs. Eversedge Sibley and Company,” in Barbara’s handwriting.
For an instant everything went black, just as it had done months ago when he had got on his feet too suddenly in hospital. He shut his eyes, and leaned back with his head against the house wall—the wall of Barbara’s Mirador. It was as if he could hear her voice speaking to him across six thousand miles of land and sea. But it spoke to John Sanbourne, not to John Denin.
“My God—she’s read the book.She’s written!”
He had to say the words over to himself before he could make the thing seem credible.
And even then he did not open the letter. He dreaded to open it, and sat very still and rigid, graspingthe envelope as if it were an electric battery of which he could not let go.
What if she hated the book? What if she wrote, as a woman who had been twice a war bride, to say that a subject such as he had chosen was too sacred to put into print? What if she felt bound to reproach the author for treading brutally on holy ground?
If that was what the letter had to say to him, his message of peace had failed, and all his patched-up scheme of existence broke down in that one failure.
The thought that he was a coward shrinking from a blow nerved him to open the letter. He was on the point of tearing the envelope, but he could not be rough with a thing Barbara had touched, nor could he deface it. He took up the scissors and cut off one end of the envelope, then drew out a sheet of the familiar gray-blue paper. Unfolding it, his hands trembled. All the rest of his life, such as it was, he felt, hung on what he was about to read.
The letter began abruptly. “You must havemany letters from strangers, but none will bring you more gratitude than this. If you are like your book, you are too generous to be bored by grateful words from people whose sore hearts you helped to heal, so I won’t apologize. You could not write as you do, I think, if you didn’t want to do good to others. Will you then help me, even more than you have helped me already, by answering a question I am going to ask? Will you tell me whether the wonderful things you say, to comfort those of us who are losing our dearest in battle, are just inspiredthoughts, or whether you have yourself been very near death, so near that you caught a vision from the other side? If you answer me, and if you say that actual experience gave you this knowledge, your book—which has already been like a strong hand dragging me up from the depths—will become a beautiful message meant especially for me out of all the whole world, making all my future life bearable.
“Every night for months I’ve gone to bed unable to sleep, because I’ve felt exactly as if my brainwere a battlefield, full of the agony and hopelessness of brave men dying violent and dreadful deaths, cut off in the midst of youth, with the stories of their lives tragically unfinished. But since I read in your book that marvelous scene with those suddenly released spirits—young men of both sides, friends and enemies, meeting and talking to each other, saying, ‘Is this all?’ ‘Is this the worst that death can do to us?’ why, I seem to pass beyond the battlefield! I go with those happy, surprised young men who are seeing for the first time the great ‘reality behind the thing’ and a feeling of rest and immense peace comes to me. I don’t keep it long at a time. I can’t, yet. But if you write and say youknow, I think I may some day learn to keep it.
“I have the English edition of your book, but I have read in a newspaper an extract from the interview a journalist had with the publisher in New York. You see, everybody who has some one dear in the war, or has lost some one beloved, is reading and talking of the book. They all want to know things about you, but perhaps not all for asrealareason as mine. Some people have said that perhaps the author may be a woman, who chooses to write under a man’s name. I felt sure from the first it couldn’t be so, for only a man could say those things as you say them; but I was glad of your publisher’s assurance that you are a man, and that your home now is in the far West in America. Perhaps I shouldn’t have dared write you if you were in this country, because—but no, I needn’t explain.
“My name can be of no interest to you, yet I will sign it.
“Yours gratefully, Barbara Denin.”
“Barbara Denin.” ...She had kept his name!
Many a woman did (he was aware) after a second marriage continue to use the name of her first husband, in order to retain a title. But all he knew of the girl Barbara Fay made it amazing to him that she should hold to the name of a man she had never loved, after becoming the wife of a man she had loved since childhood.
A wild doubt set his brain on fire. Could there have been some terrible misunderstanding? Was itpossible that after all she had never married Trevor d’Arcy? ... Carried away on the flame of passion fanned by her letter, Denin told himself that it might be so, and that if she were free he would still have the right to go back to her. If she had not given herself to another man she belonged to him, to him alone, and she would not hate him if he explained the sacrifice he had made for her sake.
He was on his feet before he knew what he was doing. The blinding hope lit body and soul as with some curative ray beyond the ultra violet. It shot, through his worn frame, life and abounding health, making of him for a magical moment more than the man he had been a year ago. But it was only a moment; indeed, less than a moment. For it did not take him sixty seconds to rememberhowhe had heard of Barbara’s marriage to her cousin Captain d’Arcy. Walter Severne the airman had said that her wedding had taken place on the same day with his own. Severne had blamed her. Every word he had said was branded on Denin’s brain. There could be no mistake. Whatever the motive mightbe for signing herself Barbara Denin, she was in all certainty d’Arcy’s wife.
With the violent reaction of feeling came a sense of physical disintegration. A heavy fatigue that weighted his heart and turned his bones to iron followed the brief buoyancy of spirit. Yet he could not rest. He had to walk, to keep in constant movement, to escape some tidal wave which threatened suddenly to engulf his soul. He passed out from the cool shadow of the balcony into the blaze of sunlight and drank in the hot perfume of the flowers. At the end of a path a tall cypress held its black, burnt-out torch high against the sky. Denin went and leaned against it; doubly glad of his loneliness in this refuge he had found, and thankful that none but the trees and flowers of his garden could see him in his weakness and his pain.
The dark cypress he looked up to seemed to have gone through fire and to have triumphed over death. Denin felt a kind of kinship with it, wishing that from the tree and from all nature calmness and strength might pass into his spirit. He imaginedthat he could hear the rushing of sap deep under the rough bark. Generations of joys and sorrows had come and gone since the tree was young, and had vanished, leaving no more trace than sun or storm. So it would be with what he was suffering now. The things that mattered in the life of this earth were strength and steadfastness. Denin prayed for them, a voiceless prayer to Nature.
When he grew calmer he walked again, and lifted up his face to the sun. “I’ll answer her letter,” he thought. It seemed strange to him now, after the shock of what had happened, that when the letters began to come, he had never imagined himself receiving one from Barbara. He had had the book published in order that it might have some chance of reaching her, of helping her; yet the proof that she had been reached and helped had come upon him like a thunderbolt.
Of course he was thankful, now that he put it to himself in such a way. He ought to be almost happy, he tried to think; but he was at the world’s end from happiness. A hurricane had sweptthrough his soul, and it would take him a long time to build up again the miserable little refuge which had been his house of peace. Still, it didn’t matter about himself. He would write to Barbara, and give her the assurance she asked for. He was glad now of a whim that had led him to learn typewriting two or three years ago, for he could not trust to disguising his hand so well that she might not recognize it. It was many months since he had practiced typing, but he thought that in a few hours he might again pick up the trick which he could not quite have lost.
Rather than let himself think any longer, he went out at once, walking to the town, where he bought a small typewriter of a new make. Its lettering was in script, which seemed less offensive and coldly businesslike for a letter than print. Back again at the Mirador he tried the machine, and sooner than he had expected the old facility returned. Then he was ready to begin his answer to Barbara; but for a long time he sat with his fingers on the keys, his eyes fixed upon them aimlessly. It was not that hecould find nothing to say. He could find too many things, and too many ways of saying those things. But all were expressions of thoughts which he might not put on paper for Barbara to read.
Even after he began to type, he took page after page out of the machine and tore up each one. Vaguely he felt that the right way was to be laconic; that he ought to show no emotion, lest he should show too much. Finally he finished a few paragraphs which he knew to be lame and halting, like himself, stiff and altogether inadequate. Yet he was sure that he would be able to do no better, and so he determined to send his letter off as it was.
“You say you are grateful to me,” Denin began as abruptly as Barbara had begun in writing to him, “but it is for me to be grateful to you really, for speaking as you do of my story, ‘The War Wedding.’ I am answering your letter the day it has reached me, because you are anxious to have a reply to your question. It is what you wished it might be. Ihavebeen very near to death, so near that I seemed to see across, to the other side of whatwethink of as agulf. If I saw aright, it is not a gulf.... Those voices of young men passing suddenly over in crowds, I thought, I believed, and still believe I heard. I can almost hear them now, because one does not forget such thingsif one comes back. I trust this answer may be of some comfort to you; and if you can feel, as you say you will feel, that my book has a message especially for you, I shall be very glad and proud.
“Yours sincerely, John Sanbourne.”
When he re-read the typed letter, one point struck him which had not so sharply pierced his intelligence before. The effect of the appeal from Barbara, the miracle of its coming, and the poignant obligation it thrust upon him had been too overpowering at first. He had not stopped, after breaking short his wild hope of her freedom, to dwell on the strangeness of one part of her letter above another. But now, in judging his own phrases, he came to a stop at a sentence towards the end of the page: “I trust this may be of some comfort to you.”
“Won’t that way of putting it sound conceited?”he asked himself. But no; she had used that very word “comfort” in her letter. As he remembered this, the thought suddenly woke in him that she had written as a woman might write who was in deep sorrow. Yet she could not be in deep sorrow. She had her heart’s desire, and at worst, her feeling for the man who was gone—John Denin—could only be a mild, impersonal grief that his life had to be the price of her happy love.
He had longed, in writing the story of “The War Wedding,” to show Barbara why even that mild grief was not needed, because in giving great joy to another soul a woman earned the right to her own happiness. Denin could not bear to think that pity for him might shadow Barbara’s sunshine, but he had not dreamed until to-day that the shadow could be dark. Now, the more intently he studied her appeal to the author of the book, the more difficult he found it to understand her state of mind.
Barbara spoke of herself as one of the many women whose “sore hearts” ached for healing because they were losing their “dearest” in battle.And she said that, if he could give her the assurance she asked for, the story of “The War Wedding” would seem to hold a personal message, making her “future life bearable.”
What a generous and sensitive nature she had, and what beautiful loyalty, to mourn sincerely for a man she had never loved, but to whom she owed a few material advantages! It was wonderful of the girl, and he worshiped her for it. His sacrifice for her was easier because of this warm sense of her gratitude, and he kissed the paper he had just written on for her, because some day it would be touched by her hands.
“If I only dared to say more to comfort her, and beg her to be happy!” he thought. But the one safe way had been to make his answer to her calmly impersonal, perhaps even a little cold. For fear he might be seized with an irresistible desire to add something more, something from his heart instead of his head, Denin put the letter into an envelope and sealed it.
Then, however, he stumbled upon a new difficultywhich had not occurred to him before. He was in the act of addressing her as “Lady Denin” (since she chose to keep his name), when his heart stood still in the face of a danger he had barely escaped.
How was a stranger like John Sanbourne to know that she wasLadyDenin?
If, inadvertently, he had written the name thus, and sent the letter to the post, even so slight a thing might have made her guess the truth. Instead of comforting, he might have plunged her into humiliation and despair.
Barbara had not spoken of herself in the letter as being married. For all John Sanbourne was supposed to know, she might be a girl, mourning a brother or a lover. At last he addressed her as “Mrs. or Miss Denin, Gorston Old Hall.” And with several other letters which he forced himself to write, he enclosed the stamped envelope in a note to Eversedge Sibley. “Please post these in New York,” he begged. “I don’t care to have every one know where I live.”
CHAPTER VIII
It was the day he finished re-plastering the house-wall, that the celebrity was “discovered” by Santa Barbara.
Denin stood half way up a ladder with a trowel in his hand, when a young man in a Panama hat and a natty suit of gray flannels came swinging jauntily along the path: altogether, a “natty” looking young man. He would probably have chosen the adjective himself.
“Good morning!” he confidently addressed the lanky, shirt-sleeved figure on the ladder. “Do you happen to know if Mr. John Sanbourne is at home?”
“I am John Sanbourne,” said Denin, making no move to descend the ladder. He wanted to get on with his work, and expected the newcomer’s errand, whatever it might be, would be over and done with in a minute. He thought that the young man hadprobably come to sell him an encyclopedia or a sewing machine, because the only other visitors he had had—except the postman, and the boy from the grocer—had pertinaciously urged that the Mirador was incomplete without these objects.
The young man looked horrified for an instant, but being a journalist and used to rude shocks, he was able hastily to marshal his features and bring them stiffly to attention. He had already learned that the Mirador’s new owner was “peculiar,” a sort of hermit whom nobody called on, because he did his own work, wore shabby clothes, and made no pretense of having social eminence. Indeed, it had never occurred to any one (until the idea jumped into the reporter’s brilliant brain) that a person who could buy and inhabit that half ruined “doll’s house” could be of importance in the outside world. The journalist it was who, happening to meet the postman near the Drake place that morning, saw a huge envelope addressed to “John Sanbourne.” He flashed out an eager question: “Is there a John Sanbourne living near here?” He was answered:“Yes, a fellow by that name’s bought the Mirador”; quickly elicited a few further details, and, abandoning another project, arrived when the postman was out of the way, at the Mirador gate. It was a blow—severe if not fatal—to romance to find John Sanbourne splashed with whitewash and looking as a self-respecting mason would be ashamed to look. But perhaps he was a socialist. That would at least make an interesting paragraph.
“Are youtheJohn Sanbourne, the man who wrote ‘The War Wedding’?” the visitor persisted.
Denin was surprised and disconcerted. “Why do you ask?” he sharply answered one question with another; then added, still more sharply, “And who are you?”
“My name’s Reid. I work for a San Francisco paper, and I’m correspondent for one in New York. If you wrote the book that’s made such a wonderful boom, my papers want to get a story about you.”
“Thank you. That’s very kind of you and of them,” said Denin coolly. “But I haven’t a ‘story’worth any newspaper’s getting. I’m sorry you should give yourself trouble in vain. Yet so it must be.”
“When I say ‘a story,’ I mean an article—an interview,” Reid explained to the amateur intelligence. “I think,” he went on, beginning to find possibilities in the hermit and his surroundings (voice with charm in it: fine eyes: striking height: peculiar fad for solitude, etc.)—“I think I see my way to something pretty good.”
“I’m afraid,” Denin insisted, speaking with great civility, because he had suffered too much to inflict the smallest pin-prick of pain upon any living thing if it could be avoided. “I’m afraid I must ask you not to rout me out of my burrow with any searchlight. You can see for yourself I’m no figure for a newspaper paragraph. If the public really takes the slightest interest in me, for Heaven’s sake leave them to their illusions. Please write nothing about me at all. But I can’t let you go without asking you to rest and drink a glass of lemonade. I’m ashamed to confess”—and he laughed—“that I’venothing stronger to offer you. I lead the simple life here!”
As he spoke he came down from the ladder, trying not to show inhospitable reluctance, and invited the reporter to sit in the shade of the veranda. Reid, seeing that the man was in earnest, not merely “playing to the gallery,” showed his shrewd journalistic qualities by acquiescence. He accepted the situation and the lemonade, and kept his eyes open. He did not abuse the hermit’s kindness by outstaying his welcome, but took leave at the end of fifteen or twenty minutes. At the gate, he held out his hand and Sanbourne had to shake it with a good grace. Noticing for future reference, that the author of “The War Wedding” had a hand as attractive as his scarred face was plain, Reid said resignedly, “Well, Mr. Sanbourne, thank you for entertaining me. But I’m sorry you don’t want me to write about you. Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Sure,” echoed Sanbourne, and went thankfully back to put the last touches on the house-wall. About half an hour later the work was finished,and he had time to remember that several letters and papers, brought by the postman, were lying unopened. Standing on his ladder, he had asked to have the budget left on the balcony table. Then he had forgotten it, for he dreaded rather than looked forward to the letters of his unknown correspondents; and even if Barbara acknowledged his answer (which seemed to him unlikely) it would be many days before he could expect to hear from her.
This time there was the usual fat envelope, stuffed with smaller ones, forwarded by Eversedge Sibley; also there was a letter from Sibley himself. Denin put off delving into the big envelope, and opened Sibley’s. Quite a friendship had developed between them, and he liked hearing from the publisher, who wrote about the great events of the world or advised the reading of certain new books, which he generally sent in a separate package. Sometimes he sent newspapers, too, fancying that Sanbourne saw only the local ones. They were having a discussion through the post, the American trying to instruct the Englishman in the intricacies ofhome politics; but the letter which Denin now opened did not refer to that subject, nor did it finish with the usual appeal: “When will the call to work get hold of you again, or when will the spirit move you to think of writing me another book?”
“Dear Sanbourne,” Sibley began. “This is an interlude, to the air of ‘Money Musk’! Our custom, as you may vaguely have noticed in the contract I forced you to sign, is to make royalty payments to our authors twice a year. But you have bought a house and land, and Heaven knows what all, out of your advance, you tell me. Seems to me you can’t have left yourself much margin. You mentioned the first day we met that you were a poor man; so I have unpleasant visions of what our latest star author may have reduced himself to, while the men whose job it is to sell his masterpiece are piling up dollars for his publishers. The check I lay between these pages (so as to break it to you gently) is only a small part of what we know the ‘Wedding’ to have made up to date. Never in all my experience has a book advertiseditselfas yours seems to have done. Onereader tells a dozen others to buy it. Each one of that dozen spreads the glad tidings among his or her own dozen. So it goes! The ‘Wedding’ has now been out three months and is in its tenth edition, the last six whacking big ones. It won’t stop short of at least a million, I bet, with Canada, England, and the Colonies as well as our immense public here. With this assurance, you can afford to use the present check as pin money. Yours ever, E. S.”
Denin turned the page, and saw a folded slip of yellow paper: a check payable to John Sanbourne for two thousand five hundred dollars.
He thought no more about the journalist. But the journalist was busily thinking about him. Mr. Reid was not writing an “interview” with Mr. Sanbourne, because he had promised he would not do that. Sanbourne had, luckily for Reid, let his request stop there. Reid considered himself morally free to write something else, which did not compose itself on the lines of an interview. He wrote what he called “A Study of John Sanbourne, Author and Hermit,” making it as photographic, yet at the sametime as picturesque, as he knew how. Just as an “artist photographer” takes dramatic advantage of high lights and shadows, so did Reid the reporter put to their best use the splashes of whitewash on his celebrity’s black hair and scarred brown face, and spots of pink paint on his shirt sleeves. He described the Mirador as it had been after the fire, and as it had become since John Sanbourne bought the little ruined “doll house” with its patch of garden walled off from the Drake (once the Fay) place, near Santa Barbara. He mentioned his own surprise at finding so famous a man voluntarily hidden from the world, in these quaint surroundings, when, if he chose, he could be fêted by “everybody who was anybody” for miles around.
When Reid had finished his “study,” he was as proud of it as his victim was of the plaster and paint on the Mirador walls. It was too good, thought the journalist, for a local paper. Why, it was a regular “scoop”! He would send it “on spec.” to theNew York Cometwhich occasionally accepted an article from him. This, he had no doubt, would not onlybe accepted but snapped at, for the great Sunday supplement which theCometbrought out. In that case, he would get a good price for his work, far better than local pay, to say nothing of the kudos; and as a queer fish like Sanbourne wasn’t likely to “run to” the SundayComet, or to a press-cutting subscription, he would probably never see the “stuff.” This thought relieved Reid of his one anxiety. Sanbourne had trusted him. And the difference between an “interview” and a “study” was perhaps too subtle for an outsider to understand.
As it happened, Mr. Reid was right in all three of his suppositions. The New YorkCometdid approve his manuscript: theirs was a dignified cross between accepting and snapping. John Sanbourne did not see the Sunday supplement, nor did he take in any of the many newspapers which quoted it. He did not subscribe to a press-cutting bureau; and the agencies which had applied for his patronage, being discouraged by his silence, did not send to him.
Eversedge Sibley, on the other hand, always saw the Sunday supplement of theComet, which specializedon literary subjects. He read the “Study of John Sanbourne, Author and Hermit,” and was astonished that so retiring, almost mysterious a person, had granted it. On further deliberation, however, Sibley decided that material for the article must have been got on false pretenses. He read the “stuff” through again, and felt that, though interesting to the public, Sanbourne would think it hateful. If a journalist had caught him unawares, he would be distressed to find his privacy so violated; and Eversedge Sibley did not want Sanbourne to be distressed. Consequently he did not forward the supplement, nor the cutting his firm afterwards received of it; and as no one else thought of sending, Sanbourne continued peacefully to forget his morning visit from a journalist. Even the fact that he was stared at in the street more intently than he had been at first, when an errand took him into town, did not remind him of the call or cause him to put two and two together. He did not indeed know that he was being stared at. He did not look much at people, because he did not wish to be looked at. And histhoughts were more for the place and the scenery which Barbara had loved and he was learning to love than for his fellow creatures, who seemed infinitely remote from him.
“How wonderful that that John Sanbourne who wrote ‘The War Wedding’ should be here, and none of us even dare try to get to know him!” some women said, when they had seen extracts from Reid’s “study” in newspapers they took in. These women thought Sanbourne’s scars actually attractive. Others announced that they didn’t believe the manwasthe real John Sanbourne. There must be some mistake.Thisone didn’t look like a gentleman. At least his clothes didn’t. Andanybodycould pretend to be John Sanbourne if they liked. Lots of frauds did that sort of thing when a novel by an unknown author made a great success.
John Sanbourne felt richer with his new check and the astonishing prospect held out by Sibley than Sir John Denin had ever felt at Gorston Old Hall with his big income. But his one extravagance was to buy some books and shelves to put them on. Inthat way he soon collected all his old, best friends around him; for that was the one joy of having books for friends. No matter where you went, you could always send for them and have them with you. You could never be entirely alone in the world.
When the time came that Denin might receive a letter from Barbara, he tried not to think of it. He said to himself that he knew it would not come, that he ought not to want it to come, that if it did come, it would only prolong the agony. He read hard, and worked hard in the garden, and took long walks, though he limped slightly still, for he was losing the worst of his lameness and might actually hope to become in the end (as the German surgeon had prophesied) as “good a man as he had ever been.” Perhaps in some ways—ways of the mind and spirit—he was better. But there was no soul-doctor to judge of such improvement. Certainly Denin was unable to do so himself.
Nothing on earth or in heaven could distract his thoughts from the letter, however, when it began to loom before him as a possibility. Constantly hefound himself saying, “To-morrow it might come.” And then, “To-day.”
When it was “to-day,” he began courageously to plan an excursion which for some time he had been meaning to make. If he left early in the morning—long before the postman was due—he need not get back till night. But his strength failed at the moment of starting. He went no farther than the gate.Shouldthere be a letter while he was away, the postman must leave it on the table outside the house, for the door would be locked. Then, Denin argued, if any mischievous person should slip in and steal it, he would never know what he had missed. And he was rewarded for staying. The letter did come. It was only when he held it in his hand that he realized how desperately he had wanted it, what a black dungeon the beautiful summer day of sunshine would have been without it.
“Thank you more than I can say for answering me!” he read. “You wrote me on the very day you had my letter, and I am doing the same with yours, for it has just arrived. Now, since you have toldme youheard the voices with the ears of your own spirit, the book can be mine—my own message, meant for me. Perhaps others say this very same thing to you—though it seems that no one can need such a message as much as I need it. I wonder if it would be wrong to tell you why?