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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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Headpiece from Lippincott's Monthly Magazine
Frontispiece
Edgar Fawcett
ALL day there had been a warm rain, with fog, and sometimes low growls of thunder. But toward evening it cleared off, and you saw blue pools of sky in the west, with flat strips of gold cloud, calm and dreamy as if they were beaches of the Fortunate Isles.
A fresh wind sprang up, too, with woody perfumes on its unseen wings. As this delightful breeze blew in the face of Hugh Brookstayne, he smiled to himself for pure refreshment, and that sense of spiritual expansion which comes to a scholar who has been pent among books throughout a dull and rainy day, and finds that the weather, after all, is not the sluggard and churl he has grown to think it.
This nook which he had chanced on among the mighty Swiss Alps just suited him. Veils of vapor were hurrying away from noble green mountains on every side of him, as he trod the pale smooth road fringed with splendid pines. Some of the great peaks were not very far off, though you did not get a view of any snow-clad summit unless you made a certain little détour for the purpose. Hugh had chosen this especial spot because it had seemed to him the least sublime in a country of sublimities and exaltations. His pension was quiet, and not badly kept for one of so meagre a size. He was not at all a hater of his fellow-Americans, and yet it pleased him to have found lodgement where he met only a few stout, commonplace Teutons, with a light sprinkling of bourgeois French. By paying a trifle more than the regulation eight francs a day he had secured a commodious room, whose casements gave upon a sheer cliff over which drooped the white airy foam-scarf of an enchanting cascade.
All in all, he was highly pleased with his summer quarters. When he needed exercise, diversion, and a change of scene, he could start off at a swinging pace for Lucerne and note the glorious panoramic changes on either hand until at last he reached that happy vale which even throngs of the most prosaic tourists cannot make less lovely than it is. More than once he had smoked a cigarette and sipped beer on the piazza of the huge Schweizerhof, and told himself how fascinating was this gem of all Alpine towns, lying beside its peerless lake. He had strolled under the low interlaced chestnut boughs in the walk that fronts the great hotels, and had watched Pilatus, Titlis, and Scheideck, looming in their variant grandeurs of contour across the blue-green waters, or that steep, dark flank of the Rigi whose habitations always look to the gazer below as if toppling over the precipice near which they are so dizzily built. He had traversed more than once the roofed bridge across the fretful Reuss, with its faded mediaeval pictures, or had sat and thrown crumbs of cake to the swans in the grottoed and fountained basin below Thorwaldsen's noble-sculptured Lion. This immortal carving, as it gleamed from the solid rock-wall of whose dumb blank it made an almost sentient part, would pierce him with suggestion. The whole place, however small might be its limit, struck him as no less lordly than monastic and consecrated. 'Never,' he would tell himself, 'was so superb a tomb raised to the illustrious dead. Art has here asked herself what she shall do that will be grandly commemorative of those loyal Swiss soldiers who died in defence of their king, and Nature has answered the question by saying to Art, "I will mate my powers with yours!" Together they have made this unique monument, overwhispered by these towering elegiac firs!'
But this afternoon Brookstayne did not go as far as Lucerne. He paused at the door-way of a small inn which he would now and then visit during his briefer strolls. The little room beyond was vacant, except for one man, seated off beside a rather remote window; the man's back was alone visible; he did not turn or move in any way at the sound made by Brookstayne's feet on the sanded floor. Soon a lank waiter came shambling in, to take the new guest's order. A sallow smile lit his fat blond face the moment he recognized the new-comer.
"Ach, mein Herr; habe die Ehre," he began, with his most cordial gutturals. "How can I serve you this evening?"
"By making to-morrow finer than to-day has been, my good Hans," replied Brookstayne, lazily seating himself.
Hans grinned. He thought this big-framed American gentleman, with the kindly hazel eyes and the short, dense auburn beard, a most winsome and gracious person. After Brookstayne had got his mug of beer and lighted his brier-wood pipe, he fell into a revery which the dreaminess of the hour no doubt induced. Outside, those golden glamours had not yet faded; they seemed to burn with even keener vividness as he watched them from the window at his elbow. But just beneath, glimpsed between monstrous buttresses and stanchions of mountain, was a bit of liquid, living emerald,—the divine lake itself! Brookstayne leaned forth upon the sill, breathing the moist, scented midsummer air. That radiant spot of water burned for him like a star of hope.
He was excessively ambitious. Now in his twenty-eighth year, he had already achieved note if not plain fame as the author of two strikingly fresh and acute scientific works. During the winter he held a somewhat subordinate though responsible position in a Massachusetts college. He had sailed for Europe in the previous spring with not a few sharp misgivings about the size of his letter of credit and a great desire to talk with three or four eminent scientists in Paris and Berlin. He had accomplished the latter object, and had indeed done considerably more, since words of the most stimulating praise from these high-priests of knowledge now dwelt with him as vital souvenirs of his interviews. The chief study of his life related to questions of cerebral function, capacity, structure, and degeneration. It had long ago occurred to him that if we benighted mortals could learn really to grasp and define the meaning and the working of our own brains, we should reach grades of elevation hardly more than imagined to-day; for besides being a scientist Brookstayne was a philosopher, a psychologist, as well.
His new work was progressing in a way that cheered him to think of it; By September he would have got it half finished, and then, in the long winter evenings at his placid New England home, he could continue and end it with that mental security which comes from having made a momentous beginning. All through the present day he had been dealing with a knotty and problematic point on the subject of hallucination. He had had time to make some copious notes at the K.-und-K. Hofbibliothek in Berlin and the Bibliothècque Nationale in Paris, but even these had not proved fruitful of precisely the aid requisite.
'What that chapter now needs,' he mused, puffing at his pipe and watching the smoke from it waver somnolently out into the lucid yet dusky gloaming, 'is a personal, practical record of some experience with a fellow-creature beset by a mania which leaves him outwardly sane and yet has rooted itself into his daily life and thought. Some close study of that kind would make an admirable finis to my "hallucination chapter."' Here he smiled to himself, and unconsciously drummed a ruminant treble with the finger-nails of one hand on the wooden table before him. 'There's that huge lunatic-asylum at home, not far from the college. Perhaps I could find my "specimen" there. I've a mind to search for him when I go back. It might not be a very pleasing task, but then my nerves are still good and strong.'
He did not know how soon and how drastically their strength was fated to be taxed. Only a little while after this, it chanced that he let his gaze wander toward the window at which was seated the one other occupant of the room. That personage had ceased to peer forth into the luring sunset glimmer, but had now half turned toward Brookstayne, though not showing the least sign of consciousness that the latter had begun to observe him. His head was drooped, and a soft revealing glow smote it, with something of the artificial effect so often seen in modern photography. Only the stranger's profile was visible, but how fall of beauty and power that showed! Brookstayne, unlike most men of the ratiocinative turn, loved art, and it now occurred to him that a knack of swiftly sketching so rich a "subject" would have wrought high satisfaction. The gentleman himself must surely never have become aware that his likeness was being covertly taken; he looked absorbed enough to refrain from shifting his posture if Pilatus, with fierce terrene clangors, had suddenly slipped into the lake.
The high, unusual light cast upon his facial outline made even one long upcurling eyelash evident. But above this gleamed a brow massive and scholarly, while below it was a nose arched in the faint yet definite purity that we call Greek; then came a moulding of mouth and chin virile, sensuous, poetic. He wore neither beard nor moustache, and his scant whitish hair, growing somewhat back from the temple and ceasing a little further upward, gave the whole silhouette a mature look which its lower lineaments failed to warrant. These appeared almost youthful, and in them, clothed as they were with unaltering pallor, Brookstayne seemed to detect the symmetry of perfect sculpture.
'A man with a past,' he began to muse. 'A man who must have suffered deeply,—the drawn-down muscle at the corner of his mouth more than hints of that; who may have loved passionately,—the firm yet ample curves of throat and chin suggest that. He has a brain of no mean force, too, for the brow is so generous. Not the face of a poet, in spite of his rapt and pensive mood while I watch him. Something like an austere challenge to imagination or fancy invests every feature. He might be a mathematician, or a drinker at the well of science, like my poor ardent self. But, whatever he is, he interests, attracts me... Yes, wonderfully ... I should like to know him. I—'
Brookstayne's meditations paused there. Abruptly the stranger had risen, and, with the air of one who has been roused to an unwelcome realization of some discomforting gazer, he now turned, making his full face apparent.
A thrill of horror shot through Brookstayne's nerves. It was not a full face at all. The other side of it, hitherto unseen, was almost entirely gone. Never was the spell cast by beauty more quickly and cruelly broken.
'Good God!' thought the man who had been silently admiring him. 'He is not a human being: he is a monster,—a creature whose face has only one side. How terrible!'
While Brookstayne sank backward in his chair, the man who had dealt him so sharp a shock passed slowly from the chamber and disappeared. He had a limping step, which denoted lameness in one limb, and bore a stout cane which he used as a palpable support.
Left alone, it was some little time before Brookstayne recovered from his dismay and consternation.
AT length, however, he regained composure, and softly laughed at his own weakness. But curiosity replaced bewilderment. Hans, the waiter at the inn, presently appeared, and a prompt series of questions followed.
Oh, yes, Hans knew the gentleman very well. He would often come in and sit like that when he thought there was nobody about.
He usually chose just this hour, but he did not come by any means every day. Oh, indeed, no. Sometimes he would not be seen twice for a whole fortnight. He lived not far away. Did not the gnädiger Herr know the chalet next to that one which a huge stone had fallen on and crushed? Yes? Well, the gentleman lived there. Two old peasants, a man and a woman, kept the place. It had been said that they were relatives of a certain servant whom the gentleman had once had in another country.
"And pray, what is the poor fellow's name?" asked Brookstayne, with almost an irritated tone; he was so tired of hearing "gracious gentleman" repeated over and over.
Hans made an effort, which resulted in a sound somewhat resembling Stoffot. Then he shrugged his big shoulders and smiled at Brookstayne with a queer, herculean wistfulness.
His hearer gave an encouraging nod. "Stafford," he said. "An English name; no doubt he's an Englishman."
No; an American; Hans was sure of that; he had heard from the old woman of the chalet; she sometimes came there and gossiped a little; she and her husband were so sorry for Herr Stafford.
"Oh," said Brookstayne, with lazy irony, "I see. You're very discreet, Hans; you're loath to tell me, point-blank, that you've done most of the gossiping yourself. Well, and did you find out how this Herr Stafford received that frightful mutilation? Was it an accident? Or can it have been a deformity that he was born with?"
But the old woman, Linda Hertz, had no real knowledge of what had caused it. Her daughter had gone into service at Berne, years ago. There she had met an Englishman and married him, leaving her native land to live with him in England. Later, when her husband died, she had emigrated to America, and there had again entered service, this time with a family named Stafford. One day, not very long since, she had brought the gentleman with the strange face to dwell at the chalet. She had answered very few of her parents' inquiries, had Hilda. She had merely told them that Herr Stafford was a very quiet and harmless gentleman indeed, though it had been thought by some people who knew him in his own country that he was out of his mind.
"Out of his mind?" Brookstayne broke in sharply, at this stage of the narration. The phrase concerned his own rattier, so to speak; he listened with closer attention to the rest of the recital.
That was brief enough. Hilda had said something about a railway calamity, but her parents had doubted this explanation. Yet they had soon found their daughter was bent on giving them no further details. Herr Stafford, she instructed them, would pay handsomely; and he did. She went away and left him there; she had been absent several months, now. He was easy as a child to get along with,—much easier, in fact, for his wants were few, and he would either stay for hours at a time quite silent in the little room that had been fitted to suit his simple tastes, or wander forth among the loneliest dells and slopes when the weather permitted, only now and then coming to the inn if it seemed void of visitors and taking a glass of red wine and a bit of brown bread. On his arrival he had worn a bandage over the hurt side of his face, concealing it, but this had greatly discomforted him, and afterward he had altogether given it up. Both Frau Hertz and her husband felt sure that he was crazy besides being so oddly deformed. At first they had been very timid about having him there in the chalet, but the money was so acceptable. And then had not their daughter, Hilda, been mindful of them in their old age for a long time past, sending them help each month from her own earnings? It would never have done to disoblige their duteous Hilda, the old couple had concluded. But now they had grown thoroughly used to their guest, and would have missed him a good deal if he had left them. Still, it did look very much as though he were out of his head. Some sort of ghost appeared to haunt him, seen only by himself. His one eye (for only one remained to him) would almost start from its socket at times like these, and he would gnaw his lips in a wildly restless way. But such fits may merely have meant the return of unpleasant memories. Hans wished to be honorably exempted from the ghost-idea. He had no beliefs of that superstitious kind. He had gone to school in Zürich till he was fifteen. It was different with two old peasants who had never seen a city larger than Basle, and scarcely knew how to read their Bibles.
Brookstayne longed for another meeting with the ill-fated being who had so lured and yet so repelled him. He could not help feeling convinced that any human creature who lived in such complete loneliness would not wholly shrink from communication with his kind. Between pity for the man's frightful affliction and a professional impulse to note his mental state, the young scientist was perhaps equally swayed. This double motive produced, in the course of a few days, its natural result. One afternoon Brookstayne happened to be passing the chalet in which he was aware that Stafford dwelt. Suddenly he perceived a shape, standing with folded arms and drooped head amid a knot of fir-trees, just where a lawny space broke away from the common road. Then, as he became nearly certain that he had recognized Stafford, the shape slid out of sight For a moment Brookstayne hesitated. Then he turned his steps in upon the springy turf and walked straight toward the little thick-boughed grove. He had been right. The loiterer was really Stafford, and now, as they confronted each other, Brookstayne once again felt his flesh creep. There was something literally unhuman about the visage into which he peered. When thus directly seen, it made you heedless of the fine moulding one side revealed, because the other was so denuded of flesh and entirely ghastly. The left eye was missing; the left cheek seemed to have been quite torn away. An outward force must have wreaked the desecration; that he had come into the world with it was an untenable belief for any one with the least experience in flesh-wounds.
He recoiled while Brookstayne approached him. Then, as if having made up his mind that the intrusion was a premeditated one, he stood motionless, with an air of doubt and trouble, though not by any means of incivility.
At once Brookstayne spoke, with tones all courtesy and gentleness, yet guarded against a sign of undue compassion. "Pardon me, but you seemed a little lonely here, and I thought I would make bold enough to come over and have a word with you. We are of the same nationality, unless I am mistaken," he went on with his frank, sweet smile; "and I have always found that two Americans, no matter how radically they may differ on a hundred diverse points, are sure to have that one for purposes of agreement."
"You know, then, that I am an American?" was the reply. It came in a grave, soft voice that put the hearer almost wholly at his ease again and made him glad of his recent overture.
"Yes. Hans, over at the inn, told me."
"Ah ... the waiter, there... yes."
Brookstayne clearly saw that he meant to be quite courteous, but also that a miserable mixture of shame and dread had begun to work havoc with his self-possession. What, however, could he fear? The revolted feeling that this nearer view of him might awaken? Doubtless; and already he had witnessed, most probably, like seizures of disgust at various other periods. Brookstayne's pity deepened while he furtively watched how the slender and well-shaped hands had commenced to tremble as this retiring son of solitude strove not to cower before the publicity of even his own single look.
A sudden irresistible impulse took hold of the young student. It was a quick growth from a soil that dealt only in good products. He laid one hand upon the shoulder of the unfortunate man beside him, and said, with speed, fervor, and a ring of manful sentiment vibrant in each word,—
"Don't think me too bold and rude if I tell you that this great seclusion in which you live is a very bad thing for you. I'm something of a physician, and so am able to speak rather knowingly. I saw you, not long ago, there at the inn. You don't remember, of course; you had but a glimpse of me in the twilight before you rose and went out. And will you pardon me if I confess that I asked our friend Hans a few questions about you? He really told me very little. But he told me that you are an American, and that your name is Stafford... I suppose I am desperately presuming. But now, having so scandalously betrayed myself, I shall go on and say to you that my quarters are only a short stroll from here, that my name is Hugh Brookstayne, and that the fact of our being neighbors and fellow-countrymen might form an excellent excuse for us occasionally to see one another."
Some men could have made this kind of familiar outburst easily offensive. Brookstayne could not have made it so if he had tried. His manner was one of well-blended intimacy and delicacy, and withal touched by a spell of the hardiest honesty and good faith, like the light which breaks along edges of certain felicitous portraits.
The effect of his words immediately told. He had stretched out his hand to Stafford with delightful daring, and a second or so later it was met by a nervous and somewhat feverish clasp.
"You are very good, Mr. Brookstayne,—very good indeed... I have never been one who cared much for the company of his kind. That is, I could do without it, even before... well, before the gloomy thing occurred which has made me as you see me now. And since then" (there was an accent of strange pathos in the speaker's voice, at this point) "I have thought it best to accept a completely solitary life..." The hand dropped away from Brookstayne's here, and the fearfully outraged face turned away from him also, leaving visible only that profile whose beauty became swiftly manifest as by some almost theatric trick of transformation. "I appreciate the kind sentiment which has caused you to address me," he continued. "Candidly, there are many men whose advances would have proved a positive pain to me. Yours do not. And yet I cannot respond to them as you have so genially suggested that I should. I cannot. There, just that terse little sentence must be enough. I don't mean it rudely. Mine is an ended life. I am here waiting for it really to close, and in comparative peace. The sooner it closes the better. If I were not beset by certain very bitter memories I should call my days here actually pleasant. The life that has renounced both hope and energy is not always a miserable one. There is a sort of moral and mental drowsiness that steals over it, like a tired child's longing for the sleepy depths of its crib... you understand... Good-by, and many thanks, Mr. Brookstayne; many thanks..."
He passed at once out of the grove toward the chalet, whose thatched and slanted roof was overbrowed by an enormous wall of beetling mountain. Brookstayne watched him disappear, and at the same time said to himself in stubborn protest that this meeting should not be their last. Now that he had broken the ice he meant that its aperture should not get time enough to freeze over again.
Oddly determined in any purpose finally formed, and armed with his rare native gifts of mind and mien, he at last won a victory absolute though gradual. To force himself once more upon Stafford was not hard. To insist upon being tolerated and endured against the will of his new acquaintance would have been an affair almost brutally facile. But Brookstayne managed to carry his point with airy yet stringent diplomacy. He played, however, no purely cold-blooded role. The humanity in him had been touched, apart from all aims that altruism could not necessarily share. He contrived that their next meeting should seem the very random flower of accident; again, having discovered that Stafford cared to read diverting French books (when his enfeebled sight allowed him to read at all), our benevolent plotter managed to fall in with him just after finishing a new novel by Daudet, which was drawn from an opportune pocket, in the midst of warm critical praises. There was a big jump, surely, between eulogizing the book and afterward reading many pages of it aloud to Stafford in his clean, prim, white-curtained little chamber; but even this last remarkable coup Brookstayne finally accomplished. An actual friendship between the two men now began to grow and thrive. Still, for a long time Stafford's reserve continued impregnable regarding his own past. Perhaps the first words that he volunteered on this head related to the Swiss woman, Hilda, who had accompanied him hither and left him in the home of her parents.
"She is at Berne," he said. "She has been very faithful. She was my mother's maid for a number of years, and my own nurse when I was a little boy. It was her idea that this trip across the Atlantic, ended by a long stay in Switzerland, would help me to.. to bear what had happened. I have only to write and she will come to me from Berne. She is with a sister of hers who lives there,—a married sister, whom she loves very much, poor, sturdy, true-hearted Hilda! These old people are very good to me. I think Hilda understood that even her kind presence now and then troubled me a little. And her parents are mere amiable shadows; I dare say she has instructed them as regards their deportment; it is the perfection of discreet silence."
"Ignorance and discretion sometimes look wonderfully like one another," laughed Brookstayne.
"Oh, I suppose ignorance has a great deal to do with it," he replied. "But, whatever its origin, it is highly satisfying. I imagine that some of these old Swiss peasants have mastered the secret of perfect domestic peace. But then they have the calmer temperament, the cooler heads, unlike so many of the other European peasantries. I recall, in the case of Hilda, how forethought, prudence, and self-rule always predominated with her. I observed that in the midst of my worst sufferings, both mental and physical."
Brookstayne felt his pulses throb a little faster. This was but the second direct allusion which had thus far been made by the sombre hermit to his own woeful condition. Still, Stafford's auditor did not wish to seize the present chance too roughly, lest it might slip away from him like the shy head of a turtle into its shell.
"She was then so capable a nurse?" he asked, seeking to make his tones quite ordinary and zestless.
"Indeed, yes. I shall never forget her courage and skill, her strength and patience."
"All that was needed, no doubt," Brookstayne ventured.
"Needed? I was at death's door for weeks. It amazes me, now, that I should ever have recovered."
"And the accident was...?" began Brookstayne. Then he paused, leaving his question thus bluntly incomplete. "Pardon me," he went on, with a soft dexterity which the other perhaps quite failed to fathom; "I may have no right to inquire at all concerning your misfortune; you have not yet authorized me to do so."
He watched, with not a little secret anxiety, the single alert and luminous eye in that sadly ruined face. Plain rebuff might quickly manifest itself, and afterward a most depressing 'no thoroughfare' as regarded all further disclosures.
But he was mistaken in his fears. "I did not think to tell you or any one how I became what I am," he said. "And now, if I should give you even the slenderest explanation I would be dealing you an almost cruel shock."
"There you are mistaken," affirmed Brookstayne. "You would only be adding to my sympathy, which is already great."
Stafford bowed his head. "Ah, there is something about you that tempts my unrestrained candor," he murmured. "I never thought to let a living soul know, between the hour of my recovery and that in which I died! I believe that hour is not far off... and yet, pshaw I what man can be sure of the real summons? I've reason to long for, to crave mine,—God knows I have!"
Brookstayne realized that he could be bold, now. "You must have suffered unspeakably," he said. "I long to have you acquaint me with the cause of your suffering!"
Stafford touched the forlorn side of his face with a light, vacillant gesture. "You mean... this?"
"I mean whatever you choose to tell me."
He rose from the chair in which he had been seated, close to Brookstayne. It was a lovely day in latter August, and the dimity curtains at the quaint little dormer-shaped windows were swaying ethereally in the fresh Alpine breeze. He looked all about him, for a moment, in a dubious, insecure way. Suddenly he came very near to Brookstayne, and with a movement which his observer had learned pitifully to explain, he made only the unravaged part of his countenance apparent.
Then he stooped down a little, still with the same evident concealing design, and spoke a sentence or two in brief, hard undertone.
Brookstayne rose flurriedly. "No!" he exclaimed. "It was that? Really! How horrible!"
"There," Stafford answered; "I knew I would shock you! Shall I say anything more? Better not... better not!" And he flung himself into his chair again.
Thrilled as he was, Brookstayne bent over him and gently said, "Such an occurrence was indeed dreadful. To have an angry dog tear your face in that way! What a hideous outrage!... But while I recognize the full ghastliness of the accident I—I confess myself surprised—excuse that expression—I—I hardly know how to explain just what I mean..."
"You thought," Stafford broke in, as his companion hesitated and stammered, "that I had some less vulgar mode of explaining the wretched injury."
"Less vulgar?" Brookstayne repeated. "No,—not that. And yet..."
"And yet it robs my story of whatever romance you might have fancied concerning it."
"Romance," faltered Brookstayne; "yes. And still-"
"Ah," interrupted Stafford, with a ringing melancholy of voice, "but you have not yet heard my story."
"I wish to hear it; I wish to hear it very much," said Brookstayne. At the same time he was thinking, 'A dog tore him to pieces. How prosaic!—though still a love-affair might somehow have lain behind the calamity, as I suppose there did! It had grown to be almost a marriage, or something like that, when the dire thing took place.'
"If you wish to hear my story," Stafford soon went on, "I will give it you."
"Thanks."
"While we have talked together, of late, you may have noticed that I have shown some knowledge of science,—that the feet of you yourself being concerned with scientific pursuit has in a measure drawn me toward you."
Brookstayne replied without hesitation, "Yes. You have made many inquiries, all of which caused me to feel sure of your familiarity with data and developments I should not have suspected you of knowing."
There was a slight pause. Then Stafford said, "I know more than you have guessed,—or even dreamed. I have followed everything that you have uttered, and often feared lest I should betray an erudition that might startle you.... But there is now no further reason for concealment. There is nothing you know which I have not long ago known and digested. There is much I know which would be of inestimable worth to yourself."
'His hallucination!' thought Brookstayne, recalling the words of Hans. Aloud he said, with soft vehemence, "I do not deny your statements. How can I do so without proof?"
"You shall have proof,—great, incontestable proof," came the response, "when you hear why this awful wound curses me...."
AT length Brookstayne did hear the whole wild and amazing tale. It is not averred of him that he ever actually credited it. Days elapsed before he could win from Stafford avowals definite enough to make him accept points and explanations of a sort that related to pure scientific discovery, and even then he rejected certain postulates with the hardihood born of a sceptic's personal surety.
The narrative which he heard was never afterward put into manuscript form, as far as correct annals have recorded. It may have been that through some oath given to Stafford he refrained from ever transcribing or imparting it in its clear entirety. But that he somehow and somewhere repeated it allows of no question. It has come to the present chronicler in a biographic form, and thus it will be made known to the reader. It is a tale which has floated about, for a number of years, among a particular set of credulous, imaginative, or romantic-minded people. What Brookstayne (who has been living in Germany for a long time past) would say to it in its present shape, one might not readily conjecture. Perhaps he would damn it as the idlest of exaggerations, or affirm, on the other hand, that its verisimilitude was but faint of coloring beside the original facts. Assertions have reached me that he has more than once denied ever having met so afflicted a creature as Stafford, apart from having bruited abroad those appalling statements which the reader is now asked to consider. But such declarations are the mere pyrotechnics of doubt; for there is a flamboyant kind of distrust in the world, precisely as there is a bovine sort of bigotry, and certain people are never so happy as when informing us, with very sober countenances, that the grass is not really green and the sky not really blue.
HIS full name was Kenneth Rodney Stafford. All his early life was passed in a large, quiet old New England homestead, among the fascinating hills of Vermont. When a boy he was very beautiful, but with a decidedly girlish look. His mother, who adored him, cut off his long, thick golden curls because he yearned to lose them, although she performed the task with great regret. He was her only child, and his father's death occurred while he was yet almost an infant.
"I hate so to do it, Kenneth," she said, with the scissors in her hand. "Why should you care if the boys in the village do call you 'missy' and 'girl-boy'? You've quite as much manliness as they, and..."
But Kenneth made stout interruption, just here. "I do care, mamma," he said. "Please cut them; you promised me you would. Cut them quick, and let us get it off our minds!"
Mrs. Stafford smiled and obeyed him. He was only eight years old, but already she had begun to find his will in many ways paramount to her own. She was, herself, an excessively gentle lady, with a figure lissome as a willow-stem, gray-tinged auburn hair that rippled back from a brow of alabaster chastity, and the whitest and most delicate hands in the world.
But just as she had finished what she held to be an act of mild outrage, her sister, Miss Aurelia Rodney, entered the room and surveyed the suddenly-altered Kenneth with a harsh little grimace.
"I hope you think you've improved the boy, Margaret!" exclaimed Miss Aurelia, with a little adverse toss of her small, sleek head. "He looks more like a girl, now, than ever,—only, like a girl who plays marbles with the boys and keeps a top hidden away among her dolls."
Kenneth bit his lip, at this. He and his aunt Aurelia were not good friends, even at that early period of his life. He had no language in which to define her, but if words had been given him he would have pronounced her a posing sentimentalist.
He would not have been very far wrong. "Poetry" was often at the tip of her tongue, but there was a slight enough hint of it in her appearance. Years the senior of her sister, Mrs. Stafford, she was a spinster of spare and angular shape, with a severe little gray eye and a pair of lips thin as the blades of a knife. She had, however, a most expansive imagination, a most exploring and fetterless fancy. She had once been passionately religious, but of late had turned her attention to certain speculative "fads" and "isms." Her sister bore with her, deplored her, often quite failed to understand her, and always clingingly loved her.
Kenneth passed through childhood, there in his placid country home, with augmenting disapproval of all that his aunt Aurelia did, thought, or said. The boy, notwithstanding his feminine look, was full of pluck and fire. He rode fearlessly, and laughed at any danger that was wed with sport. He soon showed keenness of intellect, and surprised his governess by large powers of memory. She who discharged that office was none other than this same aunt Aurelia, and between the two a kind of dull, covert, stubborn war was forever being waged.
"The boy is born without any imagination whatever!" Miss Aurelia would lament. "I never saw a child so stolidly matter-of-fact. The other day I told him that invisible angels were always near us, and he wanted to know if they brought lunch-baskets with them when they came to spend the whole day down here, so far away from heaven. Did you ever hear of anything so blasphemous?"
"I don't believe he meant it to be so, Aurelia," said Mrs. Stafford. At the same time she secretly sighed. She was thinking of her late husband, whose audacious radicalisms had not seldom pained her own meek orthodox spirit.
One day Kenneth came to his mother with a little red spot on either of his delicate cheeks, and with a spark of droll arrogance in his fine clear eyes.
"Aunt Aurelia can't teach me arithmetic any more," he said. "She doesn't know how."
"Why, Kenneth!"
"It's true, mamma. She doesn't understand fractions at all. She has to look in the book and study the rules; and this morning I caught her in a big mistake."
Here was open contumacy indeed. Kenneth faced his aunt, a little later, with this awful charge, and at last the affair ended by Miss Aurelia bursting into vexed tears and saying to her sister that she would no longer dream of teaching so saucy and disrespectful a pupil.
"He is full of the most unbecoming pride," she complained. "He shows it to you, Margaret, but your love blinds you so that you either cannot or will not see the truth."
"I'm as fond of mamma as she is of me, every bit!" cried Kenneth; and, with a challenging glance at the kinswoman who roused his dislike, he threw both arms round the neck of his mother.
Miss Aurelia turned away with a shrug of her thin shoulders. "Some day," she murmured, in tones of sibylline affront, "you will be sorry, Margaret, that you ever tolerated his whims and follies."
A little later, when his aunt was absent, Kenneth said to his mother, "Don't most people think Aunt Aurelia a lady that makes herself out ever so much wiser than she really is?"
"Kenneth," sprang the reproving answer, "what put such a naughty fancy into your head? Of course nobody thinks anything of the sort."
"Well, I think so," declared the boy, with a funny gruffness.
From that period the tuition of Miss Rodney ceased. A gentleman was summoned from New York to be Kenneth's tutor. He was a person well past fifty years, with a bristly brown beard, chronic green glasses, and a manner which Miss Aurelia at once pronounced bearish.
But he swiftly won Kenneth's liking. No doubt for this reason Mrs. Stafford, whom his lack of suavity also repelled, both endured and smiled upon him. "How does my son progress in his studies?" she inquired about a fortnight after the tutor's installation. "I have been hoping, Mr. Apsley, that you would give me some kind of favorable account."
The grim tutor rubbed his rough beard with one rather dingy hand. "He's deficient in some things," was the bluff response. "But not from want of ability. Bless me, no! He's been horribly taught,—abominably, in fact."
"Ah," murmured Mrs. Stafford, in furtive thankfulness that her sister was not present; "that sounds discouraging!"
"But in some ways," continued Mr. Apsley, "he astonishes me. He has a most extraordinary mind. I'm a good deal mistaken, madam, or your son has got it in him to make, if he chooses, a really great logician and mathematician. I've never before met a boy of his years whose understanding could pierce through sham and reach certain plain, hard facts with so much ease and speed."
His father, again,' thought Mrs. Stafford. Tenderly as she loved the memory of her husband, she could not forget how often he had shocked her of old by the ruthless vigor with which he had tilted against this or that so-named fallacy and illusion.
In these boyish years of Kenneth's he was called upon to suffer one sharp, self-humiliating sorrow. Not more than a quarter of a mile away from his own home stood the handsomer and more modern residence of his mother's third- or fourth-cousin, Mr. Rodney Effingham. This gentleman was a widower, with one child, a little girl called Celia, about three years the junior of Kenneth. Celia was even then a beauty, with big, dark eyes and captivating dimples. Kenneth would sometimes be taken to visit her, or would sometimes (when leisure from studies allowed him) go alone. He preferred the latter mode of procedure as age advanced with him, because of its more manly look.
But, alas! he might have spared himself all such ambition as that of ever appealing to Celia through the medium of manliness. Her graceful head, with its dark, mutinous curls, would poise itself haughtily on her little white throat while she surveyed him. She thought him the most tryingly odd boy to behold! It was like seeing a girl in boys' clothes. Celia felt sure that she would look a great deal more like a boy if she were dressed as he was. Now and then her red lips let him learn this, unsheathing the milky teeth behind them in that merciless mockery a child's laughter will sometimes wear. For Kenneth her blundering little shafts were tipped with a venom which no other satire could have equalled, and went fleeting home to their mark with fearful accuracy.
But there was another form of his misfortune which he found harder still to bear. Celia's contempt for his effeminate face and figure was odious indeed, but when it became coupled with the scorn of an ally, and that ally an urchin of about his own years, tolerance forgot the virtue of stoicism. Celia had even then another admirer, though by no means as devout a one as Kenneth. Young Caryl Dayton was the son of a wealthy Bostonian whose large estate adjoined that of the Effinghams. It was a noble amplitude of acres, and a sort of castellated gray-stone mansion rose from it which the country-folk round about regarded as an abode of baronial splendor. The Daytons were social new-comers in Boston, and the fortune made by Caryl's father had been one of those rapid growths which were quickly amassed from the shady and shabby railroad enterprises that interested our national Congress and Senate somewhat disreputably from fifteen to twenty years ago. Caryl had brothers and sisters older than himself, who held their heads high as adults; and he, as a youth just bordering on his teens, followed their supercilious example. He was a tall, vigorous fellow, with light-blue flashing eyes and a mouth whose childish yet resolute curve too often evinced an unwonted worldliness and cynicism.
Almost from the first moment that he and Kenneth met, the latter detested him. Celia, who rode dauntlessly on her shaggy little pony, showed herself flattered whenever Caryl rode at her side on a fine thoroughbred out of his father's well-stocked stables. But Caryl was not a good horseman, and one day Kenneth felt a thrill of wicked delight when he chanced to join Celia and her companion, he himself being mounted on a stout-limbed, hard-mouthed horse apparently beyond his feeble powers of control. Kenneth could manage his own steed adroitly, notwithstanding his frail build and slim wrists, while in the course of a mile or so Caryl's horse suddenly shied and threw him. A few minutes before this, the millionaire's imperious son had murmured a few disdainful words to Celia, whose import partly reached Kenneth; and so, when the disaster overtook his rival, the heir of the Staffords could not resist a secret exultant glow. Still, he behaved very well, and at once dismounted after the accident, tying his horse by the bridle to a near sapling and doing his best to stanch Caryl's bleeding forehead, though the hurt soon proved to be the merest surface-wound.
Caryl had shown disarray and alarm, at first. His horse had dashed at a skittish gallop completely out of sight, but he paid no heed to this feature of his overthrow. His injury had dizzied and shocked him, and, while Celia broke into sympathetic plaints, Kenneth behaved with the nicest coolness and good will. But very soon Caryl became his old pert self. He almost threw Kenneth's proffered handkerchief in the latter's face, and presently walked away in the direction that his fugitive horse had taken, with a sulkily clouded brow and a churlish growl of annoyance.
Kenneth, after this repelling treatment, grew to be the sworn foe of Caryl. They met several times afterward on the lawn of Celia's dwelling. Twice or thrice the father of Celia happened to be present, but at last there came an afternoon when one of Caryl's most insulting humors overtook him, and then, as it chanced, the three children were alone together. They were playing croquet, and Kenneth alone knew how to treat the game with other than the merest hap-hazard stroke. But Kenneth did nothing at random; he had long ago shrewdly seen that blind force is the idlest of spendthrifts. Caryl gnawed his lips at having been badly beaten a second time, and no doubt the cut went deeper because he had had Celia for his partner, Kenneth playing against them both. But now Caryl asserted that their foe's game was not half so difficult as their own. "To manage two balls, as you did," he grumbled, "is a good deal the easiest way."
This, under the circumstance, appealed to Kenneth as the worst freak of silliness. "Why, you told Celia how to make all her shots," he said,—"and she made most of them very well, too. But, if you prefer, I'll play against you with Celia, and you can take the 'dummy' just as I did before."
The alacrity with which Celia acceded to this idea may have ruffled Caryl still further. The little girl was to-day in one of her most coquettish moods, and chose either to feel or affect pique at Caryl; it may have been that she wanted him stoutly to oppose Kenneth's new plan and insist on retaining herself as a partner.
Matters turned out no more successfully for Caryl during the next game than they had heretofore done. Indeed, he was beaten somewhat more ingloriously. Celia applauded all Kenneth's brilliant shots, followed his counsels with a pointed eagerness, and exulted loudly in their joint victory.
"Well," suddenly exclaimed Caryl, with savage irony, "it is rather unpleasant to be beaten by two girls!" And then he laughed out his acrimony, shrilly and harshly.
Those were the last insolent words one boy ever spoke to the other. Kenneth flung his mallet on the dark-green turf and dashed up to where Caryl stood. He had little fists and frail arms, but he did not strike out at all like a girl. Caryl had got two or three blows full in the face before he could just master his poise. After this the pair were matched most ill, for one boy loomed robustly above the other, so that it became a fray alike droll and pathetic. But, though neither lacked pluck, Kenneth had the long smart of grievance to spur and goad him. He had science, too, of a sort that resembled his deftness at croquet,—empiric, perhaps, but showing plainly the drift of temperament, and that pugilism, like other forms of experience, had passed under his analytic survey. Caryl's blows were given with twice his antagonist's force, but they were parried, every now and then, with an unforeseen skill. Celia's cries rang out wildly as the blood began to stream from Kenneth's face. She ran shrieking into the house, and luckily found her father, who was about emitting it When Ralph Effingham tore the two boys apart, Kenneth had drawn nearly as much blood as his enemy, and showed twice as much disposition to continue the fight. It was a scarlet feather in Kenneth's cap that so big a lad as Caryl had fought him and not promptly triumphed. Though Mrs. Stafford put her son to bed pale and aching, several hours later that same afternoon, tidings of his prowess presently transpired everywhere throughout the neighborhood, and what scars Caryl Dayton wore during the next fortnight or so were widely proclaimed the badges of disgrace.
A year or two later the Stafford household began to spend each winter in New York. Miss Aurelia persuaded her sister to make this change. She had become devotedly attached to spiritualism, clairvoyance, mind-reading, and other like shams by which our poor human brains are sometimes duped. She had taken to weeping over Andrew Jackson Davis, and she read aloud to her patient sister profuse "trance poems" all about the "summer-land." But being near other spiritualists did not form Miss Aurelia's only reason for going to New York. Mr. Ralph Effingham, little Celia's father, dwelt there every winter.
EFFINGHAM had surely given his daughter none of her beauty. He was, indeed, a man with a chalky cheek and a viscous, ascetic eye, and was never in the best of health. As a young man he had had literary ambitions, amiably looked on by some of his patrician relatives and anxiously by others. But there was no cause for any alarm: the vulgar guild of letters did not prove zealous in seeking his membership, and perhaps he had never been vain enough to imagine that it would. He was apparently most modest about his own powers; you saw the tyrannous autocrat spring up within him only when he discussed those of others. A few generations ago he would no doubt have been a fervid religionist. It is not probable that to-day he was even much of a church-goer, but he had certainly plunged his spirit into idealisms of various phases, and went abroad among his fellows with a perplexed air of spiritual remoteness that must have seemed sadly incongruous among the New York drawing-rooms he frequented. After a little while, however, he ceased to frequent them; he had found in one of them a congenial sweetheart, a Miss Van Styne, whom he soon made Mrs. Effingham, It was thought a most proper match, for there was Knickerbocker blood on either side. But in a few years they were saying mournfully of poor Mrs. Effingham that the whole melancholy meaning of her brief marriage had seemed for her to become the wife of her husband, to bear him a pretty little golden-haired girl, and then prematurely to die. She certainly left no resigned and plaintless widower. Effingham now became more immersed in abstractions than ever before. If he had been a great poet some of his stanzas on his dead wife would have thrilled the world, for so much genuine grief went to make them. But as it was, his turn for verse took the form of what he would have told you remained the only verse worth writing at all,—the "natural," the "simple," the "spontaneous." If he had been a poor man there is little doubt that he would have become a critic and controlled a column or two of some newspaper in which all the minor bards, from Cowley to Barry Cornwall, would have been besieged with eulogy, and all the living ones who stood even a faint chance of immortality through the sustained and academic excellence of their work would have been either covertly satirized or openly abused. But Effingham's wealth prevented, as it now happened, one more emotional trifler from entering the critical field. He employed the splendor of his clairvoyance in constructing lyrics that "breathed," as he expressed it, "an indefinable feeling." This elusive quality, he maintained, was at the root of all real poetry, and consequently, like every member of his irritating school, he placed security of artistic touch below a kind of daintily devil-may-care naiveté. Among modern poets he held Tennyson to be ornate and Longfellow mechanical. Certain metrical hysterics of the late Sidney Lanier he thought entrancing, and the worst things that Mr. Browning has written he found "packed with soul." As for his own compositions, they were apt to run somewhat like this:
I stood on the headland and listened
To the warring of waters below:
In my heart was an infinite sadness
More deep than the sea's ebb and flow.
I said to the cloud sailing o'er me,
"O light-hearted roamer, God-speed!"
I said to the swallow, "Be joyful;
Thy wings from all bondage are freed!"
And the cloud and the swallow went past me,
And I stood on the headland alone,
In my heart all the sea's rhythmic rapture,
Yet all its mysterious moan!
But to write such verses never has meant or can mean more than
the possession of a graceful facility. Effingham's trouble was
that his nature preferred the flickering rays of a candle to the
steadfast light of stars. He was too feverish, too feeble, and
too shallow a personality for the grand repose of true poetic art
not to strike him as "stilted." He so disastrously confused
thought and feeling that his mentality might be compared to the
gaudy tangle a girl's workbox will sometimes present, after her
favorite cat has been intermingling silks with worsted: His
metaphysics and transcendentalisms had affected not a few of his
old friends repellently. But they did not so affect Miss Aurelia
Rodney, who doubtless blended her choicest smiles with a lurking
recognition of his eligible widowerhood. It was because of
Effingham that Aurelia induced her sister to winter in New York.
Kenneth, who was now growing up with that extraordinary speed
which almost deals pangs of fear to adults over-sensitive about
the flight of time, would regard these two elderly cousins as
though they were the odd denizens of another sphere. His fair
straight brows would crease themselves in a perplexity charged
with all the sarcasm of his own innocence while he watched his
aunt Aurelia in the company of her kinsman. It struck the lad
that they were both talking for the mere sake of hearing their
own strange words and phrases, and with no actual desire to reach
any real goal of truth. He could not understand people ever
talking like that. To listen and observe, in their case, would
sometimes give him resentful thrills. Effingham, who had admired
his courage that day on the croquet-ground, soon got cordially to
detest him. And still later, when Kenneth had definitely left the
crude bounds of urchinhood and when Miss Aurelia had abandoned
sentimentalities of a more general scope for the dives and
flights of spiritualism, affairs in the Stafford home-circle
assumed a still sterner aspect. Kenneth had succeeded in making
himself so odious to Effingham that the latter had informed
Aurelia of his disgust. "The boy should be sent abroad, or
somewhere, to school," he had said. "Caryl Dayton is now at
Geneva. The idea of Kenneth having the impudence to ask me
whether I can prove the existence of a spirit as I can—no,
as he can—prove the multiplication-table! Good heavens! one
can answer grown-up folk when they assault one with such
materialisms, but what answer can be given a youngster of his
years except to make him hold his precocious little tongue?"
"If he could only be made to hold it!" sighed Aurelia. "But he is not all to blame. His mother pets and humors him so. As for discharging his masters and sending him off to a boarding-school, there is very little chance of her showing that amount of discipline. No, I regret to say, my sister is too weak in her love." Here Aurelia sighed again and obscured those sharp little gray eyes of hers for a moment in their drooped lids. "But is not all love weak, Ralph? I can realize its lofty and sublime self-abnegations; I can comprehend how mysterious powers in the vast invisible world beyond our groping sight may give many a tender and subtle monition to some heart either doubtful of its own love or wondering if this be adequately returned by another; but, after all, love, as I grasp the idea of it, is an emotion, an impulse quite ungovernable,—and therefore weak, quite weak!"
And then Aurelia looked up into the rather dead eye of Effingham, while another very faint and fluttering sound passed from her lips. Perhaps her kinsman did not see the connection between this little rhapsodic burst and the fact that Kenneth Stafford needed either a good trouncing or a long sojourn at boarding-school, or both. And possibly this dubious mood was reflected in the brief, blunt answer received by Aurelia.
Still, as time went on, she managed to convince Ralph Effingham that brief and blunt answers were better left unspoken. Kenneth did not go to boarding-school, but profited by his mother's proud appreciation of his talents and acquitted himself finely under the care of the several different daily instructors with whom she provided him. Scientific study was now recognized and accepted as his strong point, and Mrs. Stafford, realizing that gifts remarkable as those of her son should be improved without stint, crushed down all futile regret and gave him every rich chance for their ample culture. She would have preferred, poor lady, that Kenneth should show something of that ideality which might have made him less fond of the bare, rigid fact and more submissive to even the most illusory spells which environ it.
But Kenneth grew hardier, month by month, in his rationalistic tendencies. His passion for pure science augmented, and the spiritualism which his aunt Aurelia began to cultivate roused in him a scorn often defiant of civil usages. At last there came a period, during his residence in New York with his mother and Miss Rodney, when merely for him to know that the latter attended séances and spiritual meetings provoked in him a sombre zeal of challenge. His aunt had more than one fit of tears over his placid gibes and scoffs.
"That boy would fling Easter-lilies to swine!" she once vehemently told her sister.
"Not unless they were a proper article of diet for those animals," replied Kenneth, who chanced to enter the room just then and to catch in full this picturesque aspersion. "I should lay a strict veto on the lilies if they had any bad effect on the character of the pork."
Mrs. Stafford laughed nervously. "Ah, my son," she said, "that is just what your aunt means,—that you would always be thinking more of the pork than of the lilies."
"One helps us to live," he retorted; "the others merely decorate life."
Not very long after this a medium was introduced by Aurelia, one evening, into the abode of her sister. Kenneth, whose hostility and sarcasm had alike been dreaded, surprised both ladies by conducting himself with thorough politeness toward the new-comer. She was in the drawing-room, talking with his aunt and Effingham, when he appeared there at the side of his mother. She looked to be a person somewhat past fifty years, and wore above her stout bosom a huge enamel brooch bearing the face and half the form of a gentleman with a stock and a capacious collar. She might have seemed passably pretty if all her hair had not been drawn back from her brows and temples with excessive tightness and tied into a severe little knob behind, making her glazed chestnut head strike Kenneth as oddly like an acorn deprived of its cup, and rounded off, so to speak, by the insertion of a human face. It was not a very happy face, either; it had a restless, uneasy expression; and very soon after Kenneth and his mother came into the room it grew still more troubled.
"I kinder feel as though there was antaggernistic influences to work," said the medium, answering an earnest request of Aurelia's that the séance should begin. "I guess we won't have much of a seeunce tonight. Things ain't right, somehow."
Aurelia stole a side-glance at Effingham, to see how he stood such lawless orthoepy and syntax from even the "child of nature" that she had already described her priestess of a new faith.
"Oh, Mrs. Gallup," she then said, with blended conciliation and persuasion, "I'm sure it will all turn out splendidly when it once begins. You had such success at your own rooms, the other evening, that can hardly realize how to-night can prove a failure."
"Goodness me!" said Mrs. Gallup, with a shake of the head that seemed to imply vast hidden plenitudes of wisdom, "if the conditions was only always alike I'd never be afraid of disappointing a soul, and reg'late all my doings jus' by the amount of psycher-ma'netic fluid I was able to receive at every seeunce."
"What do you mean by psycho-magnetic fluid?" asked Kenneth, with a sudden curtness.
The youth sat with his hard, bright eyes on her face and his lip unconsciously curled. He was not far from early manhood, now, and although there was a boyishness in his look which until old age came he could never wholly lose, there was still a good deal of high-bred beauty and not a little delicate dignity as well.
"There!" exclaimed Mrs. Gallup, suddenly pointing her finger at Kenneth, "it's you! Young man, I couldn't no more tell you what that psycher-ma'netic fluid is than you could tell me who and where Gord is! I jus' know it kinder comes a-flowing and a-flowing all aroun' me" (here the lady made undulatory movements with both hands), "and then it's—we'll, then it's time!" She beamed upon Miss Aurelia with a sudden smile, after giving her sentence this abrupt end, with its ghostly intimations. "You understand me, o' course!"
"Oh, yes," said Aurelia, with a repressed fervor that hinted of freer speech when her present auditors had been absent; "indeed, Mrs. Gallup, I do!"
"It's him," pursued the medium, once more pointing at Kenneth. "That young man's a septic, and he's spoiling the conditions. I felt he was in the house as soon as I come into it."
"Does that mean you'd like me to go?" asked Kenneth, with a tantalizing repose.
Mrs. Gallup gave him a sullen stare, and then turned toward Aurelia with another exorbitant smile. "'Tain't for me to say who shall be at a seeunce when I'm engaged to give one."
"Still," persisted Kenneth, with his calm, bell-like voice, "you think you could humbug everybody here a good deal better without me. You're afraid I might see through some of your shams if I stayed; though perhaps I might be equally dangerous if I left the room. As it is, I intend to stay." He reached over for his mother's hand and took it in both his own. "When my mother goes into the company of such brazen frauds as all you people are, I go with her."
Under the circumstances (as will be seen hereafter), this was a most reckless little gauntlet for Kenneth to fling down. But youth and impetuosity are seldom other than twin terms. However he may have regretted them a few seconds after they were spoken, no power could then unsay them.
Just what he did not desire to have occur now took place. Effingham sprang up from his seat with a disgusted sniff. Aurelia threw both her hands toward the ceiling, as if she wanted to invoke some sort of celestial ire upon this perverse young desecrator. As for Mrs. Gallup, she was seized with a fit of trembling and whimpering that threatened to finish in hysteria.
But it did not. The stance was to be paid for by a fat sum out of Mrs. Stafford's pocket, and here may have lain the secret of that fine composure which soon replaced the medium's disarray. His mother had softly implored Kenneth to offer some kind of apology, but this he refused to do, sitting with his graceful head obstinately thrown backward and a stern resolve on his tender, boyish lips. Effingham now and then shot looks of disgust at him, but Aurelia wholly occupied herself in salving Mrs. Gallup's wounds.
The latter presently recovered with an almost startling expedition, and told Kenneth in tones of sullen wrath that she would try and let him see whether she was the brazen fraud he had been impudent enough to call her.
"Go ahead, then," returned Kenneth. "I'll take back what I said about you when you've proved to me I was wrong."
"Bless my soul!" murmured Effingham to Aurelia. "Only think of such talk from a lad of his age! If I had a son like that I'd soon show him the meaning of manners."
"For his own sake, poor boy," Aurelia murmured in response, "I do wish that he had been your son!"
And meanwhile, in a low voice, Mrs. Stafford was saying to Kenneth, "Oh, my boy, how ungentlemanly has been your conduct I And under your mother's roof!—your own roof! Ah, with all your past fits of willfulness, I never believed you would come to this!"
But Kenneth merely gave a chill smile and lifted his head a little higher. His dislike of Mrs. Gallup had not been personal. He loathed, as if through indomitable instinct, all that she represented. This detestation of every alleged claim to wield occult and necromantic powers formed a sort of corollary to his reverence for the firm exactitudes of science.
The stance began soon afterward. It was held, of course, in a darkened room. Earlier in the evening Aurelia had spoken, with tones of expectant rapture, regarding the blessed chances of a "materialization." It seemed as if Mrs. Gallup might be so favored by some of her spiritual allies as to produce one, and a very handsome specimen of its grisly kind as well; for in the almost pitchy darkness that now filled the room she suddenly said, with a voice of hollow resonance,—
"Margaret Stafford, your little girl, Elsie, that you lost years ago, is a child o' light now, and would like to let her ma see what a 'cute and sweet little dearie they've made out of her, off there into the summer-land."
Mrs. Stafford started, and shuddered audibly in the gloom. Her first-born, Elsie, had indeed died years ago, but the wound of that loss had never wholly healed, as so many a mother will understand. But her sensation was not only one of pain; terror mixed with it. She stretched out one hand gropingly for Kenneth, who had been seated next her at the lowering of the light. But she could not find him. Where had he gone? She had not heard him leave his chair. "Kenneth," she called, in a low whisper. No answer came.
"How... how marvellous!" the voice of Aurelia was now heard to quiver. "I never dreamed of mentioning poor little Elsie's name to Mrs. Gallup."
"I think we'd better be quite quiet, hadn't we?" said Effingham.
There was a silence, during which Mrs. Stafford's terror grew. She felt like screaming her boy's name aloud. If the little dead one were to come back, she wanted Kenneth near by; he had somehow got to be so strong and big, of late; and then she wasn't ever at all sure, nowadays, about her feeble nerves.
"I guess little Elsie'll come," at length proclaimed Mrs. Gallup, though with the effect of a person who talks in sleep. And then, in a monotonous, droning whine, "Come, little petty... come away from them heavenly blooms and birds you're a-playing among; come here for a little while and see your own darling mommer, that ain't forgot you yet, nor never can."
For the mother who heard them these nasal strains might have been the rarest euphony, while it is doubtful if she even noted the raw vulgarity of their appeal. The longing, the agitation which they roused had slight concern with their tone, their taste, or their grammar. Like many religious people, she was easily impressed by just such quackeries as the spiritualist, the occultist, the theosophist, the Christian scientist, or whatever he may choose to call himself, may care to deal in. She stretched forth her yearning arms as a vague light stole through some sort of aperture yards beyond. Slowly the rays increased until they made one broad shaft on curtain and carpet. And then, suddenly, but with no more sound than the coming of the light itself, a small shape, clad in white, with a lovely childish face and a pair of lifted arms, glided into view.
Sobs broke from Mrs. Stafford. "My child! my Elsie!" she exclaimed.
"Hush!" said Mrs. Gallup, with a dreadful solemnity.
"Hush, Margaret!" gasped Aurelia.
And now Mrs. Stafford's imagination went wildly to work. She distinctly recognized the child whom she had lost years before. She had not a doubt but that her own dead little Elsie stood in spectral beauty just yonder. A cry—an eager maternal cry—trembled on her lips, when the swift darting from shadow of another shape stilled it. A moment later she saw that Kenneth had seized the child. Then there came a shrill, babyish scream, and some one rushed toward the chandelier with its turned-down gas-jets, making each, in quick succession, burn again mercilessly bright.
There stood Kenneth, near the drawn portière of the adjacent dining-room, with a laugh of terrible scorn that drowned the affrighted wails of the child he was holding. But he held it very tenderly, and almost at once, after the spectacular éclaircissement (which had been wrought by none other than Luke, an old butler long resident in the Stafford family), he brought the dismayed little girl over to his mother, saying, with clear, vibrant voice,—
"There, you see she's only somebody else's flesh-and-blood child, after all! Kiss her and hug her all you please, poor little frightened thing. She deserves it for being made the tool of that wretched old mountebank there!"
He turned to Mrs. Gallup as he spoke the last words, and contempt flashed from his ardent young eyes, glad with the joy of a complete victory.
Soon afterward, to the humiliation of Aurelia, every detail of the real truth transpired. Kenneth had heard from Hilda, his mother's devoted maid and his own former nurse, certain words which had caused him to suspect that Mrs. Gallup had been trying to corrupt one of the other female servants. Whatever may have been the medium's triumphs at private residences in previous times, her vicious arts had failed her in the present instance. She had bribed too much or too little; the maid whom she had insidiously approached had betrayed her, and Kenneth, with his hot young soul aflame for the exposure of charlatanism, had not found it hard to enlist on his side the Swiss woman, Hilda, who adored him, or the old Irish butler, Luke, who held him in devoted esteem.
Mrs. Gallup went away crestfallen and feeless. Kenneth had proved himself a power against which the innuendoes of his aunt and the morose mutterings of Effingham were alike futile. His mother clung to him more than ever after that night when he had so pitilessly yet with so austere a kindliness brought to her side the little guiltless, hired minion of Mrs. Gallup's detected chicanery. In spite of his youth, Kenneth now became the real head of the household. Even Aurelia bowed to him, with no more muffled complaints against his "cold-bloodedness" or "lack of sentiment." But his reign as acknowledged autocrat proved, nevertheless, a brief one.
ONLY a few months later Mrs. Stafford, whose health had not for years been strong, suddenly sickened and died. Kenneth was overwhelmed with horror and loneliness at her demise. It changed him for a long period. He would scarcely see or speak to one of his tutors; there were moments when he meditated suicide.
The news of his aunt's prospective marriage with Effingham woke him into comparative action. He disliked them both, and appeared at their wedding in deep mourning, scarcely uttering a syllable. Soon afterward he made up his mind to go abroad, and as soon as his financial affairs could be arranged according to the terms of his mother's will, he departed for Europe. Mrs. Stafford had been rich in her own right, and had left certain amounts to religious charities. Kenneth paid over all these sums, and found himself afterward possessed of a large fortune, the heritage of both his parents.
Reaching Europe, he went almost directly to Germany. He knew his own ignorance, just as he was perfectly aware of his own exceptional attainments. He gave himself in the humblest spirit up to the instructors of the Berlin University, and soon became aware that an enormous amount of study waited between his ambitions and their potential span. But he was prepared to shirk no height of toil, and in his later career as a student of science he won shining distinction. The new atmosphere tingled for him with a most welcome stimulus. Intercourse with congenial minds at first nearly intoxicated him by its delicious novelty. This life of the university, as he soon perceived, filled a yawning vacuum in his nature. He was now a living refutation of the cynical words "Tout nôtre mal vient de ne pouvoir être seul." It seemed sometimes to Kenneth as if absolute solitude would henceforth become hateful; he forever sought an interchange of ideas with his co-disciples, and frequently dispensed to them on this very account entertainment which his well-filled purse made a light enough consideration. For such reason, and for others as well, he was popular. His freshness amazed and pleased everybody. He went about seeking knowledge everywhere and from all informants. "He is not a man," said one of the students: "he is a thirst." "No, an enthusiasm," preferred another. They called him kenntnisverrückt behind his back, and made amiable sport of him for his craze after knowledge of a certain character. But they all liked him for his fine simplicity and that species of courtesy which holds no man, not even the meanest, an unimportant factor in social forces. For nothing so flatters the ordinary human intellect as to become convinced of its own instructive value. The moment you make a fellow-creature believe that he can help you by information which at once costs him nothing and yet shows forth any of his own mental equipments, you have created an eager, if temporary, friend. And friends of this description Kenneth did create by the score. His drift was away from orthodoxy, and plenty of encouragement with respect to this mood awaited him at the Berlin University. He was confronted, indeed, with not a few atheists, who occupied their leisure in shaping dauntless and biting epigrams which sounded like shibboleths to be printed glaringly on the banners of some future rationalistic revolt. But he revealed no sympathy with this mode of destroying conservative tenets. He had a rooted and inherent distrust of eloquence, and it gradually grew upon him that oratory as an art was one of the most harmful enemies of civilization. The deeper he plunged into science the more potently he was convinced of how its lustral waters cleansed the mind from every form of parasitic and clogging impediment. "I live," he once announced to a throng of intimates, "in search of nothing except the actual. Progress has for centuries lost untold opportunities through her hospitality toward imagination. All dreams are a disease; the really healthful sleep has none. It has often occurred to me that mankind now suffers from an immense and distracting toothache, called religion."
"Are you going to invent a cure for that toothache, Stafford?" queried one of his companions, over their beer and pipes.
"No," said Kenneth. "But time will. They gave one of the mythic Fates a scissors; I would put into her hand a forceps, and have her pull out that' raging tooth! She's bound to do so sooner or later; she's tugging away at the nuisance now. When the entire world perceives that there is nothing to worship, it will comprehend that there will be nothing to feel afraid of,—not even death. For death, shorn of all ecclesiastic appendices, is really a most sweet falling asleep; and nature has prepared an annihilation of dusky yet enticing splendor. No gorgeous paradise of the Koran's most glowing pages ever equalled it. The dark slaves of oblivion wait upon us there; they are better than the loveliest houris; they can never be corrupted, for the simple reason that they are corruption itself."
"Aha!" cried one of his hearers, "you're a pessimist, then!"
"No," said Kenneth. "A pessimist is a rebel. I am a martyr." And he laughed a little. "I shall always believe in having the human race accommodate itself sensibly to the curse of consciousness."
That last phrase roused a roar of laughter from a certain clique of devotees at the grim shrines of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.
But Kenneth seldom obtruded his materialistic feelings. He nurtured them in silence, and with but few incidents of unreserved disclosure. They strengthened within him, however, as his course at the university continued. Year after year he reaped the highest honors. Electricity attracted him more than any other branch or science, and his environment gave him the best means for exhaustive researches. He was so rich that he could purchase the most precious instruments without a thought of their cost. Subjects that also keenly interested him were physiology and brain-structure in all their subtlest details. He was never tired of microscopic investigations with respect to animal tissue, nerve-cells, ganglia, cerebral mechanism. Our entire mortal coil, physical and mental, was a source of exquisite interest to him. He would spend hours before his microscope, gazing at bits of human brain-matter in which evidence of some lesion like paresis had shown itself. It was declared of him that he had the temperament and mind of a great physician, if he should choose to make medicine his cult. But once, on hearing that this had been stated, he shook his head and dryly answered,—
"Oh, no. Medicine is all a huge experiment. I prefer to know something."
His rationalism was completely bloodless. To him the only deity possible of belief was both centred and comprehended in nature. But he regarded such deity as a totally unconscious one, and hence neither blamable nor innocent. Of all philosophers, no doubt Spinoza most pleased and satisfied him, though throughout the last year of his residence at the university he cared but little for philosophy of any sort. It seemed to him that there was only one book worth reading, one enigma worth solving. Through what strange and thrilling stages of development had man reached his present majestic condition upon this planet? There were times when the youth in Kenneth's blood mingled with the scholar that was part of his being, and caused him to feel as if he could almost plunge thought aeons back into the past until it had made bold to pluck priceless riches along its pathway, bidding the rocks render up new treasures from their caverns and the rivers to babble new secrets with their liquid lips. Man!—to understand his beginning and the slow crescendo that had followed! How triumphant an Oedipus it would take to solve such a riddle! And yet Kenneth often told himself that he had intuitively solved it. Man, the crown and flower of all evolutional progress, though having attained a higher place in the great plan than any other of his animal kindred, was intrinsically neither more nor less than the earth from which fable had long ago claimed that he sprang. A certain mysterious and beautiful law had acted upon him more stringently and tellingly than upon vast hordes of other living creatures; a more heterogeneous entity had resulted, in his case, from the vast homogeneous One of inchoate matter. Psychology and anatomy had already both proved that between the brain of man and that of horse, lion, ape, or even of the invertebrates, there was a difference solely of degree.... And while he thus mused, Kenneth was never tired of repeating to himself certain words of Darwin, a writer who had impressed him with singular force:
"... All living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. Therefore I should infer by analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."
Kenneth quitted the university keenly regretted by not a few of its best professorial adherents. One old and very wise instructor told him in serious tones, on a certain afternoon, that he had mastered the entire subject of electricity with an unparalleled power for one of his years.
Kenneth never forgot that afternoon, as much because of the marked compliment paid him by a scientist renowned throughout Europe as because of a special resolution which his talk with Herr von Sachs engendered. For a good many years past it had been known among the pundits and cognoscenti of the university that a little weak old man, dwelling in Strasburg, had somehow won the repute of having discovered marvels as an electrician. Rumor had asserted that these discoveries concerned a particular sturdy and curiously new force exerted by the electric current under circumstances of a chemico-dynamic action hitherto unguessed. But ridicule, it was furthermore reported, had so depressed and discouraged the Strasburg Galvani that after learning his treatise would be scornfully received he had withdrawn it from publication almost on the eve of its appearance. Herr von Sachs confessed to Kenneth a lurking faith in the possible worth of that suppressed treatise, and such words, coming from such an authority, were sufficient to kindle in his hearer a vigorous curiosity.
"I will take in Strasburg on my way to England," said Kenneth; and he did so. A note »f a few lines from Herr von Sachs acted like magic with the morose, pale, attenuated little fellow whom he found in a dingy garret-room on a side-street adjoining the magnificent cathedral. Strasburg is not a cheerful town of a gusty night in late autumn, especially when you must thread its lonely mediaeval alleys instead of haunting its more modern quarters. That shabby room of old Conrad Klotz, ill lit by one smoky lamp, made no pleasant terminus of a voyage in which Kenneth had almost expected to meet the ghost of an ancient Elsass burgher or a phantasmal lady with coif and missal.
In his colorless and shrunken face the eyes of Conrad Klotz glittered like diamonds. Kenneth had a fancy that some of the electricity he had spent his life in observing might have lustrously imbued their pupils.
"I've given up nearly all work now," the old man said, after he had read Herr von Sachs's note by the light of his decrepit lamp and had scanned Kenneth's face in consequence with a decidedly more amical gaze. "You see... even my instruments for the most part are gone. I—I've sold them. Yes, I acknowledge it, I'm very poor."
"But there are many who would surely be glad and proud to help you," said Kenneth.
"No doubt," said the little old man, crisply. "But I don't care to be helped. I dislike debts of any sort. Besides, I possess, most probably, enough to get me through the present year, since my wants are so slight. It will be the last year of my life,—if I live through it, which is very doubtful."
"I wish I might believe you are jesting," returned Kenneth, with shocked tones.
But Conrad Klotz soon explained, in his tart, gelid style. For some time past he had been troubled by an aneurysm, which of late had grown worse. From his own close acquaintance with cardiac disorders he had become convinced that his case was quite hopeless. He did not suffer; there was discomfort rather than suffering,—that, and the certainty of a near end.
With great tact Kenneth presently mentioned the treatise on electricity. An irascible defiance at once asserted itself in his hearer. "What," he sharply queried, "had Kenneth heard concerning that work?"
The answer was given with entire frankness. Just here it struck Kenneth that the best tact would be to conceal nothing.
"It was a lie!" at length returned Conrad Klotz. "I was never afraid of any critic or fellow-savant in my life. I destroyed that whole edition because..." And then further words died on his lips. He sat staring straight past his visitor with those eyes like two tiny plates of pallid fire.
Kenneth soon found out that he had a most tantalizing person to deal with. One advantage remained, however, to aid the purpose that was now strengthening within him: Conrad Klotz permitted more than a single visit, and gradually chose to talk with greater freedom on questions which dearly concerned his young guest. In a little while Kenneth 'felt his admiration stirred to its depths by the scope and profundity of his new friend's learning. He had seen nothing in the university at once so brilliant and secure. And yet not merely all this man's instruments of science were gone, but all his collection of books as well. He had sold them, to keep body and soul together, and would not accept a thaler from any living being. His days were nearly over; he recognized it; he awaited the solemn summons. There was to Kenneth a piercing pathos in this proud and splendidly erudite little fellow-being perched up yonder expectant of his death; and there was a pregnant suggestiveness, as well, in the fact that over him, and just a few hundreds of yards beyond, towered the Strasburg cathedral, that superb symbol of a faith which he had spent so many a caustic hour in challenging and deriding.
Kenneth certainly managed, as days passed on, to draw him out with a remarkable skill. But, though the old man not seldom would speak of previous more prosperous times, always regarding that suppressed treatise he was reticence itself.
And yet one day Kenneth questioned him so boldly and so artfully that, with a peevish little smile and a toss of his frowzy gray head, he surrendered. Still, before he had begun to speak, his expression altered notably; into his icy eyes came the softer light of revery; his hard, veiny hands knotted themselves together.
"I recalled that book;" he said, slowly and with an immense earnestness, looking past Kenneth again and as though he were addressing the spirit of some departed friend, "because I dared not have on my conscience the horror, the misery, that it might produce."
"Horror? Misery?"
He started and glanced straight into Kenneth's face again as the latter spoke these two sudden querying words.
"Yes; just that," said Conrad Klotz. "I had given the work to a publisher, after years of toil. My whole idea was based upon the intimate connection between latent or statical electricity and the laws of evolution."
Kenneth felt himself turn pale. He was like one with whom some indeterminate yet cherished dream has given abrupt promise of turning golden, tangible actuality. He did not dare to make any reply, lest its effect might prove fatal to further confidences.
"There is no doubt," continued Conrad Klotz, "that I had reached the root of that strenuous and steadfast propulsion which is forever going on throughout all nature, and of which modern science has hitherto caught a somewhat capable glimpse as regards its workings, while she has remained wholly ignorant of its cause. But it is not every man who has thought of seeking in the complicated and apparently baffling phases of embryology, in the unnumbered stealthy and separate growths of organic bone, filament, muscle, and fleshy texture, in the curious augment and decrease of that strange force called nervous vitality, an explanation of purely electrical meaning and origin. I, who had pored upon the workings of electricity for years, until there were hours when my brain wearied of them and loathed them because of the little positive gain they brought me, one day perceived that periods of former devoted attention to anatomy might now extend me precious help. Help toward what? Toward unravelling the real mysteries of man's development. I went to work, then, with a new impetus, an unforeseen fervor."
Once more he paused, and Kenneth, whose blood was now bounding in his veins, could not refrain from the eager murmur,—
"Well, and you succeeded in formulating...?"
The lip of Conrad Klotz tightened together, and for a little space he drooped his head,—the most unusual of gestures with him, since he was nearly always alert and mercurial, no matter how much gloom the shadow of his anticipated death might have cast across his mind.
"I formulated what filled me, at first, with an immense gladness," he deliberatively said. "I wrote my book—why should it be called a book?—it was only a treatise. I had secured a good publisher; I felt certain that the limited pamphlet, comparatively slim as it was, would stir the whole world of science. Did I care for that, however? Pah! It was so idiotic to care. We are all such motes. Look at that giant edifice over yonder. It was begun in 1045, or thereabouts. Who will know, in a few thousand years, either when it was begun or finished? But 'a few thousand years' are to the monstrous minor quantity which we call eternity as a second by the clock is to us. My work was slight in bulk, as I have told you. But the realization that it might give me—poor, mortal me—a so-termed great fame, melted into mist when I thought of what hideous injury it might also bring mankind."
"Hideous injury?" faltered Kenneth.
"Yes. It spoke words that would act like drops of molten lead upon the cobweb fabric of many accepted creeds. Its reach was partial; I had thus far dealt only with the brain of man; all the other details of his organism remained to be treated. But what electricity, as regarded my management of it, my new diagnosis of it, would accomplish in the way of radical development, was treated exhaustively, with respect to a single human organ,—the brain, apart, as yet, from all others. I had builded, as I told myself, a magnificent vestibule to my mansion. The rest would soon follow... But it did not follow. I have never completed my structure... A sort of horror came upon me,—a conscientious horror. You can understand this, in part, at least, for you have already shown me in our talks together that you plainly comprehend how the moral, the altruistic sense may exist in a man devoid of all religious tendency. I have it, just as Spencer, Huxley, Darwin, have it, in spite of their reputed scorn of it. You see, I refer to your English-writing philosophers because I have grasped their greatness, their lucidity, their freedom from vapory German mysticism. Kant was a superb dreamer; Hegel was a Locke spoiled by religious fantasy; Fichte was a splendid juggler with shadows which he believed substances...
"And you," said Kenneth, softly, though firmly, "are a philosopher who did not juggle with shadows: you overcame them, exorcised them, and found beyond them the grand white light of truth."
"Perhaps... perhaps," murmured Conrad Klotz.
"But your dread,—your horror?" pursued Kenneth. "It made you recall the edition of your semi-published treatise. It made you destroy it. Pray answer me,—did you destroy it wholly?"
"I kept one copy,—one only."
"One?"
"Yes."
"And may not I-?" Kenneth felt his own voice fail, then, a look of such austere veto was flashed upon him.
"Read it? You? No; nor any man! It dies with me. I shall destroy it here, in this room, just before I die. You cannot have it, young man. No one shall ever have it or ever see it."
And then, in a low voice filled with intense earnestness of tone, Conrad Klotz uttered a few more words.
Kenneth sprang to his feet. "Ah, you wondersmith!" he broke forth; "how glorious! how unprecedented!"
ALL in all, that particular interview was to Kenneth at once the most interesting and unsatisfactory of any which he had ever yet held with any fellow-being. But the sullen, damp winter that falls on Strasburg approached with its depressing series of cold, cloudy days, and made him feel as if the harshness of the weather had entered into Conrad Klotz's invalid yet strangely virile temperament. Again and again he tried to wring from this extraordinary recluse further disclosures than those which he had already triumphed in securing. Impossible! There were times, during their subsequent talks together, when Klotz phrased certain feelings and creeds with a surpassing eloquence. But there it ended; he could never again be got to touch upon the treatise, however strongly and trenchantly he might discuss other questions.
But one clear, temperate January night, when the moon was shining down upon the great cathedral with a radiance which made you feel as if the pious souls of the past who had helped to glorify the Oeuvre Notre-Dame must be gliding here and there under James of Landshut's porch or the equestrian statues of Lotharius, Pepin, and Charlemagne, it pleased Kenneth's mood to climb the steep dark stairs which led to Conrad Klotz's attic chamber. He knocked at the door, as had been his custom, and received no answer. Then a long, low, sighing groan sounded, and he at once pushed the door open.
Klotz lay upon his bed, with an ashen face and gasping breath. In his right hand he clutched a book. Kenneth felt, as he looked at the thick, worn little volume, what it possibly contained. This was no doubt the "one copy," still undestroyed. Klotz appeared in agony.
"How can I help you?" exclaimed Kenneth. The old man's face was bathed in a beam of moonlight. All the rest of the chamber was drowned in shadow, for the lamp on a table not far from the bed had ceased to shine and was giving its last few moribund flickers.
"You—you can burn this," faltered Klotz; and with a hand that terribly trembled he put forth the book which he held. Then suddenly he withdrew what he had proffered. "No, no," he went on; "you will not; you will see what it is; you will want it. And yet... a dying man speaks to you I—This is my heart-trouble; it is the last spasm; it will kill me; the aorta is splitting in twain... I know; I feel—but, most of all, I know. There is always a chance in these horrid strains, but... but..." He suddenly lifted himself on one elbow; his face was ghastly, and the moonlight seemed to follow it and make it more corpse-like, while the undimmed splendor of his eyes glowed toward Kenneth. "I say you will want this book and keep it; I should have destroyed it as I did all the others, but I have not done so. Will you make me a promise? Will you swear an oath to a dying man? Will you swear on your soul to destroy it without ever reading a page?"
Kenneth, infinitely moved, answered, "Yes, yes. I will swear, Herr Klotz. I will swear on my soul! I give you my most sacred oath never, never to turn a page of the volume!... But perhaps you are not so ill as you believe! Let me try to get a doctor! Let me—"
"Try," came the difficult interruption, "to—to get means for—for destroying this book! Yonder, on the table, you will find matches. There is a brazen pot near the window that is closest to—to the cathedral spire. Fetch these things, and burn the book. Burn it before my sight!"
"I will," said Kenneth.
He went to do the dying man's behest; it seemed to him incomparably sacred... But he had hardly taken ten steps away from the bed when he heard a loud, fierce, resonant sigh. He at once hurried back. Both Conrad Klotz's hands were raised in a frenzied, tortured way. He seized one of them, but it grew lifeless in his grasp.
Something fell on the floor with a soft, dull sound. It was the book. A little later Kenneth stooped and picked the book up. By this time Conrad Klotz was quite dead. Shortly afterward Kenneth hurried down-stairs and alarmed all the other inmates of the house.
"I CAN'T see just what you mean, papa," said Celia Effingham, with one of her most rebellious pouts. "I've always behaved politely enough to Kenneth Stafford whenever we've met. To be sure, that's not proved very often. Ever since he came back here from abroad he's acted as if he were a sort of harmless lunatic,—which I believe he is," finished the pretty young maiden, with a backward toss of her dark, graceful head.
"Nonsense, Celia!" retorted her father, who had grown gaunter and grayer since we last saw him. "Kenneth is a remarkably sensible man. Besides..." And here Effingham gave a dry cough, glancing toward his wife.
"Oh, yes," hurried Mrs. Effingham, who at once caught the drift of her husband's words; "we can't overlook the fact that he is a very eligible young man, my dear." She detested Kenneth as greatly as when she had been Aurelia Rodney and he an urchin of twelve, packed with precocious ironies.
"How I hate that word 'eligible'!" cried Celia. "It somehow always makes me think of the 'sober, honest, and industrious' in a coachman's recommendation. Besides, I've no reason to consider such a question." Here she rose from the breakfast-table at which they were all three seated, and walked to the window with parodied queenliness, looking across one shoulder as if to make sure that a fancied train flowed behind with the right grandeur. She was full of these sportive little arts, and you had only to watch for an instant her damask cheek and dancing eyes to feel that youth bubbled its reddest and blithest in her veins. "If the man I marry isn't eligible," she went on, "my consenting to take him will render him so."
'What a beautiful young witch she is!' thought her father, as the morning sunshine struck her crinkled ebon hair, with a tint in it that made you think of dark-blue autumn grapes. 'Her mother wasn't half so lovely as that; I suppose she gets it from some far-away ancestress.' And the same day he went to his study and wrote the following piece of verse, which he afterward read over to his wife and which in reverent tones she informed him was "perhaps the most purely lovely" of all the lyrics he had written that summer:
The blooms of the garden are swaying
Their odorous disks in the sunshine,
But fairer than they is the maiden
Who stands at the window and watches.
O maiden, O daughter belovèd,
I tremble to think of thy future,
So swift are the tempests that blacken
Sweet maidenhood's pearl-pure horizon.
Yet just as thou watchest the flowers,
Mayhap some Benignancy gazes
On thee, O dear maiden, my daughter,
A sun-smitten rose in life's garden!
"I am glad you like it, Aurelia," said her husband. "I think, myself, that it belongs among those poems of mine which chiefly demonstrate my belief in a spontaneous, unstudied expression. I do not think my worst foe could call the little thing at all labored."
"Labored!" murmured his wife. "Heine might have written it!"
"Heine?" echoed her husband, with accents that told of his deep pleasure. "Do you really think so?"
"Or Browning," went on Aurelia, with the effect of having selected this name from others of a very select few.
"Oh, it's hardly obscure enough," returned Effingham, still stroked the right way. "I sometimes think," he went on, "that when ray verses are finally gathered together they will strike the best minds as too facile... too readily understood... not subtle and profound enough."
"Oh, never, my dear Ralph! Never!"
"Well, there is one thing they never can call me,—stilted, perfunctory, coldly artistic, like Tennyson and Longfellow."
"Indeed, you are right, Ralph!" And Aurelia laid one bony hand on her husband's shoulder, and looked into his wan, waxy face. "You have so much more spirituality, too! Oh, how I long to have your book appear! Not because of the fame it will bring you, for I know you will despise that; but because of the many wounded and groping lives, dear, to which it will be as a balm that heals and a light that guides!"
Gay, careless, capricious Celia was in the habit of hearing a good deal of talk like this within her limited home-circle. It was not often that she listened to anything so worldly as the suggestion which had recently reached her concerning Kenneth Stafford. Usually marriage was referred to before her as a "precious intercommunion of spirits," or a "divine comradeship," or something of that rather frenzied description. She got along very well, however, with her father and stepmother. They thought her prosaic and unintellectual, but neither of them was indifferent to what Aurelia had once called her mirthful commonplaces. On the other hand, she had long ago taken their oddities for granted; it was like having been born in a house full of gargoyles; less eccentric architecture would have seemed out of place there. Romanticism was not in her nature. "I belong to the big practical rabble," she once told a blue-glassed Browningite who had said to her with shudders that not long ago he had heard a horrid Philistine confess a preference for Gray's 'Elegy' over 'The Statue and the Bust.' "I'm of the kind that like Gray's 'Elegy.' I can't help it, you know." And then she gave one of her laughs that had the notes of a flute in it. "The whole thing was an accident of birth, I suppose."
"But I had imagined that your parents—" began the Browningite.
"Oh," interrupted Celia, "mamma isn't my real mother, recollect; and papa and I—well, there is a little spot half-way up his mountain-height—a sort of mental Grands Mulets, one might call it—where I meet him now and then and get along very comfortably with him after all."
'She's not the fool I fancied her,' afterward mused the Browningite, 'though her irreverence toward our great master so shocking.'
Celia had spoken of Kenneth With a most unmeaning exaggeration. She was very far from thinking him a harmless lunatic, but his unneighborly conduct had piqued her; for education had modified though not by any means crushed the coquette we formerly found in her. Her feelings would have been different indeed if she had known the real conditions of the case.
The truth was that after two or three visits at the Effinghams' Kenneth had given up going there through a fear of himself. Celia had simply enchanted him. He thought her at once the most beautiful and natural young damsel he had ever looked upon. She made his boyhood seem but yesterday, and yet she gave to it a memorial sanctity. He looked into her sprightly dark eyes, he let his gaze wander over the lovely undulations of her hair, her throat, her breast, and it was with him as though some prized but long-faded picture had become tinted and illumined by a sorcerer's pencil. During one of his visits who should appear but Caryl Dayton!
Oddly enough, also, the three came together on the very croquet-ground (it was a tennis-ground, now) where years ago Kenneth and Caryl had fought their furious fight. They had not seen one another since that Homeric event Caryl volunteered no allusion to it, showing twice the repose and grace of Kenneth. Between these two friends of hers, now grown from boys to men, Celia could not but note the in-tensest contrast Caryl was from head to foot the gentleman of wealth, leisure, good breeding, and culture. He had read hard at Oxford and acquitted himself rather handsomely there. His calm, aquiline face, with its trailing amber moustache, betokened as much intelligence as refinement. The throaty Oxonian drawl which Kenneth found such an affectation was no less a part of him than the palate that helped to shape it His old supercilious air had quite vanished, and he looked like one who would always cling to courtesy where it was not a question of risking dignity.
Kenneth had a wholly different air. Had nature chosen to give him a beard, he would have let it spread, if possible, over three-quarters of his face. But no virile growth of this kind had ever sprouted on chin or cheek. He looked, at certain times, like an absurdly tall boy, but in the sense that Shelley is said to have looked like one. His gray eyes, between their dark, thick lashes, held a soft splendor of expression, and it would have been hard to fail of noticing the noble and scholarly air of his head. But a German university never yet has done for a man's outward felicities what an English university can do. It is now a good many years since Englishmen were the best-dressed race in Europe and Germans the worst. Kenneth would perhaps never have cared much for his apparel, even though his most impressionable years had been passed in London and not in Berlin. But there is just the point: London makes men who care nothing at all about dress appear as if they had given it not a little civilized heed; Berlin quite rarely does.
Kenneth left the tennis-ground and started homeward, that day, with a dull, fretting pain at his heart. 'Good heavens!' he thought to himself, as he walked along the pleasant midsummer roadside, 'can it be possible that my old dead-and-buried jealousy of Caryl Dayton has got up and come forth in its winding-sheet after all these years?'
He knew well that his manners had been moody and at times almost churlish, while Caryl had behaved with no less kindliness than tact Whoever had been right, whoever wrong, in those other days, there was no doubt now that Kenneth had acquitted himself most ill. He had begun to realize that nearly all his former suavity had departed. He could never have stood forth at the university as a popular personage any longer. The truth was, conscience incessantly stung him, and the effect such irritation produced was to tinge his demeanor with acerbity.
He had broken his oath to Conrad Klotz. He had not merely opened the volume containing the treatise, but had devoured page after page of it with wonder and delight. For some time (as deserves being recorded to his credit) he had struggled against temptation, and with victory. Then had come a moment of weakness; words uttered by the dead philosopher had re-echoed through memory; the keenly dramatic quality of that revocation which kept the treatise from appearing in public had impressed him more than ever before; recalled hints as to the vitally important nature of the work had fed curiosity anew. At last he broke, so to speak, the letter of his oath; he opened the covers of the little book and read its title-page. To sink lower, after that, was not so difficult. At least twenty sophistries darted from nowhere. One of these assured him that it was really his bounden duty to find out what great service those remaining pages might bestow on mankind. But all this while Kenneth knew quite well just where his bounden duty lay. He was a man of too much brains to sin any other way than deliberately. His moral sense, based on human justice rather than religious sentiment, could do nothing unconsciously evil. Every step in any downward course must of necessity be clear to him. The smirch he had cast on his own honor stared him in the face as though it were some indelible stain befouling his hand.
But nevertheless a great exultation, a fierce inward joy, now filled him. He felt the enthralling ardor of the man who believes himself near some grandeur of discovery that shall amaze the world. He had seen, with a lucid view that was at times terrifying to his own thought, just whither Conrad Klotz's magnificent investigations and conclusions tended. His wealth gave him all needed opportunity for the series of experiments which he had resolved to begin. This Vermont homestead, encircled by quiet hills, had seemed to him the fitting theatre for his coming efforts. They might last several years; he expected that they would do so. It was easy to fit up a fine laboratory extending through a suite of spacious rooms, and by degrees to have brought to him, from New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and elsewhere, just the electrical instruments which he desired. This plan he entered upon so gradually that even the placid neighborhood where he dwelt learned little of his actual doings. It began to be understood, in a rather vague manner, that he had decided to make the homestead his permanent residence, and to pursue there the scientific studies which had absorbed him while abroad.
His reserve and reticence grew upon him, and in his own household he seldom addressed any of the servants except his former nurse, Hilda, an elderly Swiss woman, who regarded him with a fondness that no neglect could alter. All the while that he was in Europe she had kept faithful watch and ward here in his deserted dwelling. She had welcomed him back with delighted tears, and her present vigilant interest in his solitary goings ana comings preserved one fixed form of constancy. She was never tired of fighting little battles for him behind his back, when the rural gossips aired opinions about his "queernees." "He is a very wise and worthy gentleman," she would say, with a look of defiant sapience on her rugged, homely face. "I held him in these arms of mine as a little boy, and even then everybody thought him gifted with a wonderful brain. Now that he is a man, and has been studying in foreign countries, he has come to know a great lot He is making use of all that those learned people across the ocean have taught him, and some day—oh, be sure of it!—the whole world will ring with his name. He never tells me anything; why should he mention his great thoughts to an ignorant creature like me? But I am certain of what I say. He's hatching out something in that clever head of his that will make poor me proud I once sang him to sleep with the old German lullabies of my own childhood,—songs I learned long ago by the lovely waters of Lucerne!"
"He looks to be fonder of dogs than he is of his fellow-creatures," a somewhat cynical villager once said to Hilda.
There seemed a strong grain of truth in that slur. Kenneth's devotion to his laboratory was varied by another. Slowly, and yet with the aptest nicety of judgment, he caused kennels to be built on his estate and stocked them with many species of the rarest and handsomest dogs. Breeding was carried on by him incessantly, and with an apparent eccentricity which would have surprised any one really experienced in the accepted formulae of canine culture. But the two or three overseers whom he employed were not thus experienced. They did their work capably according to their master's instructions, and nothing further was required of them. The kennels themselves were held sacred from all outside intrusion. Kenneth laid down certain rules with respect to the exercise, feeding, and general management of his dogs, and made the least violation of such code a sharply serious affair.
MEANWHILE months had passed on, and the green Vermont hills had long been swathed in winter's whitest raiment. Weeks ago the Effinghams had gone back to New York. If they had not completely forgotten the existence of Kenneth, they had doubtless made up their minds that his country home would retain him indefinitely, when one evening he presented himself at their town residence. Celia was talking with two or three young men of fashion as he entered the drawing-rooms, and her step-mother sat not far away, clad modishly and enacting the part of duenna. Aurelia had an open book in her lap, but she had not been reading it; she had been permitting even so idealistic a mind as her own to need the tenuous gossip and babble of Celia's admirers.
When Kenneth appeared, however, she at once began, as if de propos délibéré, to "entertain" him, and to place him on pins and needles in consequence. Now that she was posing as the social guardian of her step-daughter, she struck him as more rankly affected than ever. The young men who surrounded Celia seemed to Kenneth ruffianly in their manners; they just allowed her to shake hands with him and no more, closing about her again in a devoted phalanx. 'And ah, little wonder!' he thought, while the tones of Aurelia's voice rang dissonantly in his ears; 'for has she not to-night so lovely a face that one might fancy her a flower just changed into a maiden!'
He said nothing so poetic aloud, however; it would have pleased Aurelia only too greatly if he had lost some of his grimness. It seemed to her that he had grown harder and gloomier than ever. Why had he come? Did he fancy himself welcome? Of course he would be a good match, howsoever blunt and dismal, for even an heiress like their Celia. But could Celia, with her caprices, ever be brought to tolerate him? It looked as if such an event were far from possible.
Outwardly Aurelia was romantic and sentimental as ever. "We have thought of you so often, living your lonely life there in the country, my dear Kenneth," she said. "By 'we' I mean Mr. Effingham and myself; our Celia has had no time, this winter, for anything but gayety. The darling has been a great belle in society, really... you should have seen her, with her bouquets, and her beaux in attendance; she was such a sweet sight!"
"I seem to see her with beaux in attendance just now," said Kenneth.
"Oh, I mean in society."
"Yes. As I believe you know, I dislike society."
"Ah, I am sorry to hear it! For, after all, what we call the flippancies, the whimsicalities, are only sparkles upon the wave of life. Below is the shadowy depth and the... the unfathomable mystery."
"I didn't suppose you thought there was any mystery about it," said Kenneth, dryly. "I imagined it was all quite plain to you."
"Oh, it is, at times!" came the fervent reply. "We all have our moments, our flashes, of intuition. Indeed, as Emerson says—"
"When anybody talks of intuitions, inspirations, and all that sort of mental magnificence," Kenneth now struck in, "I'm prepared to hear 'as Emerson says.' It's always quite certain to follow remarks of a certain vague character." He had dropped naturally into the old brusque, satiric tone with which he had so often addressed his aunt on former occasions. Even her good-natured answer bored him, just now, more than if it had been a challenging one; and when, as the minutes dragged themselves along and he found her asking him whether he had not often gained a certain elevation of soul in watching the chastity expressed by snow-clad meadows, he began to fidget on his chair with ill-hid nervousness. It was even worse with him a little later, for he had inquired concerning Effingham only to receive such an unwelcome reply as the following:
"To-night we persuaded Celia to remain at home, and my husband went to a lecture given at Chickering Hall by Mrs. Humphrey Boas Anderton, the lady who has lived so many years in India and knows such marvellous things concerning Theosophy. Ralph and I are deeply interested in Theosopny. Its teachings, alike in their splendid charity and their precious promise of a strange, complicated, yet divine immortality, have appealed to us beyond all language.... But perhaps an exact thinker like yourself, Kenneth, will hardly sympathize with—"
"Theosophy? No. You're quite right I am an exact thinker, as you're good enough to remind me."
He had desperately meditated departure, when two of the high-collared young gentlemen who were being civil to Celia got up and made their adieus. Not long afterward the third went also, and then Celia joined her step-mother. At once Kenneth felt a great desire to be agreeable, but there was a delicate, playful mockery in the girl's mien which thwarted this tendency. Celia spoke of her present life as if it were the joyous be-all and end-all of human experience. She chose to ignore his own recent existence, and did not even inquire of him when he had left his rural retreat or how long he purposed remaining in town. But his heart fell terribly when she began to express her great delight at the prospect of soon going abroad.
"Oh, yes," chimed in Aurelia. "We expect to sail during early April. I have never seen those lovely storied lands of the Old World, Kenneth, as you perhaps remember. What enchantment they will mean for me! Ah, I expect indeed to find Rome the city of the soul, as Byron so grandly called it! I ..."
But Aurelia's voice became a distant hum to him. He felt pierced with pain to realize that he should not have Celia near him throughout the ensuing summer. And then a new stab was given him on learning that they would remain abroad for a considerable time. He rose and took his leave with a sullen misery at his heart. He promised to visit them again, but did not do so. As he left the house Celia seemed to him more unreachable than one of the silver wintry stars that glinted above the roof-tops.
'She would laugh me to scorn if I dreamed of telling her,' he said within his own wretched soul... The next day he went back to his laboratory, his brooding hours of solitude, and his furtive, strenuous ambition.
For months and months he let the strong force of the latter sway and coerce him. A summer came and passed. Another winter dropped wan snows on the encompassing hills. Then summer came and passed again. The Effinghams were still abroad. One day he told himself that they had been gone two years. But he almost laughed, then, at what seemed to him his dead love.
'I have been wise,' he mused. 'I have chosen a philosopher's life, a philosopher's consolation. And ah, I have done so much more! If old Conrad Klotz, dead in his grave, could see me now! He would never curse me. He would understand that I am his loyal disciple, not his unworthy betrayer.'
A long time now elapsed, and suddenly, one morning, Kenneth gave orders that his kennels should be quite broken up. He retained but a single dog, that one being still of a tender age. He had never permitted this animal to draw milk from its mother's dugs, but had Drought it up in the laboratory on food chemically prepared with his own hands. The mother had been a dog of rare beauty, great size, and wonderful intelligence. But Kenneth sent her away with the rest. Her name had been Elsa, and, although she was nearly always in the laboratory with her master, those of the servants who had found a chance to caress her and to hold with her an occasional half-stolen minute of meeting felt toward her a fondness of peculiar strength. Hilda had seen more of her than any one else in the household save Kenneth himself. When spoken to regarding the dog's extraordinary sagacity and lovableness, Hilda had preserved, after a while, what seemed studied silence. The Swiss woman appeared loath to discuss the question of this brute's exceptional qualities. There were reasons why she preferred not to do so, and the reasons may be simply told.
One day, believing that Kenneth was not in his laboratory, yet having a note for him which she had been instructed to deliver forthwith, Hilda had determined to place the sealed envelope on a certain desk of her master's, with the object of having him see it as soon as he returned from the walk which usually absented him at this particular hour. The note was, after all, of comparatively small moment, and Hilda had no right to pass the threshold of that special suite of rooms. She had been forbidden to do so without permission, as had every other inmate of the homestead. But for once in her faithful and duteous life she had disobeyed, and the disobedience cost her many after-hours of odd perplexity and surmise.
The first room which she entered was vacant, as she expected. Here were but a few of the many instruments which Kenneth had collected. The desk was but a score of paces distant, and she approached it, laying the missive where she thought it would be most readily seen. Just then a low, sombre, ululating moan reached her ears. The door of the next chamber was now close at hand. It was open, and, impelled by a sharp, sudden curiosity, Hilda hurried across this second threshold. And then a strange sight confronted her.
She saw Kenneth standing in the centre of the apartment Beside him was an odd-shaped receptacle, half glass and half metal. Within it stood the dog, Elsa, held immovable by a skeleton-work of glittering bars and clamps.
Kenneth sprang forward with an angry face, the instant his eyes lit on Hilda.
"How dare you—" he cried.
But even then the frightened woman had retreated. She would have hurried at wild speed into the outer hall again, if Kenneth's hand had not presently caught her by the shoulder. This happened just after she had found her fluttered way back into the first room. She had never seen him look so wrathful as now.
"Have I not told you," he recommenced, "that no one must ever enter these quarters unless I deliver an order to that effect?"
"Yes, Mr. Kenneth," she faltered, "but—" Immediately, at the sound of her voice his manner softened, his grasp relaxed. "There, Hilda," he said, in a wholly changed voice, "I did not mean to be so severe with you. Go now; go... and remember in the future that my directions are not idly given.... I see, Hilda; you thought, most probably, that I had gone out. For this once, I will accept such excuse." He paused and looked at her steadily, but no longer with the least irate sign. "Understand, please," he went on, "that you are not to let any living soul know what you just saw."
"I—I understand, Mr. Kenneth," stammered Hilda.
"And you promise?" he pursued, with a sort of stern gentleness.
"Oh, yes, sir... I promise."
Hilda always kept her word. But when she heard others praise Elsa for remarkable and almost human endowments, that silence already referred to was her unvaried mode of response.
The kennels were disbanded, as we have learned. Elsa went with her other less favored mates. "He is tired of his dogs," the countryfolk said concerning Kenneth. "Before long it will be some other craze with him. Perhaps he will breed pigeons. Or his taste may take a turn for either cattle or horses. He is such an oddity that no one can tell what new freak may get hold of him."
That one dog which he had retained ably throve under Kenneth's quiet and mysterious care. Full growth at last made of him so superb a creature that when seen abroad with his master he evoked occasional cries of wonder. Whatever subtle stirpiculture Kenneth had used, a shape of unrivalled symmetry, dignity, and grace had resulted. Once, when a stranger met him walking on a rather deserted road with his beautiful charge and paused to ask its name, Kenneth answered with a hesitant, dreamy air, as though he were pronouncing the word now for the first time, "Solarion."
'That was an inspiration,' he told himself, as he walked onward. 'There is majesty in such a name, and a large suggestion of loneliness as well. I like it. I am glad it came to me.'
KENNETH alone had realized what surprising powers of intelligence had been evolved from both the parents of Solarion. Their parents, in turn, with the grandparents and great-grandparents of these, on either side, had all given proof of striking and of gradually increasing capacity. Elsa, the mother of Solarion, eclipsed them all, but his father had been of noble appearance and unwonted keenness. The truth was that for six years Kenneth had kept the actual traits of this entire little group more or less hidden from those few observers likely to discover them. Solarion's progenitors had been under his constant watch, and had spent hours with him in his laboratory. What points of mental development they had really reached no one knew save Kenneth himself. It seemed cruel to let them all depart as he did, and be sold with the other former inmates of the kennels, running the chance of meeting new masters who might maltreat them. And yet he had no other choice: the whole throng must go, and he preferred to know nothing of their whereabouts hereafter. Solarion would alone remain to him, and Solarion he cherished with an ardor that daily deepened.
In physical grandeur and comeliness his new favorite surpassed all predecessors. Immense of stature, with a leonine front lit by a pair of lustrous dark eyes, he was clad in a curly silken fleece of that shimmering whiteness which invests a flawless pearl. The nails of his feet were of a delicate rose, and his thin sensitive nostrils bore the same tender hue. Notwithstanding his great size, every motion that he made, whether quiet or agile, breathed an equal grace. All the poetry and loveliness of his kind appeared to be concentrated in this one splendidly flexile and majestic shape. To glance at him was to appreciate that he lived the flower and crown of his race. There are some blooms that in curve and texture of petal, in rarity and freshness of tint, in their way of drooping yet not drooping upon their stems, make us almost feel as if one more felicitous touch added to them would have produced some sort of thrilling specimen it were rank profanity to call merely vegetable. So with Solarion. Not that Kenneth now doubted his dumb associate's right to be called human. Already this right had addressed him in terms distinct and cogent.
He watched, he waited, he closely and devoutly experimented. Each successive week brought him additional hope and faith. The teachings of Conrad Klotz had seemed to him, at first, capable of an expansion from cerebral to physical improvement But later he had confessed the failure of such effort in himself. Klotz had seen how evolution could be pushed forward by means of electrical nursing and stimulation, according to his own firm and faultless method, in so far as concerned the brains of lower animals alone. He had found no means of simultaneously aiding their bodies. Physiology had not responded to his researches, nor could Kenneth, howsoever he pored over the precious treatise and sought to take that intuitive leap which when safely and successfully made we always hail as a burst of pure genius, decide just where the two great forces of animality could meet on one congenial ground of progression.
And yet, as he noticed the splendor of Solarion's corporal condition he could not but feel that it took origin from those laborious and promising trials made upon the brains of Elsa and her kindred. Surely there had never been so glorious a brute as Solarion, looked at from the stand-point of brute alone. After all, had Conrad Klotz realized that the corpus striatum, the gray cortical substance, the medulla oblongata, the optic thalamus, are all media of a far more facile receptivity than stubborn sinew and obdurate thew? These, in the brute, might need our slow centuries for their change into a positive human organism, while their motor brain, itself the nest and lair of all higher conscious life, might far more quickly answer to any such potent and novel law as that which this little obscure scientific Napoleon had hit upon.
As Kenneth labored and thought, there grew upon him the conviction that Klotz's discoveries and his own patient employment of them were overshadowed by a terrible sarcasm of incompleteness. It was almost as if the voice of a wrathful and yet tolerant Deity had said,—
"Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther. And if so far thou goest, beware of thine own rashness in tampering with my works. Let their uknowableness remain clad in their own native sanctify. Forbear,—or reap the bitter result."
But Kenneth believed in no such warning voice. He merely told himself that a man of the reverent, the orthodox, the imaginative turn might have become persuaded that he heard it, and so really forbear. But he never once felt visited by the least impulse to forbear. He simply pursued his work and blessed it for the absorbing charm which it afforded. Celia had almost ceased to exist for him. It was now six years since he had seen her. A rumor had reached him that she had been engaged to an Italian prince of illustrious rank and large fortune, but that for some reason the marriage had never taken place. 'Well, I do not care,' he had meditated quite callously. 'I have Solarion.'
There was no exaggeration in this mental mood of his. Conrad Klotz had not been mistaken. The brain of Solarion had already marvellously yielded to his master's process of stringent artificial evolution. One of the great secrets of the universe had truly been unlocked by that little Strasburg scientist. He had shown how electricity, applied in certain ways, could change and ameliorate the brain-functions of nearly all lower animals.
Solarion's acceptance of the enlightening aids now brought to bear upon him gradually filled his master with a strong, triumphant gladness. There came at last a day when Kenneth, after using a certain new force hitherto kept discreetly in reserve, anticipated hearing from him the first sounds of articulate speech. Everything had thus far foretokened such a result. For weeks past Solarion had shown the ratiocinative energy as a factor of his mind that slowly yet surely strengthened. He might now be compared to a child of between two and three years of age, though his conditions of growth were still those of his own species and dependent upon its far more rapid system of maturing. Ten days might accomplish for him what as many months would fail to do in the case of a child. That he would shortly speak, in some sort of rudimentary yet decisive way, Kenneth scarcely felt ¦himself able to doubt.
And yet he somehow did doubt. It seemed so prodigious, so incredible a fact! It transcended in strangeness and wildness the first throb of momentum given by steam, the first legible word written by telegraphy. These foretold agencies that must forcefully influence the destiny of man; but here was an exploit whose connection with himself took far more intimate coloring. As he entered his laboratory on the particular day in question, Kenneth felt as though he were indeed about to call spirits from the vasty deep. And well might he so have felt. Superstition is fading from the earth; but while men live and awe is an emotion that may be quickened, some adequate substitute will not prove wanting. The Unknowable, as an element in science, will continuously supply this; for until all final causes are comprehended, mystery must ever hide at the base of both human knowledge and endeavor. Here will lie all the ghosts of our future "Hamlets," the witches of our future "Macbeths." Electricity is not the only nimble and fiery demon to be summoned by unborn sorcerers from nature's unexplored and shadowy gulfs. Light, heat, optics, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, will all have their weird and perchance blood-curdling messages to deliver, and it may be that aeronautics will surpass even these in grandeur and suggestiveness of tidings. People with "nerves" will possibly be as much afraid to look through one of our coming telescopes as if they were now requested to walk at midnight through a graveyard. The mysterious will go on holding its own, precisely as before. Though fable will have perished, a sense of the vague, the mighty, the occult, even the diabolic, will yet remain.
Kenneth had not a little of this latter sense when to-day he dealt with Solarion for the purpose of testing what might prove the defeat or victory of Conrad Klotz's audacious theory. If Solarion did not speak now, the chances were that he would never speak. Not until resent occasion had Kenneth dared bring to bear upon him this peculiar force, really a discovery of Klotz's own, and explained and formulated in the memorable treatise. The time for a first application of this force had arrived, and none of Solarion's kindred had been deemed in a state properly receptive to its transmission. A second application of it might be perilous; a third would in all likelihood mean death.
Kenneth's pulses fluttered as he began his work. Solarion must suffer acute pain for perhaps the first time in his brief life, and he seemed to anticipate some such occurrence. If this were indeed true, he showed perfect courage. But it would have been hard to separate the idea of courage from his nobility of aspect He looked to Kenneth so strong, so beautiful, so infused with a quality higher than instinct, so trustful of his master's fair and just intentions, that to set him in toils which might, if even for a short space, inflict burning agony, wore the hues of an unpardonable outrage.
'Ah,' shot through Kenneth's thought, 'if I could only change his body—admirable though it is—as I hope soon to change his mind! Then there would be a perfect transformation indeed! Then the dreams of poets and story-tellers would be proved but the avant-courriers of what science had for years labored to achieve!... For evolution, after all, is only a fairy-tale made actual. The great Buckle was right when he said that men like Shakespeare often prophesied through their imaginations what progress would one day accomplish.'
But Kenneth was not a man to recoil for any protracted space of time from an undertaking toward which long toil and study had led him. Yet his hands trembled as he made the last preparations in that apparatus from which Solarion might find exquisite if transient torment.
His expectations were verified. He grew firm as if every nerve were wrought from steel while his dumb associate was subjected to the first harsh throes of suffering. Here flashed and writhed a new electricity, whose potency dealt in molecular agitations and displacements never dreamed of by the most learned men of Europe. Begotten of a chemical combination hitherto unguessed, its rigors had the stress of half-tamed thunder-bolts.
But Solarion stood them stoically. A shaft of love entered Kenneth's heart as he saw the earnest look of those dark, brave eyes, fixed on his own. They seemed to say, "I will bear this pain, because you have put it upon me and you know best." From that moment his feeling toward Solarion altered; it became in a manner parental, and yet touched by a spell still more solemn and august. Mere ordinary birth, like every other mysterious matter which constantly goes on occurring, has become a triteness to us all. But Solarion appeared as one who has been born in some way that is appallingly new, and Kenneth soon had the sense of standing toward him in terms of miraculous fatherhood. For the fateful trial did not bring forth failure. Though dragged almost lifeless from the machine that had held even his lordly strength captive in complex metallic bonds, it was not long before Solarion revived, to become a different being throughout the remainder of his life. The faculties of his brain had been pushed into a puissance which thousands of years might not even have wrought in some far-future descendant, acting upon himself as but the single link of an immense genealogic chain-work.
Learning to speak was with Solarion an affair of much greater speed than it is with even the most capable child. In a few more weeks he had made brilliant progress. And now his education was begun and carried on by Kenneth with extreme care.
HOW unutterably strange it seemed to hear (as Kenneth did hear, after a while) this glorious animal addressing him in a voice of the richest, sweetest intonation and with the purest of English! There were times when Kenneth wanted to proclaim before the whole world just who and what Solarion was. There were other times when it seemed to him as if the very sunbeams that crept in through the windows of his laboratory were bright and stealthy spies upon the unprecedented scenes that passed there. Solarion learned with a swiftness that sometimes wrapped the mind of his teacher in secret gloom. This easy and splendid aptitude,—what did it mean except that the brain thus forced into such vigorous capacity would share the inevitably short life of the body to which it belonged and yet somehow did not belong? But meanwhile the incessant surprises that Solarion gave to his master offered large consolation for these passing fits of depression. The great feat had, after all, been achieved. When occasion was quite ripe the world should be apprised of it and bow before him who had called such a marvel from the stubborn calms and silences of the Unrevealed. Kenneth felt himself craving that sort of recognition. One sin begets another, and he had now determined that when he announced himself to mankind in the role of so stalwart a victor over the impossible, he should do it with Conrad Klotz's treatise safely reduced to ashes. Thus the honor, the fame, the immortality, would be all his own. 'They will repay me,' he once told himself, in a mood of retrospective sombreness, 'for the sorrow destiny burdened me with in other days.' For he had never really forgotten Celia, and there were times when he felt assured that his intense mental concentration upon this very purpose which had now turned out so radiant a success was the sole reason of whatever rest from fretful love-longings he had been able to secure.
He kept Solarion always at his side. He desired, as yet, no confidant with respect to his mighty secret He would still have guarded it from the greatest scientist on earth, had such caution in that quiet little Vermont village been requisite. As it was, Hilda stood the chief chance of becoming at all suspicious. But before long Solarion himself had understood his master's aversion and was loyally ready to obey the least detail of its dictates.
Kenneth made a masterly instructor. Into the fine virgin mind of his strange disciple he poured floods of precious knowledge. To educate Solarion was like planting gourd-seeds in tropic soil and afterward finding that they had almost sprung up during the space of a single night. Kenneth's own mind was a storehouse of the richest learning, and what he knew he knew so radically and intimately that to impart it to another was little more of an effort than the shaping of the willing lip to the willing word. It meant no trivial task, however, to acquaint his pupil, when the needful time came, with the unique and awesome place he had been called upon to occupy in the great ordered scheme of creation.
Solarion listened with a gentle gravity to the first words which were spoken on this most pregnant subject Kenneth, realizing that he was now clearly qualified to comprehend, weigh, and estimate every sentence that bore upon it, strove, while proceeding, against an agitation difficult of control. He felt, at the end, that he had acquitted himself ill. Solarion's visage, in which there shone, quite often, a human quality of expression that made his peerless animal beauty enchanting beyond all the art of language to convey, now betokened a doubt, trouble, perplexity, not hard for his observer to read.
"And then," he presently said, in his mellow, dulcet voice, "I—I am quite alone—quite alone—among all created beings?"
"Quite alone," answered Kenneth, averting his eyes a little. "You are—Solarion; I named you that, for it seemed to express a living loneliness. Only two others were born with you. These I destroyed. Your mother, influenced by the forces which I brought to work upon her, lost the wonted fecundity of her race. This was to be expected. The higher the type of creature the less its propagating power. Man is perhaps at present the least fecund of animals. But in coming ages man, when he has reached a position far above that which he now occupies on the planet, will probably be a sort of angelic paragon, yet wholly sterile; he will no longer reproduce his kind. Evolution will have ceased, for its goal will have been attained. Perfection will ensue, companioned by great individual longevity, to be followed by that slow period of dissolution symbolized and prophesied already by individual death."
Incongruous and ill-advised as these words of Kenneth's may sound, they were in reality neither. Solarion had become capable, by this time, of understanding all that he said, provided it did not completely deal, on the one hand, in recondite scholarship, or, on the other, in thoughts and sentiments to which experience could supply the only key. Already Solarion had become in a way erudite; he had so opulently profited by the tuition bestowed on him that there were moments when his teacher felt as if he had developed a brain beyond the best scope and reach of man's in its existent sentience, and that with a little more mental training aptitude might transform itself into some kind of novel and dazzling efficiency.
"All that you tell me," Solarion presently answered, "is but another way of making me sure that my solitude without yourself for friend and guardian would be horrible and even ghastly."
Kenneth affected an irritation which he did not feel. "Where do you get these fine and rolling phrases from?" he asked, in no kindly tones. "Ah, Solarion, what mystery of brain-power lies beyond all that I ever anticipated in you! You are too wise,—too self-searching. I did not foresee this. You use words whose origin in your memory I fail to decide. Each new day that we are now together you amaze me the more deeply. Have I produced in you not merely a monstrosity that shall thrill the world with consternation, but one that shall also transfix it with awe at the height and embrace of an intellect far beyond anything its most daring conjecture has ever spanned?"
"Monstrosity," murmured Solarion. "I have not learned the word before, but I guess its meaning. It still rings upon me a repetition of that idea, solitude. Am I not right?"
"Perhaps."
"And you have told me about death. You may die at any time. If you should die and leave me, what would my fate be?"
The sweat broke out on Kenneth's forehead. "Your—your fate?" he could only stammer and no more, grown pale as ashes.
"Yes,—my fate. Did you think of this when you created me?"
"I—I did not create you. Only God could do that, if there were one."
"And you believe there is not one?"
"I—I do not know."
"Does any one know?"
"People have said that they do."
"And you think them wrong?"
"I think their statements unproved."
"Tell me," said Solarion, after a little pause, "why did you make me what I am?"
"Why?" faltered Kenneth, looking at the perfect beauty and stateliness of his hearer's aspect as he thus spoke. "I—I suppose it was through a desire to accomplish, something,—to show mankind that I was not content with its recognized creeds, postulates, axioms."
"I see," replied Solarion, with a touch of supreme sadness in his low, melodious voice. "You cared nothing for what I might be or do or suffer. You had concern simply with the success or failure of your own daring and mighty plan."
"Solarion!"
"Do I distress you? Well, I must speak out. As it is, I cling to you. You have brought me forth from a sort of nothingness. You have told me to be silent and I will obey you. But that word 'monstrosity' must haunt me with a frightful cruelty. You have made me man and yet not man. If I lost you I am certain that I should have no chance of happiness anywhere on this earth, since the race from which you say that I have sprung would be loathsome to me as associates, companions, and the race of which you have caused me to become so forlornly a part would spurn me and shrink from me were I to seek its help or sympathy!"
"Solarion!" again cried Kenneth. He was fearfully agitated. He rose and tottered toward the being that had just addressed him in terms agonizing to the keenest degree. "You... you are not what I believe you!" he went on wildly. "You are a spirit,—a mocking ghost,—an incarnate vengeance! You... you are his mind, his soul,—Conrad Klotz's,—returned to torture, to punish me! Ah, that I, I should say this, admit this!—I, who have scoffed at soul and spirit for years!—I, who—"
And then all speech failed him, and he sank unconscious at Solarion's feet.
THIS mood of weakness was followed by its due reaction. An unflinching rationalist like Kenneth could not deal sternly enough with himself for having given way to it. He had expected fierce revolt from his charge; he grew prepared for a new outburst at any moment, and one which might easily end in his own destruction. At times he even desired that Solarion would rise in the wrath of a tenfold superior strength, and kill him.
But meekness and obedience could go no further than Solarion's placid exhibition of both. The usual lessons continued for many days, with a perception and grasp on the part of his pupil little short of unearthly, and with an automatic serenity on his own that hid untold discomfiture.
Finally, one morning, in a burst of irrepressible enthusiasm, Kenneth said, "This brain of yours is a miracle! You forget nothing; you apprehend, you comprehend, with a fleetness and power man has never shown before."
"You once called me a spirit," said Solarion. "Do you think me one now?"
"No... Why refer to that bitter day?"
"I refer to it," answered Solarion, "because it gives me great sorrow."
"Sorrow? And why?"
"I wounded you."
Kenneth started, and looked fixedly into the splendid, dark, soulful eyes that as fixedly met his own.
"You were right, Solarion!" he exclaimed. "Though you had poured thousands of worse reproaches upon me, you would still have been right!"
"No," came the answer, slowly delivered, and in that voice rich as the tender tolling of a golden bell. "I was wrong. You have created in me a mind, but you have also created a nature."
"A nature?"
"Yes. Mind is not all. Being what I am, I do not merely think; I feel, as well. No matter with what purpose you made me. I have been lifted from lower brutish levels. That is not simply something; it is a vast and glorious something. We have gone forth together, often, on our walks. Now suppose I had been a little wild-flower, like those we saw yesterday clustering at intervals along the roadside. Suppose I had been one of these, living only for a few brief days, and yet you had infused into me the larger life I now possess. I must have been a strangeness, a solitude, an anomaly among my mates, just as circumstance finds me at this hour. But the little transient force of higher and greater life that you had given me could never have been a boon for which I owed you ingratitude. I must have praised and thanked you as I do now! I must have loved you as I do now!"
Kenneth's face lighted with a rare gladness. He sprang toward Solarion and buried his head in the soft, silky curls that clad a neck sculptors might have sought for years to rival and then flung down their chisels in despair.
"And I, Solarion," he cried, "I return that love with all my heart! A cold ambition, a fatal selfishness, may at first have begotten you, but now the feeling I bear toward you is one full of tenderness, of sanctity! You shall always be to me the strongest and dearest link between myself and life. Indeed, I shall live only for you, and in the marvels of this mind that I have unlocked it will be my happiness to find the most vivid and unfading interest!"
"And your ambition?" asked Solarion, in a tone where perhaps lingered the least delicate trace of irony. "Is that wholly extinct?"
"Absolutely."
After this there passed many weeks of the most harmonious intercourse between master and pupil.
But one day Kenneth said, "I am no longer fit to be your teacher, Solarion; you eclipse me in everything."
"I know so little practically," was the reply. "If thrown tomorrow upon my own resources, what could I do or be? And I was not then thinking," he added, after a little pause, "of those other terrible physical hindrances."
"Ah, you still think them so!" said Kenneth.
"Can I help it?"
"But unless you were to lose me—" he began.
"Unless! In that little word lies an infinity of risk and threat."
Kenneth bit his lips and drooped his head. "I believed, Solarion," he returned, "that this regretful mood of yours had forever passed."
"It revisits me at times; I cannot prevent it. I try to conquer self, but the foe dies hard."
"There, at least, you are no exception to the general throng."
A deep sigh left Solarion. "I am so mercilessly an exception, though, in other ways!... But there is consolation. Yes, it is very distinct; not always, perhaps, but often."
"Consolation? You mean...?"
"That I stand as the beginning and the end of all such abnormal, experimental life; that no more chimeras like myself will be sent adrift upon the world."
Kenneth slightly frowned. "You speak with great confidence," he said. "How can either of us be sure of what you prophesy?"
"How?" Solarion exclaimed. "Are you then willing to cause the existence of other creatures like myself?"
"No," responded Kenneth, quickly. "So far as I am concerned, you are alike first and last. But who can tell how many may desire to use my secret when it has become known by thousands?"
"Known by thousands!"
"Yes. Why not?"
"But who will tell it to thousands?"
"My book, sooner or later, of course."
"Your book!"
"Assuredly. You did not suppose that I meant to let humanity remain ignorant of this most precious discovery?"
"Precious to you, perhaps," declared Solarion, with sternness.
"And to the cause of science."
"You care nothing for the cause of science. It is your own ambition that you would feed."
"Solarion!"
"I speak truth. Your ambition, that you asserted not long ago to be completely dead! But it was not dead; it never has been; you threw dust in your own eyes. And now you boldly tell me of this infamous intention."
"Infamous!"
"Vilely so!" Solarion's eyes were two disks of lambent flame; his majestic head was lifted in challenge and defiance; there was terror in his anger, and there was also an excessive grandeur. "By making man familiar with these formulas you will prove yourself the coldest and hardest egotist. If a whole race of beings like myself were to spring up on the earth, only wars and discords could ensue. But even such result were far better than that these isolated instances of what science could accomplish were to exist in all stages of shunned wretchedness. It shall not be!—no, it shall not! Hitherto I have obeyed you; now I both resist and warn you!"
"Ah," said Kenneth, furious, between his clinched teeth; "you warn me?—you!" And he made a movement toward Solarion.
Solarion met him as he advanced. Then Kenneth recoiled a little, awed if not affrighted.
"Kill me," he said. "You can. Why do you not? I gave you a life above the brutes you belong with. Perhaps it is only fitting you should pay me my reward in death."
His words had their visible effect. But the firm, austere answer came, notwithstanding. "I demand of you," said Solarion, "that you never tell a living soul your secret. If you did, it would be a horror, a shame, an outrage,—and a sin beyond all earthly pardon!"
The door of exit from the chamber was near where Kenneth now stood. He veered toward it, his face white, his steps reeling with agitation....
He scarcely knew how he gained the lower regions of the homestead and passed out upon the big, still, white-pillared portico. It was an exquisite morning in early June. The soft New England hills rose before him like lucid blocks of rough-hewn amethyst in the warm, liberal sunshine. A pear-tree on the lawn was pink with blossoms, and in it a bird poured forth ecstasies of silver song. The peace, the cheer, the gentle splendor of the day, all helped to calm his fevered pulses.
Solarion had been right. And yet, after having won such heights of achievement, how hard to relinquish all thought of the deme that should duly follow! It would have been different if he had not tried,—if he had simply fallen upon this grand idea by accident and picked it up like a golden nugget where no treasure was foreseen. Far easier to relinquish what we have gained sans chercher ni vouloir than what we have longed for and struggled after through years of greed and flame! A great renown was to have been his wage, and toward that goal the arms of his spirit must forever stretch. And yet why should he dare to tell himself that he deserved a single coin from the sacred mint of fame? What had he done beside the wondrous work of Conrad Klotz? There was nobility of intellect and of soul, both wedded in one! Self-abnegation, the higher philosophy, the chaster altruistic dictate, had spoken in that dead man's act. An immense celebrity towered on the one hand; an obscure death, with the certainty of not having harmed his race, lay on the other. Klotz had made his choice, and sublimely chosen the latter.
Kenneth pressed his lips together in bitter pain as these thoughts now swayed him. A large wicker-work chair stood near, as if tempting to better enjoyment of this rare day in the light coolness of its arms. Kenneth sank into it. 'Bandit that I am!' he mused, 'what right have I thus to crave and covet a fellow-creature's renown? Oh for strength to stifle this longing! Have I not sinned enough already? Must ambition goad me into still worse hypocrisy?'
He started, the next moment, as a step sounded at his side. It was Hilda's, and she had come to bear him a piece of intelligence that amazed and shocked him.
"I have not seen a newspaper for several days!" he exclaimed, as Hilda paused. "I did not even know that such a calamity had taken place. And is it certain that Miss Celia Effingham was rescued from the sinking steamer, while neither her father nor her step-mother escaped?"
Yes, Hilda said, it was quite certain. Miss Celia had come to the old family estate a day or two ago. She had brought a few servants with her, and was living in the closest retirement. Hilda knew her maid, who had expressed the opinion that she would never quite recover from the horrible effects of that disaster at sea.
"You should have told me all this before, Hilda," Kenneth presently said, rising.
"I only found it out two days ago, Mr. Kenneth," was the Swiss woman's reply. "Since then, sir, it... I beg your pardon, Mr. Kenneth, but it seemed to me as if perhaps you had too much on your mind already."
Kenneth gave a start, and raised his brows as Hilda drooped hers. "Too much on my mind?" he said, in a tone where anxiety almost conquered hauteur.
"I only mean your studies, sir," said Hilda, very humbly and reassuringly.
"Ah," said Kenneth, half turning away.... "I must go and see Miss Celia," he soon added, as though half to Hilda and half to himself.
Hilda, with plain embarrassment, drew nearer to him. "Mr. Kenneth," she began, hesitatingly.
"Well?"
"If you do go, sir, will you not please let the...the barber in the village see you first?"
Kenneth's hand went to his boyish chin. "Why, surely, Hilda," he broke forth, "I don't need—" And then a laugh left his lips, gay, jocund, in harmony with the blossoming pear-tree and the carolling bird. He suddenly ceased, and looked at her who had been his nurse in childhood. Hilda's eyes had filled with tears.
"Oh, Mr. Kenneth," she said, "how sweet that laugh sounded! I haven't heard you laugh in so long till then!"
"True,... true, Hilda," he murmured. "I've had serious thoughts to occupy me."
"Oh, I know that, Mr. Kenneth!"
He tried to speak with an air of levity, now. "But you've been having serious thoughts too, I find. You can't have been wanting me to consult a barber for this absurdly smooth face of mine? It must have been for my hair, must it not?" And he passed one hand through locks whose thickness and length startled him. "Yes, I've neglected it, have I not?" he went on... Once again he looked full at Hilda, and saw her tears quite plainly, even if they had before escaped him. "I'm afraid I've neglected you too, good Hilda." Here he put forth his hand, which she eagerly took.
"You've—you've worried me, Mr. Kenneth!" she said, tremulously. "You've seemed, for a very long time, so sad and... and wandering, sir. I've spoken to you, now and then, and you haven't even answered me."
"No, Hilda?"
"No, sir. You didn't hear me, I knew. Or, if you heard, you... you didn't hear right; it was just as if you were listening to other voices that I couldn't catch. And... and it frightened me, sir. I thought how troubled your poor dead mother would be, if—"
"Yes; I understand, Hilda." He pressed her hand, shook it once or twice with tender vehemence, and then lingeringly let it fall. "You're so good, so faithful; and I recollect how fond my mother was of you, and how you loved her in return."
"No more than I do you, Mr. Kenneth!" broke from Hilda... Speech failed the devoted creature, at this point; she stood with hands tightly clasped together, staring into Kenneth's face with swimming and wistfully eloquent eyes.
'Love?' brooded Kenneth, a little while later, when he was again alone. 'It seems to me that I am utterly done with it, now, in all its conceivable forms... Solarion, whom in a sense I could have worshipped, has become—Well, no matter.' He laughed again, but very low,—almost so low that no listener could more than just have heard him. 'I will take poor, dear Hilda's advice. I will go to the barber in the village and have my hair cut.'
He did so. Meanwhile a silence nearly if not quite unbroken was maintained between Solarion and himself. For hours that afternoon and evening the two did not exchange a word. On the following day Kenneth paid his visit to Celia.
The servant who admitted him knew him, and declared, with a doubtful shake of the head, "I'm afraid, Mr. Stafford, that Miss Celia will not see any one. But in your case I may be wrong, sir."
HE was wrong. Mourning did not specially become Celia; it rarely suits a woman of her dark type. But, on the other hand, grief had not marred her beauty, and as Kenneth gazed upon it he grew convinced that this beauty had been only brilliantly matured by a somewhat considerable lapse of years. The old sorcery had him under its control almost on the instant. He could scarcely trust himself to speak, at first, while he watched the sad lustre of Celia's eyes and saw the lines of her delicate mouth tremble. But she referred to the horrors of the shipwreck with firm enough tones, and her voice betrayed signs of complete surrender only when she mentioned how a wave had literally torn her father from her grasp as they stood together on the oscillant, shriek-haunted deck. Kenneth felt a keen relief when at last he had won her to dwell on less painful matters. And all the while he was saying to himself, 'How beautiful she is! how time has given her new witcheries and not stolen a tint from her former girlish freshness! She must be seven-and-twenty, yet her cheek is even a lovelier bit of coloring and chiselling than when I saw it last.'
"How the years have swept along!" he presently found himself saying aloud. "Did you not stay abroad much longer than you had designed to do?"
"Yes," said Celia, a sweetly retrospective look seeming to possess her eyes. "At first we were a good deal in England, but afterward we went to Italy. Mamma loved it so! She was so filled with enthusiasms about it! And papa, too!"
"I can easily understand that," said Kenneth, off his guard.
Celia gave a distinct start, and looked at him with her milky brows drawn a little, either querulously or in a simply troubled way.
Kenneth had dropped into his old sarcastic habit of comment, without really knowing it He bit his lips, while his color rose; he would have thanked the floor if it had swallowed him. He was pierced by a sense of his brutality toward the dead. But at the same time he felt a desire to make plain the unintentional character of his apparent rudeness.
"They were both," he began to stammer, "so—so given to—to enthusiasms."
Nothing, in the circumstances, could have been much worse than this. But he soon saw what a woman of the world time and experience had made of Celia.
"Yes, you are right," she said, using a cold courtesy that filled him with hate of self. And then she went on, with what struck him as a veiled and subtle defiance of his own ill-timed satire. "Papa wrote many sweet poems while we were in Italy. They were all lost, with his other manuscripts. That is one of my deepest regrets, for I should so have loved to bring them out. Papa was not a great poet, perhaps, but he had a gift as unmistakable as it was fine and sincere. He had arranged with an American publisher while we were living at Sorrento, just before our homeward voyage. But, too unfortunately, the manuscript had been returned to him for a final revision, and now there is no other copy!"
She drooped her head, making two white oval curves of her lower visage against the blackness of her gown. Kenneth could have fallen at her feet in abject contrition. He did not afterward remember what he said, but his words vaguely occurred to him, in subsequent thought of them, as a dreary blending of falsehood and fatuity.
There is no doubt that all this while Celia kept telling herself he had become even a more awkward person than when she had last seen him. He had the air of a timid-mannered valetudinarian, and there were points of a careless kind about his dress which made it pleasant not to find these hopelessly abetted by tokens of actual personal neglect as well. He had so thoroughly failed in making a good impression that she almost felt like offendedly quitting the room when she at length heard him say, and with none of the calm assurance that women like men to show in their delivery of bold personalities,—
"You, Miss Celia, have had your noteworthy heart-troubles while abroad? Or do I trespass too much on our old childish acquaintanceship by alluding to them?"
Celia scanned the dark breadths of her gown, for an instant, with compressed lips. Then she lifted her beautiful head and looked Kenneth full in the eyes with a glance that seemed to him the tender sublimity of forgiveness.
"How odd you are!" she said, smiling. "But you were always odd, were you not?"
Kenneth now had another droll desire to fall at her feet, from sheer gratitude at her sudden clemency.
"I—I feel like a positive boor," he faltered. "Do forgive me! I have been in great solitude for a long time. That is my only excuse if I have offended you."
"You have not offended me," Celia said, and her repeated smile was like an abrupt sunburst to him from a sky of lead.
"I am so glad,—so very glad!" he continued, half wildly, as it were.
"But I heard—" And then he paused, looking at her with helpless regret and shame.
"I think you must mean my engagement to Prince Soriato," she said, the next instant, with faultless composure.
"Yes, that is what I mean," he managed, quite piteously.
Her smile deepened. She sat before him, mondaine to her fingertips, wearing the purple of high breeding and elegance with just the right unstudied air.. "And you want to know about that little affair of mine? Well, there really isn't very much to tell, Kenneth." (It seemed to him as if she were showing a seraphic benignancy in thus calling him "Kenneth.") "The Prince Soriato was a rather important Italian who did me the honor of asking me to marry him while we were living for a while in Rome. One day I became aware that I had done the most senseless and trivial thing in binding myself to a man whom I could neither love nor respect. Just at this time our old friend Caryl Dayton made his appearance in Rome. You remember Caryl Dayton, of course."
"Oh, yes; perfectly."
"I asked him to help me, and he did so,—very effectually, and with the nicest art of the diplomat. Prince Soriato was furious, and a duel was talked of between himself and either Caryl or else poor papa. That rumor nearly drove me to despair; I seemed in my own eyes the worst type of a vulgar, heartless jilt, and on the verge of a horrible yet wholly just punishment. It is all a good while ago; I had more imagination then than I have now, and perhaps I made a more willing instrument, as well, for the grisly fingers of remorse to play upon. In reality no duel took place; but before very long, on our leaving Rome for Venice, an affair of a much less hostile character did take place. This, I suppose, is a rather bungling way of telling you that I became engaged to Caryl Dayton."
"To Caryl Dayton!"
"Yes. You had not heard of it till now?"
"No," replied Kenneth, staring into her face brusquely; "I had not."
"Ah, you've indeed been living out of the world! They said shocking things of me in New York; it's odd how one hears those shocking things when one is abroad. They get into the eastward-bound steamers; they are like rats; only, rats don't leave a ship after it reaches port, and they do; they travel direct to the unhappy person for whom they've been intended."
Kenneth had grown more at his ease. "And they travelled direct to you, in this case? What were they? Were they so very terrible?"
She looked down at her hands, dropped like two curled, listless lilies upon the darkness of her lap. "They hurt me very much," she answered, "though perhaps they were not, after all, so terrible. They said that I had learned the Prince Soriato was not half so rich as report had stated, and that I had planned to make Caryl Dayton cancel my engagement for me with a clear understanding of my becoming betrothed to him as soon as I could decently extricate myself from the princely toils... But perhaps I should not have made any reference whatever to this part of my life. Still, you asked me for some definite information, did you not?"
"I shall think it very indefinite if you pause here," said Kenneth. "It will be like seeing the first two acts or so of a play—"
"Which did not end at all tragically," Celia broke in, with a staccato trill of laughter. "Oh, no. Mr. Dayton and I were engaged for about four months in Venice and about six more in Paris. Then it was broken off."
Kenneth could not resist saying, "Did you also decide that you neither loved nor respected him?"
If the sarcasm hurt she did not show it. Indeed, her tones were full of a dreamy sadness, now; and she soon said, still watching the fair, placid hands in her lap as though they were somehow not her own,—
"No. I liked him. I often thought that I liked him very much indeed. It was so strange. I did not break it off, you know." She raised her eyes, now, and their soft rays pierced Kenneth's heart with a new, delicious, and yet remembered pain. "One day we parted by mutual assent. We parted very good friends, by the way. There was no quarrel. Caryl said something that ought to have angered me, but it did not."
"What was it?" Kenneth asked.
"He told me that I did not know how to love."
"Perhaps he was right."
"I hope he was wrong," said Celia.
There had been a simplicity about her later words which made the most singular contrast with her tranquil, worldly, collected maintien. 'Does it mean,' thought her observer, 'the profoundest and most adroit artifice of a trained coquette?—one whom the ablest European schools for flirtation have amply and dangerously equipped? But no; surely no; her mood is too sorrowful for that, and the gloom of her recent bereavement hangs too heavy upon her soul.'
A little later, when he had taken his leave of Celia and was walking homeward along the familiar roadside in the sweet, exuberant June weather, he asked himself if she had shown any real wish to see him again. Well, at least she had not forbidden future visits. And then her little confidential outburst... that might or might not have been a graceful tribute to the distant yet appreciable kinship which existed between them. And could it really be true, after all, that she did not know how to love? He had heard or read or dreamed about this queer, stubborn virginity of the heart among certain women. Yet why should a woman like Celia find it so difficult to love? Nature had surely made her no great intellectual or moral exception to her sex. Might not the terms of that bond between herself and Dayton be resumed hereafter under conditions of still rosier romance? Kenneth smiled bitterly to himself as a pang of the old jealousy shot through his heart 'To feel like this again,. he thought, 'after all those years! It's almost incredible!'
When he again met Solarion it was with an utter change of feeling. He could not account for the dissipation of his own late wrath. He strove to look into his heart and rigidly analyze its workings. Then, startled, he recoiled from this introspective course. Had he discovered the truth? Had love leaped up burningly within his being once again, and had ambition ceased to hold forth, as only yesterday, its lure of intoxicating promise?
He found himself capable of reflecting that the complete loss of deme would be, after all, as trifling as its acquirement. Love had taken entire possession of him after a period of at least seeming desertion. It was like the return of the reinstated sovereign who has come to claim his own; and yet Kenneth was not without a mystic inward faith, just now, that this potentate had never left the throne at all, but had been carrying 011 a sort of drowsy reign there,—perhaps even as somnolent a one as that of the sire of the Sloping Princess in the tale. And with the unselfish feelings begotten by that one divine selfishness, both sympathy and affection for Solarion returned in greater than their previous force. He was not without a sense of humor, and the speed of this alteration in him plainly provoked it. But, like almost all his emotions, it had a bitter touch. 'What ludicrous little puppets we are!' he mused, 'and what fun we must make for our wire-holder,—provided such office be filled by a consciousness and not a mere blind force!... How if our whole universe, by the way, from Canopus to an asteroid, were so contemptible a proceeding in the eye of some remote and sublime mightiness that time, space, the travail of worlds, everything which means human felicity or suffering, stood for that Power in the same light as some theatrical matinee performance stands for us? How if all were a mere transitory episode with Him (or Her), surveyed as a brief recreation between demands of an inconceivable urgency? Man expresses a little holiday stroll, as it were; the Deity (if He be) creates and destroys a universe as we cause an egg to be hatched and then crack it... Who was the poet who wrote in a transcendentally ideal mood that he saw "space at his feet, like a star?" I forget;... I've always read the poets—even those that I liked the best—with such a sense of poor dead old Aurelia's rhapsodies.'
The silence of Solarion seemed like that of the Sphinx. Kenneth had a certain awe about breaking it. But after he had once done so their former relations were genially renewed. Lessons and discussions began again. But it soon became evident to Kenneth that his pupil saw some difference between then and now.
"Your heart is not in your work," said Solarion, after a day or two. "What does it mean?"
Kenneth smiled. "Where did you get that phrase from?" he asked. "It is like many others that you use, and yet its oddity specially strikes me."
"I can't tell you whence it came," was the reply. "No doubt from your talk, rather than from the books you have both read aloud to me and arranged that I should read unaided by you. Perhaps it is quite true, as you once told me, that I possess the largest powers of language... But you do not realize the greatness, the depth, of your own instructive methods."
Kenneth shook his head for a moment, and then bowed it. "I realize," he said, "your incomparable mind... As I before told you, there is nothing that I can now teach you. You are—"
"I am anxious to learn why you do not teach me as you did of old," Solarion here interrupted. His wonderful eyes were riveted on Kenneth's face, and the latter drooped his own look before them.
The glance was so arraigning that Kenneth for a brief space had no response at his command. "I am anxious to learn this," Solarion continued. "I love you—"
"You love me, Solarion!"
"I love you even in greater degree, I think, than that which you have told me belongs to the friendship of men whom loyalty, honor, respect, make their adherents in the huge outside world."
Kenneth placed one hand very fondly on the noble head of his companion.
"And my love for you, Solarion," he said, "is devout as when I first knew you for what you are and realized you in all your strange intellectual grandeur."
"But there is a difference. I do not mean in your wish to instruct me, but..."
"I cannot instruct you further. You are already my superior."
"Do not say that... There are hundreds of simple things which you yet can teach me, apart from the many complex things which I still have not learned."
"And yet," said Kenneth, his voice breaking a little, "you think there is still a difference?..." He tried to laugh, and failed. "A difference? What do you mean?" Then he paused for several seconds, and at length added, "I hope, Solarion, you have forgotten our quarrel."
"No," was the answer, "I have not forgotten it. I am always thinking of your declared intent."
"My declared intent?"
"Need I remind you of it?"
"Ah," said Kenneth, "I remember. You mean my wish to... to publish before the world what I have accomplished."
"What you have accomplished?"
"Yes," cried Kenneth, eagerly. "Why not?"
"Have you accomplished," pursued Solarion, "or was it Conrad Klotz?"
Kenneth turned ashen. "Are you, then, a spirit?" he queried. "How can you possibly know of Conrad Klotz?"
"I am not a spirit," said Solarion, "but I remember you addressed me once—not long ago—as if you thought me the spirit of—"
"Klotz! I, too, remember. And you have deduced from those few words—? Well, I do not care what you have deduced. I am willing to tell you all, now, Solarion. I revoke everything that I said to you regarding my future aims,—my book,—my desire of letting the world know what I have done." He added, an instant later, "or what Conrad Klotz has done, wizard, if you prefer to put it in that way."
Solarion's answer was calmly given. "I ask nothing concerning that man. Tell me of him when you will, or not at all, as it suits you. But this willingness to renounce ambition,—let me know the meaning of that."
"It is love."
"Love? You mean such love as I feel for you? .. such love as you feel for me?"
"No."... Kenneth spoke many sentences, then, relating how he had met Celia in boyhood, how in the full vigor of early manhood he had afterward met her, how he had become passionately enamoured of her, and at last how he had striven to make science the regnant genius of his life.
"And you loved her," said Solarion, when he had finished. "I recollect 'love' of this sort as touched on in our philosophic talks. It belongs purely to the emotions, does it not? It is a part of the sensibilities, the feelings?"
"Yes."
"So, then, it cannot be explained, can it, like the catching of a disease?"
Kenneth tossed away his métier of tutor, for the instant, in a burst of non-professional cynicism.
"No; it is not a question of microbes or contagion. With all your extraordinary talent, Solarion, you betray depths of discouraging inexperience when you ask such a question. Alas! you have so much knowledge, and yet so little! Love? I cannot define it to you. Who could? It is a power that pulsates incessantly throughout mankind. To some hearts it is a benign blessing; to others it is a frightful curse. Now, while you and I speak together, there are men and women pale and tortured with the throes of its ungratified passion. Men, when they feel it, cannot explain it; women can explain it still less. It drags certain men toward certain women; it makes certain women almost mad because certain men will not recognize their yearning and answer them. Love? It is a perpetual comedy, a perpetual tragedy. It is always crowning mortals with roses, it is always dooming them to bottomless pits of torment. It has brought into the world untold bliss, it has brought measureless misery!"
Solarion was silent for several minutes. "It will bring you such misery?" he presently asked.
"I hope not."
"Do you not know?"
"Ah," said Kenneth, "I shall do my best to forget."
"But it must be a vast power, this love, since it has influenced you as it has done."
"It is a vast power," acquiesced Kenneth. Then, looking fixedly at the regal shape of Solarion, he slowly added, "You should thank me that the weird, hybrid nature you possess guards you from it forever. Your splendid intellect crushes the brute in you; the brute has no chance; it is fainéant in spite of itself; it will always be sluggish, inert, subjugated."
"Is love, then, brutal?" asked Solarion. His great, rich-colored eyes were like two dark stars as he thus questioned.
"No,—not brutal," answered Kenneth. But there was perplexity in his voice. "It is angelic," he quickly added, and then his tones fell somewhat. "It is also gross," he said. "I can explain it no further, just now... We will talk of it again... I am not in the fit mood at present... Perhaps I never shall be, Solarion. Of all the philosophers who ever lived, none has been able to give love a true definition, and yet there has never been one of them—if he were not a monster instead of a man—whom some woman has not enslaved, either for good or evil."
THEIR long and pleasant walks began again. It was a summer of exceptional coolness and charm. Not seldom they would plunge together into the green heart of the sweet neighboring hills and either rest in some grove by the shore of a silver lake or ascend to its breezy summit a height commanding miles of the most enchanting pastoral landscape. The superb health and vigor of Solarion made these rambles a keen, exhilarant pleasure to him. One day it chanced that they came upon a spot of especial loveliness and at once paused here to rest. Down the granite side of a mountain tumbled a cascade of the purest white foam, while just below brimmed a natural rocky basin with those dark-brown, eddying waters in which the trout loves to lurk. All about them were stalwart forest-trees,— birches and oaks and maples,—fluting sylvan melodies, delicate or sonorous, below a sky like deep-blue crystal.
"I have been thinking," said Solarion, "that perhaps for my brain to have been thus wondrously lifted out of itself and made so far above what the ordinary train of circumstance would have left it, is but a proof that some divine possibility waits in the very humblest forms of animal life. And yet you have told me that science has never been able positively to assure itself that man has developed from a far lower order of being, and cannot find here upon this earth a sequence of fossils that makes his regular upward progress matter of absolute certainty."
"True," said Kenneth. "Pious people, who see no science outside of their Bibles, will not for an instant believe that men sprang from apes. But I have yet to hear of the nineteenth-century thinker whose opinions and teaching are held in the least esteem and yet who has reached a contrary decision. Still, all just minds must admit that the evidence is incomplete,—which of course puts a feather in the cap of the 'special creation' zealots."
"But why should the record of man's beginning be so partial?"
Kenneth smiled. "Who shall answer that question? The world is filled with just such baffling ones, and whenever they are scanned in a spirit of candid inquiry a bevy of conservatives are always ready to pounce on the investigators and call them 'morbid,' 'unhealthy,' and names of a similar sort. I believe it is Huxley who says that Nature first slaps us in the face and then leaves us to find out the reason why. That, I should think, is the fairest way of expressing her cold, cruel, inscrutable methods toward man. But the 'slap in the face' has been splendidly salutary on countless occasions. It is because we have wounded our fingers in tampering with the frigid machinery of things that we have grown to understand at least a little of its dread, irreversible wheel-work."
"I see," said Solarion. "You mean that necessity has taught the race to tear from its environment much needed benefit and comfort."
"Precisely. You could not have expressed it better."
"And necessity has, then, stimulated every species of quest, interrogation, discovery?"
"Yes."
"And yet this 'connecting link,' as you once told me that it has been called," Solarion pursued,—"this actual proof of the relationship between highest and lowest,—has never become a manifest fact?"
"No," Kenneth conceded. "But you recollect what I have so often tried to impress upon you,—the extreme comparative youth of all science."
"And yet Geology, though its disclosures may be limited, has already revealed so much!"
"Still, Darwin aptly reminds us that only a small portion of the globe has yet been geologically explored with any real care,—that only certain classes of organic creatures have been preserved in a fossil state,—that countless generations of beings must have passed from the earth without leaving a vestige behind them,—that between successive formations of fossiliferous deposits vast periods of time must have elapsed, and that during these periods of subsidence and elevation complete extinction of many a precious relic has been more than merely probable. Then there are other reasons, as, for instance, that widely ranging species are those which have been most variable and have oftenest been the causes of new species... But, after all, the struggle for existence, the survival of the fittest, has written a very vague work on palaeontology. Or I might rather say that it resembles a book once perfect in almost every part, yet with pages here and there ruthlessly torn out, and now and then with whole chapters, copious and important, lamentably missing."
"Not long ago you mentioned to me," said Solarion, "the great convincing verdicts of embryology. Will you touch on these again, and with more definiteness? I remember all that you said, but—"
"Ah, Solarion," cried Kenneth, "is there anything that your photographic brain forgets?" ... He discoursed for a long time on this subject, second in value to none throughout the whole range of natural history, and ended by using almost the very language of that radiant modern writer whom he so loved, to the effect that embryology is a dim, half-obscured picture of the common parent-form of each great animal class.
Intently, as was his wont, Solarion listened to every word. At length he said, musingly, and with a ring of dreamy sorrow in his voice, "It is strange to hear of these firm, unflinching laws that must have ruled the orb we dwell in for millions of years, and yet to feel one's self, as I feel now, beyond them, outside of them!"
"That is impossible," said Kenneth. "Nothing can be beyond and outside of nature. You are simply the result of a new combination and disposition of forces. You are as natural, in your way, as I am. You could not exist were it otherwise. Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of what might not be accomplished by nature. All the fables in which men once believed—the tales of gods, demons, dragons, fairies, minotaurs, elves, and gnomes—may possess their foundations of solid truth. I think it is John Stuart Mill who said that on some other planet than ours two and two might make five. Beings precisely like yourself in every particular may exist on spheres of whose very existence we can only have the vaguest conjecture."
After a somewhat long silence Kenneth's companion again spoke. "This theory of a soul behind human intelligence,—how the history that you have taught me is constantly infused with it!"
"Indeed, yes. But it has been said with much wisdom that the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly feet is the great tragedy of science."
"But for humanity to have that immense want and need of an immortal state! Is there not some profound, mystic meaning there t You spoke to me of love, not long ago, in the bitterest and most despairing way. Surely there have been many strong thinkers who have reaped from it more of comfort than disappointment, in the sense of delicate yet distinct spiritual prophecy."
"You almost make me wish I were some dream-swayed metaphysician," said Kenneth, with a sad smile, "instead of the rigid rationalist you behold me. But it's of no use. The reasonings of metaphysics do not mean to me reasonings at all. The phenomena which I see about me are known to me solely as facts of consciousness, and these facts are explainable only by the tests and uses of physics. I am devoted to the verity of Descartes's maxim, which bade us assent to no proposition the matter of which is not so clear that it cannot be doubted."
"Has there ever before been an age," asked Solarion, "when the ethical and ideal parts of mankind—all his moral obligations, in fact, toward himself and his fellows—were so thoroughly accounted for by scientific methods as at the present time?"
"No," said Kenneth, with decision; "never, to our knowledge. Sentimentality has hitherto had a great deal to tell us about the higher standards of conduct. But selfishness lies at the root of all morality persevered in for the sake of reward hereafter. The incomparable Herbert Spencer says that underneath all so-termed 'intuitions' regarding the goodness or badness of acts, lurks the fundamental assumption that acts are good or bad according as their aggregate effects increase men's happiness or increase their misery. This, too, you will, affirm, points toward selfishness; but it is of the race and not the individual. Just as the choice of the most dainty epicure for an ortolan in place of a quail originated in the lowest forms of cannibalism, so the most heroic deeds of self-sacrifice that patriots and philanthropists have performed had their beginning in the grossest longings after personal pleasure. The evolution of structures and of functions throughout the ascending types of animals plainly has gone on pari passu. Advancing but a little further, we reach the certainty that an evolution of conduct is correlated with these others."
"I perfectly grasp your meaning," said Solarion, "because you have made it even plainer than this before now, through example and illustration...." But he continued silent for a long time after he had thus spoken, until Kenneth said, somewhat curiously,—
"Of what are you thinking, Solarion?"
"Of something which might not please you," came the slow reply.
"Pray let me hear it, nevertheless."
"Well, it is this: If you have so lucid an idea of just how the loftiest unselfishness has been gradually lifted from far inferior grades of feeling, why should you yourself ever have known the least wish to gratify individual ambition and place your name proudly above those of your fellows? Why are you a contradiction of your own beliefs? For such mental power and cultivation as yours ought surely—"
"I understand you," Kenneth interrupted, with clouding brows... He strove not to be angry, and succeeded.....
They held many more talks together during the next few days. Kenneth was meanwhile burning to see Celia again, and at length he paid her a second visit. She treated him with what seemed to him a tyrannic cruelty. He left her, saying to himself, 'She loathes me. I am beardless, and still look like an overgrown boy. She has never forgotten how Caryl Dayton used to jeer at my effeminacy.'
One day, not long afterward, he learned through Hilda that Caryl Dayton was occupying his old residence, near to that of Celia. The tidings dealt him an acute shock. Nor was it pleasanter to learn that through the deaths of three or four members of his family Caryl had been made much richer than formerly.
'She teems with a flirt's worst trickeries,' Kenneth told himself. 'I shall never enter her doors again,—never!'
The next day he entered them, and found himself face to face with Caryl Dayton.
He acquitted himself execrably, and knew it all the while. It was the past repeating itself in pitiless recurrence, except that then he had merely loved Celia (or so he now assured his fluttering heart), while at present he worshipped her. Caryl Dayton, looking a little older, but none the less well-bred and suave, inflicted torture by his presence. Kenneth had no courtesies for him; every grace in the man was like a veiled challenge. When Dayton rose and quitted the room he was equally preyed upon by wrath and satisfaction.
"So," he at once said, with absurdly awkward reproach, to Celia, "you are friends with that man, after all! You told me—did you not tell me?—that you and he had broken with one another forever!"
"I forget, Kenneth, just what I told you," she said, with an exasperating calm. "Anyway, we're very good friends now."
"Good friends! Does that mean—?"
"Oh, never mind what it means."
"But I do mind," fumed Kenneth. "I—I love you, and I do mind," he added, hearing his own heart beat while he framed the words.
She smiled. "You love only your books and your science," she said, carelessly... And then he went to where she sat, and put out both his hands, and cried to her from the hungry depths of his soul,—
"No, no, Celia! I love only you! I loved you long ago, and thought I'd crushed all that love down. But it rose again when I saw you. I love you now more than ever! I want you to be my wife! Celia, don't look like that, in the name of all that's merciful! Can't you love me?"
"No," she said.
Her answer had been implacable. He went home, that day, with a dim understanding that he could go to her again and be on amical terms with her, but that he must never, under any circumstances, refer to his vivid and dominant passion.....
Solarion found him a most faultful and derelict instructor, now. They took their long walks together, but these were the sombre makeshifts that replaced former hours of stimulating discussion. "You suggest so much to me, Solarion," Kenneth had not long ago said. And yet in his once-prized friend much of the old fascinating influence had perished. They would now and then speak most freely to one another, and their converse was full of the best and happiest significance. Solarion learned the apparent meaning to the human mind of what we name natural beauty. Kenneth and he went together often again into the heart of those delightful Vermont mountains. They watched the flight of sunshine over great foliage-clad slopes; they paused, side by side, near lakes almost as enchanting as Constance or Como. They heard the silvery plash of cascades, and the delicious basso profundo of streams which emptied their angry waters into shady gorges.
"You feel nature, do you not, Solarion?" Kenneth said, one day, as they sat within a great grove of primeval hemlocks, dusky as the cloister of a cathedral, with vague whispering noises in the boughs overhead. "You recognize alike the mystery and the splendor of its revelations?"
"Yes," answered Solarion.
"Do you feel, too, that there is a conscious and active God behind it? I have often fancied that you do."
"I feel that there should be," said Solarion, gravely.
Kenneth drew closer to his companion. The plashing of a dulcet water-fall was near them. Between rifts in fringy hemlock-boughs gleamed the turquoise of a stainless midsummer heaven. "Oh, Solarion, I am so unhappy!" Kenneth cried, and as he spoke his face was buried in the tender down of his friend's neck, that gave forth a scent delicate, sweet, and yet nameless as that of the garments of a pure, healthful woman. "I am so unhappy!" he went on, and then, suddenly, he burst into a passionate flood of tears.
For some time he sobbed his misery out upon the soft and massive breast of Solarion. The silky fleece was drenched with his hot tears when he lifted his eyes and saw that Solarion also had been weeping.
"You know why I am so wretched," exclaimed Kenneth. "I see that you do! You understand me!"
"Yes," Solarion answered; "I understand you. If there were anything I could do to help you! But I am so powerless! It seems to me that she must love you as you deserve to be loved. But if she does not you must force her to do so."
"Force her, Solarion?"
"Woo her,—win her,—make her love you. She must see, sooner or later, that nature could not have given you such a pulse of passion unless there were a corresponding ardor in her."
"Nature teems with mockeries and satires like this," replied Kenneth. "She does not love me; she never will! she will let me go to her—I sometimes think that all she would ever care for is just to let me go to her and crouch at her feet in hopeless adoration!"....
A day or two afterward Kenneth and Solarion were strolling together along a wayside rarely frequented, yet rich in picturesque effects of boulders half smothered with ferns, and in maple-groves that made the sward beneath them one incessant flicker of sunshine and shade. "This is the most exquisite solitude, Solarion," Kenneth had just said. "It is not far from the village, and yet we have not met a single wayfarer during all our tramp. Perhaps we shall not meet one till we have ended it."
"Here is one," said Solarion,—"a woman, with her hands full of ferns and wild-flowers. Do you see? She has just turned the bend in the road."
Yes, Kenneth saw, and with a great throb of the heart. It was Celia. She had been taking an afternoon ramble. She was warm, and had pushed back her hat a little from her brows, over which the glossy dark curls wildly clustered and twisted.
Kenneth was deeply embarrassed when they met, but Solarion soon supplied a surcease to his confusion. "Ah," cried Celia, "is he yours? Yes,—yes, I remember. They have told me of him; his beauty has made everybody talk,—everybody who has seen him. Is he not superb?" She forgot her wild-flowers and ferns, almost tossing them aside. She dropped on her knees before Solarion, looking up at Kenneth. "He is not fierce, is he?" she pursued. "How can he be, with those great, sweet eyes?"
"He is not fierce," Kenneth answered, and then Celia's arms were about Solarion's neck.
"Oh, how perfect he is!" she exclaimed. "How strangely and wonderfully beautiful! Surely nothing was ever like him before! What is his name?"
"Solarion," said Kenneth.
"Solarion?..." Celia rose and surveyed her new idol with a glance that seemed to indicate the struggle between admiration and criticism. "It's a stately sort of name, but he is so stately and splendid!... Ah, how I should love to have him for my own!"
Kenneth walked with her until their paths diverged, Solarion following.
"Her last act was a caress for you," he said to Solarion, after she had disappeared.
"You love her so much, then?" came the answer.
"She is life, happiness, everything, to me," replied Kenneth.
"I understand," Solarion murmured.....
A day or two later Kenneth went to visit Celia. She talked of nothing but Solarion. There had never been so exquisite and glorious a creature. He was like a human being. Of course no price could purchase him.
"No,—none," said Kenneth.
He returned home with a heavy heart. He saw how Solarion pitied him.
The next day he went again to Celia. Caryl Dayton was with her as he entered the room in which she received him. He was almost insolent to Caryl, whose demeanor never lost a single trait of its high breeding. Agonized, he returned to his laboratory, where Solarion waited.
"I am in torture," he said.
"Can nothing be done?" Solarion responded.
"Yes," he said, scoffingly. "She adores you. I can give you to her. Will you become hers? You might tell me, then, of what passes between herself and Dayton." He spoke in a swift, odd, wild way.
"Do you mean it?" Solarion said.
"Yes,—yes," returned Kenneth, desperately. "That man is a torment to me. I don't know what he may feel toward her. They were engaged, once."
"You are bitterly jealous."
"Yes."
"And you wish that I should become her companion, so that...?"
Kenneth knelt down beside Solarion. "I don't know what I wish!" he cried. "I only know that I am very miserable!"...
The next day was perfect. Flocculent clouds voyaged across a sky of the richest azure, and the trees were vocal with soft breezes. Kenneth and Solarion went together to Celia's dwelling. She welcomed Kenneth's associate with an undisguised fondness.
"Do you want him for your own?" Kenneth presently said. "He is yours, if you do."
"Mine!" cried Celia. She rained kisses upon Solarion, again fondly embracing him. "Mine!" she cried once more. "Oh, no, no! You can't mean it! Don't you love him too much to part with him?"
"I love you," said Kenneth. "I love you so much that I will give him to you."
Celia burst into tears. "Give him to me!" she exclaimed. "Oh, do you mean it! But he will be unhappy! He will long for you... Will you not, Solarion?"... And her head fell among the stainless curls of the mute, grand creature.
Kenneth had given his gift... He went home, and felt very lonely for a day or two. Solarion had been willing; he was with her; he would come back, in a little while, and tell what had passed. "Point toward my home," Kenneth had said to Celia, "and he will come to me. He is wonderfully intelligent, as you will find."
But Solarion did not come. Two, three, four, five days went by. At last, however, he appeared. Kenneth eagerly welcomed him.
"You come late, though," he said,—"strangely late. What have you found out? Does she love Caryl Dayton?"
"No. She loves no one. She is there in her mourning, and he visits her, but that is all."
"All, Solarion?"
"All. She does not care for him. He adores her, but she cannot like him in return... She is so beautiful and so lovable! It is all so sad! Yesterday she looked into my eyes and spoke to me in a fierce, melancholy voice. 'Solarion!' she cried, 'what are you?' And then her arms were about my neck.... Let me remain with you now... I will not go back to her, unless—"
"No; go back to her," broke in Kenneth. "But come to me again, Solarion, and report what has passed between herself and him."
Kenneth never dreamed of suspecting the truth.
More days passed, and Solarion did not return. Kenneth went to Celia. It was morning, and she sat on the piazza, with Solarion at her feet.
"He has grown fond of me," she said. "I am so glad and grateful that you gave him to me!"
"But your gratitude," said Kenneth, "will show itself in no other way... You will not be my wife, Celia?"
"No," she replied.
Solarion went with him for a little way past the house. When they had come to a certain lonely place on the roadside, Solarion paused and spoke.
"I cannot endure this longer," he said.
"Endure?" repeated Kenneth.
"I have told you... This man's-brain that belongs to me has begotten a man's love. I am so far human that I love Celia. I love her,—yes, as you do! She looks into my eyes and seems to see there some strange, divine spirit. She herself does not understand... I burn to speak to her. It is not the brute in me that she cares for; she would loathe that if she had any real conception of the force that rules her. It is my identity, my soul, my intellect,—all that you have called out of chaos and given to me. She is ignorant of what she truly feels. But her instinct, ideal and yet earthly, tells her that I am human!"
"Not another word!" shot from Kenneth. "How dare you speak to me like this!" He drew backward and raised the stout staff which he carried.
"Ah," retorted Solarion, "how did you dare create me? Am I to blame? And why should I merit your scorn? This love of mine is chastity itself; it is pure as a saint's dream of his heaven!"
"Solarion, hush! It is infamy!—it is horror!"
With those words Kenneth fled to his laboratory. But Solarion followed him thither, like an accusing conscience.
"What is to be done?" he questioned.
"Done?" faltered Kenneth. He fell trembling into a chair while he spoke. "You... you have told her nothing?"
"Nothing. But you must tell her."
"I?"
"Yes. I demand it of you. I cannot live like this."
"You must so live, Solarion. Remain here with me. Never look upon her again."
"No. I must return to her."
"You shall not!" cried Kenneth. He flung himself upon Solarion, who had darted toward the door. But Kenneth was tossed away by that living might as a gale tosses a leaf. In another moment Solarion had disappeared....
'It is the vengeance of Conrad Klotz,' Kenneth said to himself... He went to a certain drawer and drew from it a pistol. Then he left the laboratory.
He walked toward Celia's dwelling. Suddenly he saw Caryl Dayton approaching him, and looking as though an earthquake could not alter his high-bred repose.
"Ah, Mr. Stafford," said Caryl, raising his hat. "I had intended paying you a visit."
"YES?" Kenneth replied, with an almost insolent curtness. "And may I ask with what intent?"
Dayton looked down and struck a weed with the stick he held. "Truly," he said, "you are very direct."
"That is best, is it not?" bluntly responded Kenneth.
"Sometimes, perhaps. And I wanted to be quite direct with you." Always the gentleman to his finger-ends, Dayton now mildly and firmly met Kenneth's gaze. "The truth is, Mr. Stafford, I am engaged to Miss Celia Effingham."
"Again?" said Kenneth.
"Again,—if you choose to put it that way,—yes."
"And you wished to pay me a visit for this reason? It is a most important one, I admit. Shall I take for granted that you would have come solely to do me the honor of announcing your re-betrothal?"
Dayton shook his head regretfully. "Are you not rather playing the spendthrift with your sarcasm?" he asked.
Kenneth was at this moment the prey of a murderous jealousy. "May I learn from you," he said, with white lips, "why you wished to hold converse with me?"
"Yes," came the quiet answer. "It is very simply explained. My marriage to Miss Effingham will be an immediate one. It will take place here, at St. Matthew's Church, in the village. You are a relative of Celia's,—in fact, her nearest living relative, unless I am in error. I thought that you might care to be present at the coming ceremony, and—"
"Good God!" Kenneth here broke in, "are you making sport of me, man? Are you seeking some curious, novel way of insulting me?"
"Insulting you? I?"
"What else, then, can it be?
"You do not know?"
"Know? Know what?"
"That I love this woman,—that I have asked her to be my wife."
"You!"
"She has not told you, then?"
"No."
As Dayton pronounced this word his mien was the perfection of what we can only call gentlemanliness. There was no mistaking either his surprise or his pain. "I must beg your pardon," he said, presently, "for having committed a most awkward mistake."
"You are right," said Kenneth, between clinched teeth, as it sounded. "The mistake has been a most awkward one. Still, I will give you my congratulations. But they are not, after all, profound. They are the merest formality. Let me be quite candid: you may have persuaded Celia to marry you, but you will never be happy with her as your wife."
Dayton turned pale and slowly inclined his head. "You would be happy, however?" he murmured. "Do you mean that?"
"No. She does not care for me any more than she cares for you. She cares for..." He paused, and looked straight into the eyes of his interlocutor.
"For whom, then, does she care?" Dayton asked, gently.
"For no one."
"No one?"
"For an ideal,—a shadow,—a dream."
Dayton smiled, drawing backward a step or two. "I did not know that she was so imaginative."
"But you may discover it, sooner or later."
Dayton gave a faint little laugh. "I hope, then, it may be late and not soon."
"Ah," cried Kenneth, "you disbelieve me!—you secretly contemn what I have told you!"
"I doubt it," he returned.
"You believe that Celia loves you?"
"I hope so,—and I believe so."
"Yet she broke with you before."
"She was capricious, fanciful, as many girls are. She is older now."
"Older, yes,—in experience, in knowledge of her own powerlessness to love."
Dayton scanned the path beneath him for a second, and then lifted his calm gaze to Kenneth's face. "Mr. Stafford," he said, "I fear that I have blundered miserably. But it has been wholly through ignorance of your sentiment for Miss Effingham. We were not friends as boys. I think our not being so was in every way my own fault. It seems to me that I was the most odious boy ever born." He smiled now, a little; he was perfect in his repose, his courtesy, his evenness, his taste, his tact, yet there was not a hint of mere vulgar artificiality in him; Kenneth felt rebuffed, defeated, humiliated, by his exquisite good breeding. "I have tried to be a better man," he went on, "and my success or failure must be left, of course, to the verdict of others than myself. The present issue between us is difficult,... extremely difficult. But I give you my word that it was unforeseen... Good-afternoon."
He raised his hat, passing Kenneth, who answered the salute as though a voice of fate had commanded him to do so. He stood in the path for some time with lowered head after Caryl Dayton had left him. He hated the man with a new fiery ardor, and yet his lips uttered the words, "Perfect; it was perfect; he is every inch a gentleman."
Meanwhile Caryl Dayton had paused at some distance away, debating within himself whether or not he should immediately seek Celia, from whom he had lately come.
Kenneth's thoughts once more flew to Solarion and the agitating mission that now directed his own steps toward Celia. He walked onward, a great anguish beginning more and more to dominate him. So she had taken Caryl Dayton, after all! Well, whether she loved him or not, let her wed him. He, himself, would control his passion and accept the inevitable. This frightful matter that concerned Solarion must now be dealt with. Had a hurricane been unleashed? What ghastly thing might already have occurred? Had Solarion gone to her and—? No, it was too horrible for thought! 'Oh, Conrad Klotz!' he bitterly mused, 'how you are being avenged!'
HE found Celia in the pretty drawing-room that was but a step from the broad, open-windowed veranda. She sat before a desk, writing. Solarion was at her feet.
A faintness came over Kenneth as he drew near her. She rose, putting forth her hand with a smile. Solarion, splendid in his repose, did not stir.
"I have just begun a letter to you," Celia said. He felt that his own hand must be like ice, because hers almost burned him by its warmth.
"A letter to me?" he said.
"Yes," began Celia, with a distinct embarrassment. "I wanted to tell you—"
"What?" he broke in, sharply. "That it's on again between you and Dayton?"
Celia drooped her eyes. "Yes. I have accepted Caryl."
Kenneth almost flung himself into a chair, and for a few seconds buried his face in both hands. "You don't love him, Celia!" he suddenly exclaimed, a moment later, looking up at her where she stood beside the desk, with Solarion crouched like a mute and massive sentinel at the hem of her soft, pale summer gown. "You don't love me, but neither do you love him!"
Celia sank again into the chair she had quitted. "Kenneth," she murmured, "love is a large word. Perhaps I've never mastered its full meaning, and never shall. But I—I have wronged Caryl Dayton."
"Wronged him?" Then the breaking of your engagement abroad was—?"
"My fault. Only mine. I see it now. He has convinced me. I owe him reparation. I must pay it, and I—I have decided to pay it. But you know of this already! Who has told you? Have you seen Caryl? Ah, your face, your manner, assures me that you have seen him. Kenneth, forgive me! I am very weak, perhaps, and very vacillating! But I have done you no wrong!"
"None. You have simply made me worship you, and... and given yourself, before my sight, to a man for whom you care nothing."
Celia's eyes filled with tears, and she stretched forth a hand, letting it rest on the head of Solarion.
And now occurred a thing which was to Kenneth fraught with unutterable repulsion.
"Here is a friend," said Celia, "who seems to me as if he might counsel me in my doubt and perplexity, had only speech been given him. Oh, Kenneth, I sometimes feel that just to live unwedded till I die, with this dear, faithful creature to crouch at my feet as he is doing now, would mean for me the greatest human happiness! I have such strange fancies about Solarion! I look into his beautiful, limpid eyes and am thrilled by a certainty that there is a soul, a spirit, behind them. After all, if one cannot love, what is one to do? If Solarion could speak, I imagine that he might tell me to let his devoted service and guardianship stand in the place of what my own curious coldness has made me miss!... Ah, this will sound strange to you, Kenneth, and yet—"
"It sounds worse than strange," cried Kenneth, rising; "it sounds brutish." Then he added, with a bleak, hard laugh, "as brutish as Solarion himself!"
Celia looked at him with her dark eyes widened by astonishment. The hand with which she had been caressing Solarion's noble head fell at her side again. "I—I do not understand you," she faltered.
"Perhaps," replied Kenneth, with another burst of his ironic laughter, "you do not understand yourself."
Celia shook her head in a puzzled way. "Now you are still more vague," she said.
Just then a servant entered the room, and, approaching Celia, said a few words to her in a low tone, while at the same time offering a card.
"I must see her, Mary, of course," soon came Celia's reply. Then she turned toward Kenneth. "You remember old Mrs. Leveridge? She knew both my father and my step-mother very intimately, and I'm sure that she has come to talk with me about the... the disaster. I will meet her in the sitting-room, with your permission, and afterward..."
"We can talk about the other disaster," said Kenneth.
"I fear you are incorrigible," she said, going toward the door. "Shall you remain, then, till Mrs. Leveridge goes?"
"I don't know; I'm not sure."
His voice had so sullen and moody a ring that Celia started and looked at him alarmedly. "You seem so very unhappy," she said, with a sigh.
"Yes," he answered, "I am very unhappy; I am even more than that." He had now fixed his eyes upon Solarion, who still sat as motionless as though he were cut in marble.
Again Celia sighed. "Your manner is very strange, Kenneth," she said. Then she tried to speak in a brighter and less concerned way. "I shall hope to see you again in a little while. Mrs. Leveridge will probably not stay long; she's an invalid, and rarely continues out of doors more than an hour or two at a time."
Celia disappeared. There are some trifling events which produce the most gigantic results. Kenneth, as he sat with folded arms and grim-knit brows, told himself now that the mere temporary absence of Celia from this chamber which she had just left might precipitate a dire calamity. And yet he was inflexibly determined, in so far as concerned his own future course. 'It is for Solarion to decide,' he had already said to his own thoughts; 'not for me.'
Dead silence reigned for several minutes after Celia had gone. Then Kenneth spoke.
"You disobeyed me."
"I did," Solarion replied.
His voice, intensely familiar to his hearer, nevertheless dealt Kenneth a shock as it sounded through that silent room. Outside, the vines on the veranda were flapping and pulsating their leaves in the pleasant summer breeze. Here the light was moderate, falling on book and ornament, on drapery and picture, while all betokened so much of the placid usualness of life that these tones, heard in their new surrounding, struck a note of piercing discord.
"You have resolved, then, to defy me?" Kenneth pursued.
"I am hers; I belong to her; you gave me to her."
"But I had no suspicion, however remote, of what has since occurred."
"Nor had I."
"Very well," said Kenneth. He rose and went somewhat near to the majestic, immobile shape. "You now realize everything quite as clearly as I. What would be the outgrowth of your remaining under this roof, even if I were willing you should do so, which I am very positively not? In some foolish moment you would betray yourself. Perhaps if Celia were to hear a human voice issue from you the shock might unseat her reason. But in any case the thought of your being here at all is detestable, execrable. It is insult to her; it is worse; no language can convey just what it is, Solarion, for such an instance as yours has no earthly parallel. You must leave here with me when I myself depart. You have become aware of her determination to marry. If you suffer, so, too, will I suffer. The excuse for taking you with me I will invent. And I will forget all that has proved so distressful in our recent intercourse. Your secret shall be held sacred forever; have no fear of that. Come, now, decide. Decide,—and consent!"
"No, I will not consent. I will stay here. That is my decision."
"You must change it!"
"Must?" came the low answer, full of deep scorn. "Force me to change it if you dare."
"Oh, I shall dare," said Kenneth, almost whispering the words, though with eyes that fiercely kindled.
"I have no fear of your threats. I see you in a new light; you are the merest self-loving tyrant. You have put this curse of mind upon me, and now you wish to make me your slave, your cringing minion. I demanded of you that you should tell her what I really am. Well, you have refused, and let it pass. But I shall not leave her. I shall be near her always till I die. Who knows from what danger I may guard her? If, as you say, I should ever betray myself, the shock might not be so terrible, after all. Perhaps it would be best that she should know the truth. But take these words from me as the expression of a great resolve. I will never leave her while I live and she lets me remain. You want me to grovel at your feet; I prefer hers."
Kenneth shook his head rapidly several times. His right hand had gone to his breast.
"You shall never do it," he said. "This thing shall not be. I foresee only unnameable horror in your mere presence at her side. Once more, Solarion, and for the last time, will you come with me?"
Solarion slowly rose. His eyes were blazing; they looked like two great purple diamonds. The sinews of his lion-like form visibly quivered. He was sublime, terrifying. But Kenneth did not falter.
"Your answer," he went on. "Reflect before you make it. You must agree to my wishes. I shall give her up forever; remember that. I shall go away and never set eyes on her again. You must come with me. If you do not..."
"If I do not?" said Solarion. His voice was faint, and yet it had somehow the effect of a distant roll of thunder, while it seemed also packed with wrath and disdain.
"You must die, then," returned Kenneth, and he drew swiftly backward. At the same instant he took something from his breast.
Solarion stood towering in fury. There was a report; Kenneth had fired, but the bullet did no mortal work. Then Solarion gave one mighty spring. Kenneth fell to the floor, and great fangs rent his face. But in some way, prone as he was, he had power to lift his weapon and fire again. It was a wild and random shot, this time, but it fatally told. Solarion, without a sound, sank. The bullet had entered his brain.
Frightfully mutilated and bleeding, Kenneth rose just as Celia, followed by Caryl Dayton, hurried into the room.
A shriek rang from Celia. Kenneth was staggering, but he lifted one hand with a gesture of reassurance. He could scarcely discern Celia; one eye had been torn from its socket, and the other was almost wholly blinded by blood, which also flowed from another shocking wound in his thigh.
"He—he showed signs of madness, and I shot him," came Kenneth's gasped words. "Don't fear; he's dead... I—I think I shall soon be dead as well," he added, falling heavily just as Caryl Dayton darted toward him.
But, as we already know, Kenneth did not die. At the end of his long illness the faithful Hilda, who had nursed him as devotedly as his own dead mother would have done, sailed, with him for Europe.
There, in Switzerland, we have seen him, and have had some knowledge, as well, of the sombre, secluded life that he lived. He would never let Celia look on his face after the healing of its dire wound, though she made several efforts to see him. When he had been absent from America about three months her marriage with Caryl Dayton took place. He may or may not have learned of this event, though most probably the news of it reached him.
And thus it befell that poor Conrad Klotz, the little Strasburg philosopher, asleep in his humble Alsatian grave, had been sternly and solemnly avenged. If all human treachery were equally sure of the expiating hours destined to follow it, a few of our sublunar experiences might be less peaceful than present conditions find them.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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