Chapter 13

The big man spread his arms in a wide, Gallic gesture. "They looked for him everywhere. No sign. But by and by some one saw a quite large piece of mud on the hospital roof begin to wriggle. The little Garin was that large piece of mud. They brought him down and put him in the hospital which he had saved. For a long time he had shell-shock. Even now he cannot speak of the war without his nerves being affected. When he got out of hospital, he did not seem to know who he was. Or perhaps he did not care. Shell-shock is a strange thing. He went away, and his records were lost in the general confusion. Afterward we sought for him. The great lady wished very much to see him. But we could find nothing except that he had come back to this country. Official inquiry was made here and he was traced to Our Square. So I came to see him. Because he cannot speak for himself and will not allow his wife to tell his story--it is part of the shell-shock which will wear off in time--I came to speak for him."

"Does your--do you do this sort of thing often?" asked the Bonnie Lassie with a queer sort of resonance in her voice.

The big man answered, in a tone which suggested that he was smiling: "One cannot visit all the brave men who suffered for Belgium. But there is a special reason here, the matter of the great and greatly loved lady whom the little Garin saved."

"I see," said the Bonnie Lassie softly.

After the big man had made his adieux, we sat silent for some minutes. Presently she spoke; there was wonder and something else in her voice.

"Plooie!" she said, and that was all.

"You are crying," I said.

"I'm not," she retorted indignantly. "But you ought to be. For your injustice."

"If we all bewept our injustices," said I oracularly, "Noah would have to come back and build a new ark for a bigger flood than his."

"What do you think of him?" said the Bonnie Lassie.

"As a weather-prophet, he was unequaled. As an expert animal-breeder, his selections were at times ill-advised."

"Don't be tiresome, Dominie. You know that I'm not interested in Noah."

"As to our romantic visitant," I said, "I think that Cyrus the Gaunt would better be watchful. I've never known anyone else except Cyrus to produce such an emotional effect upon you."

"Don't be school-girlish!" admonished the Bonnie Lassie severely. "Poor old Dominie! He doesn't know what's going on under his very nose. Where are your eyes?"

"In Mendel's top drawer, I suppose.... The question is how are we going to make it up to Plooie?"

"I don't think you need worry about that," returned the Bonnie Lassie loftily.

Nor was there any occasion for worry. Two days later there occurred an irruption of dismaying young men with casual squares of paper in their pockets, upon which they scratched brief notes. They were, I was subsequently given to understand, the pick and flower of the city's reportorial genius. (I could imagine the ghost of Inky Mike with his important notebook and high-poised pencil, regarding with wonder and disdain their quiet and unimpressive methods.) A freshly painted sign across the front of Plooie's basement, was the magnet that drew them:

Emile Garin & Wife Umbrella Mender & Porch Cleanser

to

His Majesty

The King of the Belgians (By Royal Warranty)

No; Plooie and Annie Oombrella need no help from the humble now. Their well-deserved fortune is made.

TRIUMPH

The months go by--bleak March and May-day heat-- Harvest is over--winter well-nigh done-- And still I say, "To-morrow we shall meet."

MAY PROBYN

The Little Red Doctor sat on the far end of my bench. Snow fringed the bristling curve of his mustache. He shivered.

"Dominie," said he, "it's a wild day."

I assented.

"Dominie," said the Little Red Doctor, "it is no kind of a day for an old man to be sitting on a bench."

I dissented.

"Dominie," persisted the Little Red Doctor, "you can't deny that you're old."

"Whose fault is that but yours?" I retorted.

"Don't try to flatter me," said the Little Red Doctor. "You'd have licked my old friend, Death, in that bout you had with him, without any help of mine. And, anyway, you were already old, then. You're a tough old bird, Dominie. Otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here in a March blizzard staring at the Worth mansion and wondering what really happened there three years ago."

"Your old friend, Death, beat you that time," said I maliciously.

The Little Red Doctor chose to ignore my taunt. "Look your fill, Dominie," he advised. "You won't have much more chance."

"Why?" I asked, startled.

"The wreckers begin on it next month. Also a nice, new building is going up next door to it on that little, secret, walled jungle that Ely Crouch used to misname his garden. I'm glad of it, too. I don't like anachronisms."

"I'm an anachronism," I returned. "You'll be one pretty soon. Our Square is one solid anachronism."

"It won't be much longer. The tide is undermining us. Other houses will go as the Worth place is going. You'll miss it, Dominie. You love houses as if they were people."

It is true. To me houses are the only fabrications of man's hands that are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement, but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained against the city's relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition, pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely endured--the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions. Yes, I love the old houses. Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed. It has outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead, unhuman thing.

That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably with the honorable generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy square. Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.

The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.

"Yes; you're old, Dominie. But you're not wise. You're very foolish. Foolish and obstinate."

Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking: "Why am I foolish and obstinate?"

"Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch. Don't you?"

"I do."

"Then why did Ned commit suicide?"

"I don't know."

"How do you explain away his written confession?"

"I don't. I only know that it was not in Ned Worth's character willfully to kill an old man. You were his friend; you ought to know it as well as I do."

"Ah, that's different," said the Little Red Doctor, giving me one of his queer looks. "Yes; you're a pig-headed old man, Dominie."

"I'm a believer in character."

"I don't know of any other man equally pig-headed, except possibly one. He's old, too."

"Gale Sheldon," said I, naming the gentle, withered librarian of a branch library a few blocks to the westward, the only other resident of Our Square who had unfailingly supported me in my loyalty to the memory of the last of the Worths.

"Yes. He's waiting for us now in his rooms. Will you come?"

Perceiving that there was something back of this--there usually is, in the Little Red Doctor's maneuvers--I rose and we set out. As we passed the Worth house it seemed grimmer and bleaker than ever before. There was something savage and desperate in its desolation. The cold curse of abandonment lay upon it. At the turn of the corner the Little Red Doctor said abruptly.

"She's dead."

"Who?" I demanded.

"The girl. The woman in the case."

"In the Ely Crouch case? A woman? There was never any woman hinted at."

"No. And there never would have been as long as she was alive. Now--Well, I'll leave Sheldon to explain her. He loved her, too, in his way."

In Gale Sheldon's big, still room, crowded with the friendly ghosts of mighty books, a clear fire was burning. One shaded lamp at the desk was turned on, for though it was afternoon the blizzard cast a gloom like dusk. The Little Red Doctor retired to a far corner where he was all but merged in the shadows.

"Have you seen this?" Sheldon asked me, pointing to the table.

Thereon was spread strange literature for the scholarly taste of our local book-worm, a section from the most sensational of New York's Sunday newspapers. From the front page, surrounded by a barbarous conglomeration of headlines and uproarious type, there smiled happily forth a face of such appealing loveliness as no journalistic vulgarity could taint or profane. I recognized it at once, as any one must have done who had ever seen the unforgettable original. It was Virginia Kingsley, who, two years before, had been Sheldon's assistant. The picture was labeled, "Death Ends Wanderlust of Mysterious Heiress," and the article was couched in a like style of curiosity-piquing sensationalism. Stripped of its fulsome verbiage, it told of the girl's recent death in Italy, after traveling about Europe with an invalid sister; during which progress, the article gloated, she was "vainly wooed by the Old World's proudest nobility for her beauty and wealth," the latter having been unexpectedly left her by an aged relative. Her inexorable refusals were set down, by the romantic journalist, as due to some secret and prior attachment. (He termed it an "affair de court"!)

Out of the welter of words there stood forth one sentence to tempt the imagination: "She met death as a tryst." For that brief flash the reporter had been lifted out of his bathos and tawdriness into a clearer element. One could well believe that she had "met death as a tryst." For if ever I have beheld unfaltering hope and unflagging courage glorified and spiritualized into unearthly beauty, it was there in that pictured face, fixed by the imperishable magic of the camera.

"No; I hadn't seen it," I said after reading. "Is it true?"

"In part." Then, after a pause, "You knew her, didn't you, Dominie?"

"Only by sight. She had special charge of the poetry alcove, hadn't she?"

"Yes. She belonged there of right. She was the soul and fragrance of all that the singers of springtime and youth have sung." He sighed, shaking his grizzled head mournfully. "'And all that glory now lies dimmed in death.' It doesn't seem believable."

He rose and went to the window. Through the whorls of snow could be vaguely seen the outlines of the Worth house, looming on its corner. He stared at it musing.

"I've often wondered if she cared for him," he murmured.

"For him? For Worth!" I exclaimed in amazement. "Were they friends?"

"Hardly more than acquaintances, I thought. But she left very strangely the day of his death and never came back."

From the physician's corner there came an indeterminate grunt.

"If that is a request for further information, Doctor, I can say that on the few occasions when they met here in the library, it was only in the line of her duties. He was interested in the twentieth-century poets. But even that interest died out. It was months before the--the tragedy that he stopped coming to the Library."

"It was months before the tragedy that he stopped going anywhere, wasn't it?" I asked.

"Yes. Nobody understood it; least of all, his friends. I even heard it hinted that he was suffering from some malady of the brain." He turned inquiringly to the far, dim corner.

Out of it the Little Red Doctor barked: "Death had him by the throat."

"Death? In what form?"

"Slow, sure fingers, shutting off his breath. Do you need further details or will the dry, scientific term, epithelioma, be enough?" The voice came grim out of the gloom. No answer being returned, it continued: "I've had easier jobs than telling Ned Worth. It was hopeless from the first. My old friend, Death, had too long a start on me."

"Was it something that affected his mind?"

"No. His mind was perfectly clear. Vividly clear. May I take my last verdict, when it comes, with a spirit as clear and as noble."

Silence fell, and in the stillness we heard the Little Red Doctor communing with memories. Now and then came a muttered word. "Suicide!" in a snarl of scornful rejection. "Fool-made definitions!" Presently, "Story for a romancer, not a physician." He seemed to be canvassing an inadequacy in himself with dissatisfaction. Then, more clearly: "Love from the first. At a glance, perhaps. The contagion of flame for powder. But in that abyss together they saw each other's soul."

"The Little Red Doctor is turning poet," said Sheldon to me in an incredulous whisper.

There was the snap and crackle of a match from the shadowed corner. The keen, gnarled young face sprang from the darkness, vivid and softened with a strange triumph, then receded behind an imperfect circle, clouded the next instant by a nimbus of smoke. The Little Red Doctor spoke.

Ned Worth was my friend as well as my patient. No need to tell you men, who knew him, why I was fond of him. I don't suppose any one ever came in contact with that fantastic and smiling humanity of his without loving him for it. "Immortal hilarity!" The phrase might have been coined for him.

It wasn't as physician that I went home with Ned, after pronouncing sentence upon him, but as friend. I didn't want him to be alone that first night. Yet I dare say that any one, seeing the two of us, would have thought me the one who had heard his life-limit defined. He was as steady as a rock.

"No danger of my being a miser of life," he said. "You've given me leave to spend freely what's left of it." Well, he spent. Freely and splendidly!

The spacious old library on the second floor--you know it, Dominie, smelt of disuse, as we entered, Ned's servant bringing up the rear with a handbag. Dust had settled down like an army of occupation over everything. The furniture was shrouded in denim. The tall clock in the corner stood voiceless. Three months of desertion will change any house into a tomb. And the Worth mansion was never too cheerful, anyway. Since the others of the family died, Ned hadn't stayed there long enough at a time to humanize it.

Ned's man set down the grip, unstrapped it, took his orders for some late purchases, and left to execute them. I went over to open the two deep-set windows on the farther side of the room. It was a still, close October night, and the late scent of warmed-over earth came up to me out of Ely Crouch's garden next door. From where I stood in the broad embrasure of the south window, I was concealed from the room. But I could see everything through a tiny gap in the hangings. Ned sat at his desk sorting some papers. A sort of stern intentness had settled upon his face, without marring its curious faun-like beauty. I carry the picture in my mind.

"What's become of you, Chris?" he demanded presently. I came out into the main part of the room. "Oh, there you are! You'll look after a few little matters for me, won't you?" He indicated a sheaf of papers.

"You needn't be in such a hurry," said I with illogical resentment. "It isn't going to be to-morrow or next week."

"Isn't it?" Something in his tone made me look at him sharply. "Six months or three months or to-morrow," he added, more lightly; "what does it matter as long as it's sure! You know, what I appreciate is that you gave me the truth straight."

"It's a luxury few of my patients get. Their constitutions won't stand it."

"It's a compliment to my nerve. Strangely enough I don't feel nervous about it."

"I do. Damnably! About something, anyway. There's something wrong with this room, Ned. What is it?"

"Don't you know?" he laughed. "It's the sepulchral silence of Old Grandfather Clock, over there. You're looking right at him and wondering subconsciously why he doesn't make a noise like Time."

"That's easily remedied." Consulting my watch I set and wound the ancient timepiece. Its comfortable iteration made the place at once more livable. Immediately it struck the hour.

"Ten o'clock," I said, and parted the draperies at the lower window to look out again. "Ten o'clock of a still, cloudy night and--and the devil is on a prowl in his garden."

"Meaning my highly respected neighbor and ornament to the local bar, the Honorable Ely Crouch?"

"Exactly. Preceded by a familiar spirit in animal form."

"Oh, that's his pet ferret and boon companion."

"Not his only companion. There's some one with him," I said. "A woman."

"I don't admire her taste in romance," said Ned.

"Nor her discretion. You know what they say: 'A dollar or a woman never safe alone with Ely Crouch.'"

"My dollars certainly weren't," observed Ned.

"How did he ever defend your suit for an accounting?" I asked.

"Heedlessness on my side, a crooked judge on his. Stop spying on my neighbor's flirtations and look here."

I turned and got a shock. The handbag lay open on the desk, surrounded by a respectable-sized fortune in bank-notes.

"Pretty much all that the Honorable Ely has left me," he added.

"Is it enough to go on with, Ned?" I asked.

He smiled at me. "Plenty for my time. You forget."

For the moment I had forgotten. "But what on earth are you going to do with all that ready cash?"

"Carry out a brilliant idea. I conceived it after you had handed down your verdict. Went around to the bank and quietly drew out the lot. I've planned a wild and original orgy. A riot of dissipation in giving. Think of the fun one can have with that much tangible money. Already to-day I've struck one man dumb and reduced another to mental decay, by the simple medium of a thousand-dollar bill. Miracles! Declare a vacation, Chris, and come with me on my secret and jubilant bat, and we'll work wonders."

"And after?" I asked.

"Oh, after! Well, there'll be no further reason for the 'permanent possibility of sensation' on my part. That's your precious science's best definition of life, I believe. It doesn't appeal to one as alluring when the sensation promises to become--well, increasingly unpleasant."

There was no mistaking his meaning. "I can't have that, my son," I protested.

"No? That's a purely professional prejudice of yours. Look at it from my point of view. Am I to wait to be strangled by invisible hands, rather than make an easy and graceful exit? Suicide! The word has no meaning for a man in my condition. If you'll tell me there's a chance, one mere, remote human chance--" He paused, turning to me with what was almost appeal in his glance. How I longed to lie to him! But Ned Worth was the kind that you can't lie to. I looked at him standing there so strong and fine, with all the mirthful zest of living in his veins, sentenced beyond hope, and I thought of those terrible lines of another man under doom:

"I never saw a man who looked So wistfully at the day."

We medical men learn to throw a protective film over our feelings, like the veil over the eagle's eye. We have to. But I give you my word, I could not trust my voice to answer him.

"You see," he said; "you can't." His hand fell on my arm. "I'm sorry, Chris," he said in that winning voice of his; "I shouldn't plague you for something that you can't give me."

"I can tell you this, anyway," said I: "that it's something less than courage to give up until the time comes. You didn't give your life. You haven't the right to take it; anyway, not until its last usefulness is over."

He made a movement of impatience.

"Oh, I'm not asking you to endure torture. I'd release you myself from that, if it comes to it, in spite of man-made laws. But how can you tell that being alive instead of dead next week or next month may not make an eternal difference to some other life? Your part isn't played out yet. Who are you to say how much good you may yet do before the curtain is rung down?"

"Or how much evil! Well, as a suitable finish, suppose I go down into that garden and kill Ely Crouch," he suggested, smiling. "That would be a beneficial enough act to entitle me to a prompt and peaceful death, wouldn't it?"

"Theoretically sound, but unfortunately impracticable," I answered, relieved at his change of tone.

"I suppose it is." He looked at me, still smiling, but intent. "Chris, what do you believe comes after?"

"Justice."

"A hard word for cowards. What do I believe, I wonder? At any rate, in being sport enough to play the game through. You're right, old hard-shell. I'll stick it out. It will only mean spending _this_"--he swept the money back into its repository--"a little more slowly."

"I was sure I could count on you," I said. "Now I can give you the talisman." I set on the desk before him a small pasteboard box. "Pay strict attention. You see that label? That's to remind you. One tablet if you can't sleep."

"I couldn't last night."

"Two if the pain becomes more than you can stand."

He nodded.

"But three at one time and you'll sleep so sound that nothing will ever awaken you."

"Good old Chris!" Opening the box, he fingered the pellets curiously. "A blessed thing, your science! Three and the sure sleep."

"On trust, Ned."

"On honor," he agreed. "Then I mustn't expunge old Crouch? It's a disappointment," he added gayly.

He pushed the box away from him and crossed over to the upper window. His voice came to me from behind the enshrouding curtains.

"Our friend has finished his promenade. The air is the sweeter for it. I'll stay here and breathe it."

"Good!" said I. "I've five minutes of telephoning to do. Then I'll be back."

Nobody can ever tell me again that there's an instinct which feels the presence of persons unseen. On my way to the door I passed within arm's-length of a creature tense and pulsating with the most desperate emotions. I could have stretched out a hand and touched her as she crouched, hidden in the embrasure of the lower window. It would seem as if the whole atmosphere of the room must have been surcharged with the terrific passion of her newborn and dreadful hopes. And I felt--nothing. No sense, as I brushed by, of the tragic and concentrated force of will which nerved and restrained her. I went on, and out unconscious. Afterward she was unable to tell me how long she had been there. It must have been for some minutes, for what roused her from her stupor of terror was the word "Suicide." It was like an echo, a mockery to her, at first; and then, as she listened with passionate attention to what followed, my instructions about the poison took on the voice of a ministering providence. The draperies had shut off the view of Ned, nor had she recognized his voice, already altered by the encroachments of the disease. But she heard him walk to the upper window, and saw me pass on my way to the telephone, and knew that the moment had come. From what she told me later, and from that to which I was a mazed witness on my return, I piece together the events which so swiftly followed.

A wind had risen outside or Ned might have heard the footsteps sooner. As it was, when he stepped out from behind the draperies of the upper window those of the lower window were still waving, but the swift figure had almost reached the desk. The face was turned from him. Even in that moment of astonishment he noticed that she carried her left arm close to her body, with a curious awkwardness.

"Hello!" he challenged.

She cried out sharply, and covered the remaining distance with a rush. Her hand fell upon the box of pellets. She turned, clutching that little box of desperate hopes to her bosom.

"Good God! Virginia!" he exclaimed. "Miss Kingsley!"

"Mr. Worth! Was it you I heard? Why--how are you here?"

"This is my house."