# The Sinister Lake/Part 1

Chapters: I — II — III — IV — V — VI — VII
Part I of a Thrilling Two-Part Story
PROLOGUE.
WHAT really did happen at Jaspar Blatch’s country place, Hinterland, on the last fateful summer of his ownership, has long been a matter of question and conjecture. Of course there were inquiries and depositions and all the rest of it, but the world—his own and the outer one which was interested in everything pertaining to the grisly circumstances—always cherished a conviction that there was more to it than came out. When the first meager filterings of news from Canada struck the city, the papers were kept busy purveying the usual lies and surmises, especially the yellow ones with their sleuthhound scent for a mystery in high life. But presently a newer sensation squeezed it out, and the Blatch story was retired to the back page and faded away.
The press, however, is more crowded than the daily life of the well-to-do New Yorker, and he talked and speculated for weeks. It was all so startling. Apart from the catastrophe, there was the presence of the Harmon children, people nobody ever heard of, unexpectedly emerging from the limbo of the unknown as vital factors in the life of one of the most unique—shall I say mysterious—figures in the city. Everybody was running about asking everybody else who were the Harmon children, who so suddenly—— But I mustn’t tell too much or I'll spoil the story. What I can say is that there were those who went from club to tea, stepping delicately and whispering, into the ear inclined at a welcoming angle, that a good deal wasn’t told, and in their opinion this, that, and the other facts had been suppressed. Very fantastic most of it and yet, when you come to know the truth, not half as fantastic—or as horrible—as what really were the facts and what led up to them.
Now time has passed, Blatch’s sun has set—— Again I mustn’t anticipate. There are young people in New York—the last callow crop—who, I fancy, only dimly remember him and Hinterland and the Harmon children. Perhaps I am writing this for them; it may give them a pleasant, creepy chill on one of those rare evenings when they stay at home and in sheer desperation take up a book. Or I may be writing it for an older group, who knew the small, shriveled figure and were proud to salute it as the Blatch motor rolled sumptuously by. They ought to be interested, for they gossiped enough about the man when he was among them, were guests at the parties in the big stone house on Fifth Avenue. A good many of them did amazing things to get invitations, but it was only to say that they’d been inside the house; not one of them but felt relieved when they could pass on from the host’s suavely sardonic greetings, for they were afraid of him. As it afterward developed, they showed a much keener instinct than one would have supposed they possessed. When they read it—and I think they will, for curiosity is one of the most persistent of human weaknesses—their uncertainties and questions should be set at rest and answered.
How did I come by my knowledge? That is one of the secrets an author ought to keep. But I will say something, for my narrative might not convince the doubting Thomases without some proof. I knew old Tom McGraw well. He died only last winter, in the secluded quiet of a little house he’d bought in the Bronx. A queer old fellow, very secretive, but in his last years, when the friendship was established and old age had limbered the rigidity of temperament and training, he grew more expansive. What he told me, as first-hand witness, and what he had sensed as one who knew Blatch’s character and history, furnished the main facts of the story. Of course I had to piece out a good deal, but that is a novelist’s function. The links in the chain had to be inserted as I guessed them. And after you have finished, you will see that I must have guessed right. It couldn’t have been any other way.
CHAPTER I.
Out of the door of a gray-stone house on that part of Fifth Avenue which has been called “The Mile of Millionaires,” a gentleman came forth. At the curb, an open motor, an object of shining perfection, awaited him. But before he made his way to it, he halted on the steps, glancing about him as if to take in the scene and the suave, quiet beauty of the afternoon. He looked up the long perspective, with its rampart of majestic houses, and at the Park’s bosky reaches, dappled by tree shadows and the slanting light on lawns. It was a gracious prospect, calm in its solid grandeur, sinking into a period of repose, for it was the end of June and the people who lived there had almost all left town.
That the gentleman on the steps should still be in the city, still have his house open, showed him as an original, one who holds himself aloof from the herd movements. And for this—as well as for other things—he was well known; even if he had flown in the face of public opinion by staying in town all summer, nobody would have been surprised. His eccentricities did not extend to outward forms; witness the meticulous correctness of the motor and the subdued elegance of his own clothing. That he was dressed in the height of fashion any one could see, but that it was a height where the conspicuous had no place, only those noticed who knew about such things.
At the door of the motor, he spoke to the waiting footman—a word of greeting cold and concise, just sufficient to recognize the man as a human entity, without relaxing their relation as master and servant. Then he gave an address in an obscure quarter of the city, where such vehicles as his, conveying such a person as himself, were seldom seen. The men on the front seat had been there before, but even if they hadn't, they were too accustomed to his divergences from a standardized line of conduct to feel either curiosity or surprise.
Propped in the angle of the tonneau, a wide, unoccupied stretch of cushion extended beyond him, for he was made on a small scale. Under the brim of his top hat, his face showed as that of an aging man, looking much older than his years, which were fifty-seven. It did not match his body—which suggested youth in an agile, wiry spareness—but was haggard and lined, the skin withered as if tropic suns might have scorched or tempests dried it to a leathern dessication. Yet, seared and riven, it was a face charged with life—seemed a battered screen behind which the spirit glowed with eager intensity. The eyes, deep set in sunken orbits, were singularly bright, like young, sparkling eyes looking through a ravaged mask.
The motor, turning from the curb with a circling sweep, headed for down-town, passing a rubber-neck wagon lumbering northward. The man with the megaphone did not see it, his glance fixed on the house which it had just left and to which he now drew the attention of his passengers. His voice, coming in a muffled, hollow note from the megaphone’s throat, announced it as the residence of Jaspar Blatch, accounted by many one of the finest examples of architecture on the Avenue.
The muffled, hollow notes from the megaphone’s throat announced it as the residence of Jaspar Blatch, accounted by many one of the finest examples of architecture on the Avenue.
The passengers submissively looked—let their eyes wander from the entrance, beneath a deeply cut frame of carving, up the gray façade, its sober dignity brightened by jardinières of rose pink and trailing green, its windows veiled by curtains of Italian lace. Some bent forward in eager scrutiny, recognizing its claims to attention, perhaps having heard of it. The man with the megaphone knew that kind, generally architects, more interested in the house than in its owner. But most of them cocked their heads and listened while he summed up Blatch in a hollow roar—the multimillionaire and art collector, come to his wealth by sudden inheritance, as in a story in a book. And then, the next house on his list looming into view, he had to hurry up with Blatch, dispose of him in a last valedictory bellow, as a bachelor and a recluse living alone among his art treasures, one of the finest private collections in the city of New York.
The house returned no sign of life to the stares that raked its proud front. Old Tom, Blatch’s valet, pottering about in his master’s room, saw the wagon through the curtains and was not sufficiently interested to give it a second glance. Had the other servants noticed it, they would have smiled superciliously. They knew what was being said and liked it, though it was their pose to be derisive.
On this mellow June day, the lower windows were open, letting in the city’s voice. It entered the rich, still place, then died away like a vulgar visitor abashed before unaccustomed refinements. The lights that came with it revealed vistas of chaste magnificence, rooms opening from rooms, slants of sun on shining floors, glints of bronze and marble. The last was a picture gallery built in the rear, a brilliant finale to the perspective, with the afternoon’s brightness bathing its walls.
The house was very quiet, as it nearly always was. Now and then its tranquility was disrupted by an entertainment, a sumptuous affair to return a season’s hospitalities. Then the city’s elect came, jostled one another on the stairs, heard opera singers sing and celebrities play, and said as little as they dared to their host, whose polished courtesy always seemed to mask an ironical disdain. But this didn’t happen often; Blatch abhorred noise and bustle, wanted to live in studious peace among his treasures. New servants entering his employment were so instructed by old Tom, who was the head of the establishment and had been with Blatch since those legendary days when he had been young and poor.
Beside the butler, in some secret niche of his own, there was only one other person on the ground floor. This was the secretary, Joe Adamson, who was sitting in the library waiting for a visitor.
The library was back to the left, before you reached the picture gallery, its stained-glass windows shutting out brick walls and flagging. It was an impressive room, the books that mounted in lines to its coffered ceiling imparting an air of friendliness to its somber grandeurs. Adamson, sprawled in an easy-chair, was reading one. His attitude suggested revolt against the oppressive perfections among which he lived, and a knowledge that his employer was out. One leg was thrown over the side of the chair, one arm uplifted against its back, the hand absently pawing at his hair. He was a long, graceful, muscular young man of twenty-six, healthily brown-tinted, cleanly shaven, and well-featured—the kind of young man the large colleges turn out by the hundreds every spring.
He had been four years with Blatch, ever since he had graduated. His class-mates had expected better of him; a secretaryship, no matter how highly paid, was well enough for a starting point, but not just where one would have expected Joe Adamson to stick. Knowing ones said that they weren't surprised; there had always been a quality of go-as-you-please, not precisely laziness, but lack of initiative, about Joe. He had the brains for success, but brains had to be reinforced by hustle and push.
Adamson had thought about it a good deal himself and pondered the something that had held him back while the others forged ahead. It was not, as they had said, laziness or want of enterprise either—it was a troublesome intruding of the affections. They kept getting in the way, disqualifying him for the race, like a weakened joint or a stiff muscle. For success the head must rule, and with him it was the heart, directing his conduct, governing his actions, making the great prizes look mean. It was not to his interest to stay with Blatch, and he saw it clearly and stayed on. In the four years of their companionship, he had come to care more for that strange and solitary being than for any other man he knew. Also, he thought himself necessary to Blatch’s comfort and convenience.
The silence that lay thick as an essence over the lower floor was reft asunder by the tinkling of a bell. Adamson threw down his book and jumped up, pulling and shaking himself into the trimness that befitted his position and the dignity of the visitor he expected.
This was a man, large and bald, with the firmness of authority in his heavy tread and the stamp of it on his face, at once bland and stern. Long lips folded together in a flexible line, deep furrows separating their corners from the smooth, fat expanse of his cheeks. He was a personage, George J. Denby, attorney of the rich and serving Jaspar Blatch in that capacity for the last fifteen years. Half an hour earlier, Adamson had telephoned him, saying that he had some information to impart and would come down to his office. Denby, inquiring where Blatch was and being told that he was out, had answered that he would save Adamson the trouble and come up himself. It was on his way home, he intended leaving the office early, and they could get through their conference before Blatch returned.
The subject of this secret conference had been disturbing them for a month. It dealt with Blatch’s growing interest in the Harmon children.
Very few people knew anything about the Harmon children. Adamson had been ignorant of their existence till his employer one day had announced that he expected them to dinner. There were three of them, and though they were always alluded to as “the Harmon children,” Mary, the eldest, was twenty-four, and the boy, Frank, only two years younger. Even Lottie, the third, though she was ingenuous and naïve, was nineteen, an age at which a New York girl has put away childhood and childish things.
Out of the unknown, unheralded and unexplained, the Harmon children had appeared from Europe and taken a sudden, prominent place in the life of Jaspar Blatch. That he should have refrained from any introductory mention of them was not in itself unusual, for he was a person of proud reticences, vouchsafing no explanation of his actions or affairs. What was unusual was that he should have exhibited so great an interest in any one. The lawyer and the secretary, the one with a long acquaintance to measure by, the other with the advantage of a daily contact, had never seen him diverted from his lonely self-sufficiency by any call to companionship or need of human society. They had been baffled, puzzled, and finally had become uneasy, as they had seen the rich man’s increasing preoccupation in this trio of detached, unrelated, and inexplicable orphans.
That they might be his own children had naturally occurred to both men, but it was a theory they had soon abandoned. At the time when they had been born, Blatch had been prosecuting extensive travels in remote parts of the earth, far from the centers of civilization. No woman had ever figured in his life; the white light of publicity that had beaten on him for the last twenty-five years had revealed no lapse from a monastic austerity. Moreover, if they were his, he would have made provision for them, and Denby knew that his will contained no mention of the name of Harmon. Adamson, who drew his checks and attended to his correspondence, in the four years of his incumbency had never heard of money or letter being sent them.
Each man’s anxiety had risen from his affection for Blatch, but each saw the Harmon children menacing his peace from a different angle. The lawyer envisaged the calamity of an elderly man, notoriously eccentric, falling a prey to a group of youthful schemers. The secretary saw the same man shaken from a cushioned routine and exposed to novel and agitating influences which might react upon him to his own detriment. While he combated Denby’s idea, Adamson was not entirely easy in his mind about one of the Harmon children; he had made discoveries which had led him to believe that they were not all of an equal excellence. And this he resented having to tell Denby; it was like a betrayal.
It was the boy, Frank, he was not sure about. A surface of European polish overlaid what seemed a childishly light and thoughtless disposition, all the more noteworthy as the Harmons had no money, no relatives, and no friends. What added to his discomfort was that the boy’s close companion was a young doctor, Melville Gaynes, whom Adamson instinctively disliked and distrusted. At a former conference, he had agreed to have an investigation made of Frank’s brief career in America and the doctor’s antecedents, and if anything discreditable should turn up, to acquaint Blatch. Then, just as the result had reached him, illumination had come from an unexpected quarter. Tom, the valet, usually as uncommunicative as his master, one night had knocked at Adamson’s door and, with dropped voice and cautionings of secrecy, had told a story that explained the mystery.
It was this story that Adamson now unfolded to the lawyer.
“It goes back to Blatch’s early days. when he was an artist, unknown, without a cent, living in some rookery downtown. Tom was the janitor of the place.”
Denby nodded.
“I remember. There was an illness when Tom took care of him. He mentioned it when I drew his will—offered it as an explanation of the large legacy he left the old fellow.”
“Well, that illness—a terrible one—had an indirect connection with the Harmon children. According to Tom, it was caused by their mother, the result of her treatment of Blatch, who was engaged to her and whom she threw over for a man named Harmon.”
The lawyer compressed his lips, his head teetering in comprehension.
“That lets in some light. So there has been a romance in Blatch’s past. I’ve often wondered.”
“This girl—Alice Brunel was her name—was young and beautiful and poor. She came from the South somewhere—she and a sister—and lived here with an aunt, a Mrs. Hamilton. The girls had a great vogue, cut a wide swath, and became for a time the fashion. Tom found this out later; at the time, all he knew was that Blatch, who had a studio in the place, was painting Alice’s portrait. He used to see her come and go, generally with her sister.
“He knew very little of Blatch himself then—met him on the stairs, now and then tidied up the studio, and says he was always kindly and genial. Yes”—as the lawyer looked up in startled question—“if those aren’t his words, that was the impression he conveyed, He saw the strangeness of it himself, and said that after the illness, Blatch was another man—never came back to what he had been. Well, to go on, one day, going up to the studio on an errand, he found Blatch desperately ill, comatose, half dead. He got in a doctor and, there being no one else to do it, took care of the sick man himself, buying what was needed out of his own pocket. He told it all as if he were ashamed of it. He’s a great old boy, is Tom.
“Blatch hung between life and death, delirious, often raving. From what he said then, Tom got a line on the situation. It was, of course, broken and disjointed, but sufficient to show that the woman had jilted Blatch for a rival who had money. Before he recovered—the illness was long—Tom saw in the papers the notice of Alice Brunel’s marriage to Alexander Harmon, and that they had left immediately for Europe, where Harmon was in the consular service.”
“Umph!” Denby’s glance was musing. “Strange how he could have bottled all this up—never given a hint of it to me or to any one else, as far as I know.”
“And bottled up Tom. I thought I'd got inside his guard long ago, but this is the first time he’s even mentioned the subject to me, and he was as uncomfortable as a conspirator informing on his chief. Blatch’s recovery was slow, and before he could get about, Tom saw that he was a changed man. ‘It was as if the spirit had been drained out of him,’ was the way he expressed it—ambition, hope, interest, all were gone. When he was strong enough to move, he cut the picture to pieces and burned it. He offered no explanation of the act and never has spoken of the woman to Tom from that day to the present. It was when he was beginning to crawl about that the news came of the fortune—fifteen millions from an uncle in New Zealand that he’d never seen and whose name he hardly remembered. Then they started out on those travels—they were years at it—in every odd corner of the globe.”
“Did Tom know if he had ever seen the woman again?”
“I asked him, and he said no—and as he’s never left Blatch’s side from the time of his illness to the present moment, he would know. He never heard Blatch speak of her, of her husband, or of her children, and he’s certain he never saw any of them. Tom himself, when they were in Europe, used to inquire about the Harmons from hotel employees and other travelers. He kept a sort of tab on them that way—knew that they had settled abroad and stayed there. But of late years he’s heard nothing of them—didn’t know the parents were dead till the children turned up in New York as orphans.”
The lawyer pondered a moment, then spoke in a low, ruminative bass:
“I have a vague memory of two girls called Brunel—a long time ago—when I was busy climbing up the ladder. They made rather a splash in a puddle that wasn’t as full then as it is now. One of them married, and they disappeared from the puddle. I imagine that was the Alice who wrecked our friend.”
“‘Wrecked’ is the right word. It accounts for a good deal that, up to now, was unaccountable.”
Denby, striking his hands on the chair arms, heaved himself forward.
“Put in plain words, it explains Blatch’s lack of balance. We all know he’s not normal, and now we know why. A man of high-strung temperament received an unexpected and crushing blow. He recovered from it physically, hut the delicately poised mental equilibrium was never restored.”
Adamson’s glance showed a startled question.
“But you can’t call him insane?”
“Not at all, not at all,” said the other with testy repudiation. “I never thought, much less said, such a thing. Blatch isn’t insane, but he doesn’t walk the chalk line between sanity and insanity as evenly as you or I do. He wobbles a bit. Numberless people do. I could make a good collection from my own clients. And this being the case, Adamson, it’s up to us to be careful of the influences he’s liable to fall under and guard him against bad ones.”
“I understand that perfectly, Mr. Denby. It’s one of the reasons I stay on here. But now that I’ve heard this story, I can’t see anything strange in his interest in the Harmons or any necessity to guard him against them. Here they are, children of his old sweetheart, penniless, without a friend. Knowing him as I do—his lavish generosity, the curious kindness he hides like a sin—it would seem to me only natural that he should want to help them.”
“To be sure—and I’d be the last one to deprive him of what may be an interest for his declining years. The point is, my dear boy, are these young people, of whom we know nothing, just the kind we’d like to see get a strangle hold on our friend?”
Adamson pushed his chair back from the desk. He did not want the lawyer’s eyes on him, but, also, he did not want to wake his curiosity by avoiding them. He tried to speak with an impersonal coolness, and it was hard, for his desire was to speak with the passion of a partisan.
“In my mind there is no doubt about the—er—high character, integrity—all that sort of thing—of Miss Harmon. I’ve met her several times, and I'd swear she is as disinterested, as free from any mercenary motives, as you and I are.”
It was successful. Denby’s eyes, fixed on the colored panes of the window, were blank with their own vision.
“Yes, I’ll admit she impressed me favorably the only time I saw her—once here. A quiet, well-mannered girl—nothing of the adventuress about her.” He swerved his glance back to Adamson, the blankness gone, keen and questioning. “But the boy—how about him? By the way, have you the results of that investigation?”
The young man felt in his pocket and drew out a sheaf of papers, which he looked through as he spoke.
“Yes, they came just before Tom opened up. As far as the boy goes, there’s nothing of any moment—just a lightweight, irresponsible and lazy, spoiled more than anything, I guess. But the doctor chap”—he drew out a paper and held it to the lawyer—“well, you can see for yourself.”
Denby read it and gave forth a grunt:
“Umph—a pretty bad egg. No regular employment, attracted the attention of the police as a suspect in the drug traffic, never has practiced his profession, gambles as a means of livelihood.” He handed the paper back with a dry laugh. “Not just the sort of man one would like to see established on a friendly footing here.”
Adamson spoke eagerly:
“But Gaynes isn’t a member of the Harmon family.”
“No,” countered the other quickly, “but he’s a close friend of a member, a boy of twenty-two, who you yourself say is irresponsible and weak. Blatch must know the result of this inquiry.”
“There’s no question about that.” The young man rose and moved to the window, where he came to a stand, looking out. From behind him, Denby’s voice came, addressing his back:
“You remarked just now on the naturalness of Blatch wanting to befriend the children of his old sweetheart. Isn’t it probable that the children may use this interest to their own advantage—may extort money from him, possibly cajole him into making a will in their favor?”
Adamson turned sharply from the window.
“No—seeing what they are, it’s not only improbable, it’s impossible. As to the will, that’s another matter. It wouldn’t surprise me if he did it of his own volition, without any cajoling.”
“Good Lord!” muttered the man of law in dismay. Then, with a revival of hope, “But he’ll be going to Hinterland soon. That'll take him from under their spell.”
Hinterland was Blatch’s country place, a vast domain in Canada up toward the Hudson Bay country. It was the one of his possessions that figured oftenest in the newspapers, having a wider interest for the general public than his pictures, his antiques, or even himself. A millionaire retreating for his summer into the wilds was a much more novel spectacle than one settling down sociably at Newport or Bar Harbor.
Adamson had begun a slow pacing up and down across the open space beyond the desk. His eyes were on his feet, pressing noiselessly on the soft thickness of the rugs.
“We go in about ten days. But people are sometimes asked to Hinterland. Last year and the summer before, there were a number of guests. It’s the only place where Blatch likes to have them.”
“Good Lord!” murmured the lawyer again, and turned on Adamson a face of consternation. “You don’t think he'll invite them up there?”
“I don’t know. No one knows what he’s going to do till the order’s given. I mention it as a possibility.”
Denby rose, held in dismayed contemplation of this disturbing suggestion.
“They'll have him at their mercy. He couldn’t get away from them. Probably nobody else in the place.” He looked at his companion and once more knew an upwelling of relief. “But you—of course you're always there.”
“Oh, yes. I’m always there.”
“Well, if he should ask them, you could be relied on to watch and yield a counter influence. Outside Tom, he cares more for you than for any one else.”
The young man paused in his walk, looking frowningly at his feet.
“I think he does care for me. He’s certainly treated me with unfailing kindness and generosity.”
“Then it’s up to you to keep him from falling a victim to his own sentimentality. It’s a word I never expected to apply to any action of Jaspar Blatch’s; he’s the last man I’d have thought had a soft spot of that kind in his make-up. But before the chance comes to extend any invitation, tell him about Gaynes. That'll be a check on his hospitable intentions.”
He picked up his gloves from the desk and made a move to go, when a last thought stopped him:
“The children themselves—have you ever heard them make any comment on him? Do they know anything of this story?”
“I think not. Miss Harmon, the only one I've ever talked to much, mentioned the fact that Blatch had introduced himself as a friend of her parents. She said he wrote to her telling her he wanted to meet her, as he had known her father and mother. She gave me the impression of being rather puzzled about it. I don’t think she has any idea of the romance in the background.”
The lawyer gave a grim smile.
“Alice evidently covered up her tracks, was ashamed of the performance. It’s possible Harmon himself never knew. What we’ve heard about her makes me more than ever averse to trusting her children. Mercenary instincts, cupidity, craft, repeat themselves as the features do.”
When he had gone, Adamson threw himself again into his chair, but this time not to read. With his hand once more pawing at his hair, his mind ranged back over the conversation, repudiating the lawyer’s suspicions. He told himself that they had no foundation, were fantastic and preposterous, that the Harmon children were as innocent of any intention to lay a covetous hand on Blatch’s millions as he was himself.
CHAPTER II.
From the corner of the tonneau, Blatch looked down the Avenue to where its perspective faded in a brownish haze. Above it the sky rose, deep blue, the crests of high buildings bright against it, here and there a tiny flag whipping out in upper air currents. It was a perfect afternoon, sun bathed, balmy, and it brought to his memory other afternoons on just such days, a long time ago, when he was young.
He saw the unencumbered spaces of his studio, its shabby furnishings, the north light clear on the gray walls. The windows were open, letting in the breath of spring, which passed over bowls of flowers, drew out their fragrance, and carried it into the room. On the model throne, Alice Brunel sat, lovely, ethereal, her white skin flawless as a petal, her hair gold as corn silk. She was the perfect flower, with a blossom’s delicate bloom, a creature to worship and cherish.
He had met her at a studio party, seen her through a break in the crowd, and stood stricken. He met her again several times, and Isabel, her younger sister, who was almost as pretty. He had heard a good deal about them; their names were on the people’s tongues just then—brought from their Southern home to the marriage market of New York by an aunt, a Mrs. Hamilton. He thought the aunt a horrible person, her meanness stamped on her hard, faded face. The girls were like captive princesses in the thralldom of a witch. When he had asked permission to paint the portrait, he could read her thoughts, see under her cold smile a wily calculation, a considering of the advantages to accrue. He was a negligible factor, a hand holding a brush, useful to advertise the wares she had to sell. From such a man, without fame or fortune, ugly, devoid of social graces, could come no menace to her plans.
She came to the studio at first; then, bored, she relegated the post of chaperon to Isabel. Relieved of her presence, they had breathed more freely, the sittings had ceased to be an irksome duty, had grown joyous with the play of young, high spirits and young enthusiasms. Those enchanted afternoons! Periods of silence when the artist had worked in a rapt abstraction; then the break into movement—the clattering fall of the palette on the table. Alice rising with a lithe, soft stretch, the making of tea, the gathering round the tilting, three-legged taboret—laughter—the music of girls’ voices. He heard it after they had gone, when he sat in the twilight, his hands clasped behind his head, motionless in the trance of his passion.
His days, which had hitherto passed in the sufficing serenity of work, were inundated by waves of emotion. When she was there, he hid a tremulous rapture; when she was absent, he saw all joy vanish and jealousy and dread rise where the vision had been. He had heard of her other suitors—everybody had—saw one of them bearing her away triumphant, and put the thought from him as men put away the fear that leads to madness.
One afternoon a man called Harmon came, dropped in to see the picture, was affably complimentary, looking at Alice, looking at the portrait, making stupid, ignorant criticisms. He was one of those other suitors; if Blatch hadn’t known, his manner to Alice would have proclaimed it, a large, handsome person, filling the place with his florid cordiality. A man of the world, he was studiously polite in an effort to hide that he thought it an alien and superior world to that of the artist. When he looked at the picture, it seemed to lose its worth, to become a tawdry, meaningless thing. Like a magic touch, his prosperous presence dispelled the illusion, brought out the studio’s naked poverty, set Blatch away in a far-off distance where artists and writers and other oddities lived in a quaint and rather humorous place called bohemia. He talked a good deal about bohemia, and Blatch answered with murder in his heart.
The long hours wore upon Isabel’s patience; she had to give up other amusements to be there, as Mrs. Hamilton, of whom both girls were afraid, would never consent to Alice’s going alone. So Isabel evolved a plan that would give her the liberty she wanted and outwardly conform to her aunt’s desires. The girls would leave the house together, then separate, Alice going to the studio, where Isabel would call for her at the end of the sitting. They were more than ever like captive princesses; there was something mischievously elfin in their glee at eluding the witch’s vigilance.
On the first day that Alice came alone, Blatch told her everything—a rush of broken, husky sentences. Then he fell at her feet with his face hidden in her dress, felt her hand in his hair, looked up, and heard her whispered response. Dizzy with a sudden bliss, he saw her through a glaze of tears; they were on his cheeks as she bent to his kiss.
The picture, untouched, looked at them in silent reproach, but they had forgotten it, had forgotten everything but one another.
The days that followed were a sequence of shining dreams. The picture, untouched, looked at them in silent reproach, but they had forgotten it, had forgotten everything but each other. They talked endlessly—lovers’ talk—fell into long pauses, kissed, and talked again. They would be married when he was able to support her. It didn’t matter when. The future was a blur; the golden veil of the present hid it, and they did not want to mar the gleaming tissue with a touch. He asked about her other admirers, especially Harmon, who had proposed to her and whom her aunt wanted her to marry. She laughed with him about them all, lying in the hollow of his arm—laughed at their hopes and pretensions—and he laughed with her, confessing his jealously, dead now forever.
So in May, the lovers’ month, they drifted on the stream of their passion, out and out, the current growing ever swifter and stronger. Finally a day came when it caught them in a mighty rush and carried them on, blind and helpless, to the ultimate sea.
They were lovers now in deed as well as in word, and it changed him. The time of drifting was over; she was his, and he woke to the meaning of his ownership. He begged her to marry him, but she shrank from it, had reasons for waiting—her aunt’s anger, their lack of means. She was frightened, wept sometimes, distressed him by her qualms of conscience, but she came, love in her eyes and on her lips as he drew her through the doorway. The picture grew again; it was their hope. He knew it as the highest point of his achievement; it would make him and they would be married.
The time of her visits was the afternoon, and one Friday, toward the end of the month, she did not come. He waited through the long, slow hours, and, no knock sounding on the door, no messenger appearing with a note, he began to rage, pacing the floor like a caged lion. The next morning a letter came, left by a servant, who said that there was no answer. It was short and pitiless. She was going to marry Harmon.
The reason she gave was her dread of poverty. She could not bear it. Harmon had money; he could give her the life she wanted. She did not try to exculpate herself, but she asked Blatch to spare her—not to write, not to come to her, to let her go and forget her, for she was not worth remembering. He sat with the letter in his hand, motionless, while the darkness came, and then the light, and then darkness again. He had no knowledge of crawling to his bed and falling there; he had no knowledge of anything but a blackness that closed down on him like a coffin on the dead. It was thus that Tom found him two days later.
She had only told him part of the truth. Had she told all, he would have gone to her, have dragged her away from them, have carried her off and held her as his own forever. The fear of poverty had made her break with him, but an even greater fear had thrust her into the arms of his rival. To only one person had she dared to tell it—her sister. In their room one night, she had sobbed it out, hiding her face from Isabel’s horrified eyes.
“You must marry him!” Isabel had said, shaking her shoulder.
And Alice, twisting away from the gripping hand, had wailed:
“I can’t! I’m afraid to! But I must marry some one, and it’s got to be Harmon.”
Two weeks later, she had married Harmon, with Blatch’s child quick under her heart.
He had never guessed it. His explanation was that Alice had had her day with him and thrown him away for what had always been her god—money. He returned to life with reluctance, groping among the broken fragments of a world he hated. When the fortune came, one thought ran like a flame across his darkened mind:
“She would have been glad to marry me now.”
The wandering years had followed, up and down the earth’s surface with Tom tagging, silent and faithful, at his side. He had earned his reputation then as an eccentric personality—one who did differently from the rest. Society knew him as a figure that came and went meteorically, disappearing into primeval wildernesses, emerging from remote solitudes. He saw what he passed through as a panorama shifting under his eyes like stage settings—deserts bare under flaming sunsets, rivers winding sluggish through tangled forests, the ocean heaving limitless to limitless skies, palm fringes mirrored in lagoons, the massed thickness of the jungle, with his bearers tramping forward in weighted file. It brought no real healing, but it was movement, ceaseless movement, and he could not rest.
The motor turned from the Avenue into narrower streets. He stirred and leaned forward, looking across the roofs. The studio had been over there; the building had long since gone, lofts having been raised in its place. He craned his neck, searching the sky line, a spare, tense figure with haggard face and curiously vital eyes. They saw nothing of the street or the wayfarers who slackened their steps to stare. Like forms taking shape from a crystal’s cloudy depths, a picture rose on his inner vision—the studio with its searching light, open windows, flowers, the empty chair on the model throne, Alice Brunel in his arms, his hand in her hair drawing her head back, lifting her face to his gaze, his heart swollen with a rapture that was pain.
CHAPTER III.
Earlier on that same afternoon, Mary Harmon was sitting by the front window of a small flat. It looked out on a street that had once been fashionable; brownstone houses still showed shamefaced above ground-floor shops and basements gone into trade. It was an animated thoroughfare and, in its shifting play of color, its hum of alien speech, its pushcarts and flower wagons, was like a badly done reproduction of streets in those European cities where she had passed her life.
She had taken the flat not only because of its low rent, but because of this resemblance. Cradled in the lazy picturesqueness of foreign lands, the Harmons had been bewildered by the formidable authority of New York, shrank from its fierce challenge, its clangorous efficiency. Like scared animals, they had run for a burrow, seeking refuge in the place that seemed least strange. Here they had tried to assuage their homesickness by creating a familiar atmosphere, and brought out their few belongings—gilt-framed mirrors, worn lengths of tapestry, Balkan embroideries, red lacquer chairs from Venice. There was not much left—the best had been sold to meet the need for money—but the place did gradually assume a welcoming look, and they kept as closely as they could to the old, accustomed ways. On a small edge of balcony off the kitchen they ate their meals, to the wondering curiosity of those who dwelt in the house across the yard.
Mary Harmon was not like either her brother or her sister. They “favored” their mother, showing as poor, defective copies of that beauty which had given her a little day of queenhood. While they were tall, long-limbed, and blond, Mary was neatly small and compact, tanning readily to a meerschaum tint, with dark, curly hair that grew low on her forehead like an Italian’s. Under the arch of her brows, sharply defined as if made with one sweep of a paint brush, her eyes, set deep in hollowed orbits, were clear brown and onyx bright.
She looked, in fact, like none of them; her mother used to laugh and call her “changeling.” Mary could remember, far back, the elder woman searching her face, scrutinizing it with a hungry intentness, then drawing her close and kissing her. Sometimes, when comments were made on her thin fragility, her mother would say, “Poor darling, of course she’s undersized and delicate. She’s been so handicapped.” It was not till years later that the girl learned what the handicap was—she had been born before her time, an accident to her mother in her father’s absence. It was the reason for the extra cosseting and petting she had received, the reason for that sedulous care, that intense, jealous affection, her mother had always given her.
She was thinking of the past now, their beautiful life in beautiful places. It had been so rich in mutual understanding, so sweet in its unbroken harmony. She had heard of families who did not “get on” together, who quarreled and nagged; there had been nothing like that among them, They had had everything, love most of all, and her mind ran back over the years to the one sorrow in all that golden time—the death of her Aunt Isabel, who had always lived with them until she married a Frenchman and died a year after in Algiers.
Then, last summer, it had all ended, broken suddenly like a rainbow bubble. Their father had gone first, and following on that shock had come the unexpected revelation of their poverty. The heyday of joyous gypsying, of careless plenty, had absorbed everything, private fortune and salary. A new, bleak life of readjustment opened before them. There had been counsels, Mary slipping into place as leader, their mother, grown suddenly old and helpless, a thing to be cared for and shielded. They rallied round her, talking gallantly of supporting her, the homage they had paid at the shrine of her beauty changed to a passionate pity. But her spirit was too broken, too bereft of energy, for healing, and in six months had shaken itself free.
The return to America had been Mary’s idea; it was the land of opportunity, offering a market for their talents. That their parents had come from there gave them a vague claim upon it, but it was as strange to them as if none of its blood ran in their veins. They knew that they had relations in the country; their mother’s aunt, Mrs. Hamilton, had a son in the South, and the scattered remnants of their father’s family lived in some Western State, the name of which they had forgotten. The Alexander Harmons, in their happy solidarity, had neglected home ties, and the children saw these people as legendary characters far removed from them and their interests, strangers that they shrank from approaching.
After the period of shaking down, they had started fairly well. A kindly lady, met on the steamer, had helped Mary to some pupils in music and languages, and the girl saw a future of growing chances. To settle Frank had been more difficult; with his foreign education, his polyglot accomplishments, he was too good for a small job and not good enough for a larger one. As he grew toward manhood, he had been a subject of concern to his parents; not bad—there was no evil in Frank—but indolent, pleasure-loving, unstable. “All Brunel” his mother had once flashed out at him in a moment of angry disappointment. He had found work—translating for a publishing firm—and Mary had drawn a breath of relief. And then the breath had been cut short by the appearance of Gaynes. She had disliked him from the first, hated his intimacy with Frank, found herself deep in new worries, and had been marshaling her forces for a campaign against the doctor when Blatch had risen above the horizon.
He had introduced himself by letter, explaining his intrusion by the fact that he had been a friend of her parents. She had had some trouble in connecting his name with any definite memory—had ransacked the past and finally had come upon an identifying recollection. At breakfast one morning, years ago in Milan, her father, from behind the paper, had announced that Jaspar Blatch was in Genoa en route to northern Africa. Her mother had shown little interest; what made Mary remember it was some comments on the man’s strange rise to fortune. It was a romantic story. She had made her father tell it to her. It came back upon her in slowly emerging fragments.
When she met Blatch, she was careful not to let him guess how completely he had passed out of her parents’ minds, for he seemed to remember them well, dwelt upon them in their blooming heyday. She eventually evolved her own explanation. Her mother had had many suitors; it was one of the cherished family traditions that Harmon had won her from a crowd of rivals, Blatch had been one of these, playing too negligible a part among the ardent throng to be remembered.
The sound of the doorbell broke on her reverie. Visitors were rare, but several times Joe Adamson, Blatch’s secretary, had come with messages from his employer. Moved by this thought, she sprang up and went to a mirror between the windows. There was a dusky color on her cheek bones, and her hands fluttered with arranging touches over her hair and white lawn collar. But it was not Adamson this time; it was Blatch, Lucia, the little Italian maid, flattening herself against the door to give him entrance. He had come to ask if Mary would drive with him. They would go along the river, which would be beautiful in its fresh greenery.
It was not the prospect of the drive that made her respond so eagerly, but the desire to lift from that curiously pathetic face its expression of wistful inquiry.
He proffered the invitation humbly, as if he were asking a favor, looking at her in tentative question with bright, sad eyes. Mary put on her hat and snatched up her cloak. It was not the prospect of the drive that made her respond so eagerly, but the desire to lift from that curiously pathetic face its expression of wistful inquiry.
For a space the flat was deserted save for Lucia, creaking about in the small kitchen. Then came Frank and Gaynes, the former making a good deal of noise, calling for his sister, brushing through doorways in a hunt for her. Gaynes, a cigarette hanging from his lip, lounged about the little parlor, looking the place over with amused disparagement. He was several years older than Frank, handsome in a pale, Byronic style which he emphasized by wearing his black hair thrust carelessly back from his forehead and his cravat tied in a loose bow. He was very much at home here, as he was wherever he made a foothold, but he was careful to subdue his bold assertiveness when Mary was present. With her he was always respectful, toning down his nonchalance to the deference he felt was required of him.
Frank came back from his search with the news that Mary had gone out driving with Mr. Blatch. He imparted the information in a tone of hushed jubilance.
“And so the good work proceeds,” said Gaynes,
Frank gave a chuckling laugh, a little shamefaced, like a child who is not quite sure that a laugh is the fitting response. The doctor answered him with a languid smile.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” said the boy. “It’s the first real piece of luck we’ve had since we came here.”
“You can’t call it luck till he comes across with something definite.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Frank was unwilling to admit any cloud on the bright prospect. “I'd call it luck to have a man like Blatch take a fancy to you—and that’s what he’s done, to all of us. You can’t tell where it will lead to.”
“I know where it would lead to if you played the game.”
“If—if—— What else am I doing?” Frank’s voice rose in irritated deprecation. “You keep on saying that as if I were spoiling everything. I don’t know what you expect. I can’t make him give me money or offer to adopt me unless he wants to.
“Money—who was talking of money?” Gaynes moved to the window and flicked his cigarette ash on the sill. He had a slightly bored air of forbearance, as of one who talks patiently with a willful child. “As for adoption, I couldn’t imagine a better punishment for a crime than being adopted by Blatch.”
“Then what do you mean? You speak of playing a game. Well, it’s for something, isn’t it?”
Gaynes turned from the window and looked into the boy’s face. This time his smile was broader, tolerantly amused.
“You've still got your European point of view—see what’s close by, see things small. Blatch has no heirs. What’s going to happen to his money? Left to institutions and orphans, I suppose. Well, you’re orphans, deserving ones, too—the best intentions in the world and not a cent to carry them out with.”
Frank glanced at his friend and then shifted his eyes with an uneasy frown, The subject was not new to him. Gaynes had broached it before, and while an inner voice repudiated it, he assured himself that there was no harm in speculating. Also, he was ashamed to let Gaynes guess his scruples. Before the doctor’s ruthless boldness, they looked girlish and silly. He envied the cold courage that could dare to envisage such possibilities. He mumbled his answer, abashed, admitting weakness:
“Maybe it is Europe. We’re not as—as—big in our ideas as you are here. It’s enough for me that Blatch has taken us on. I can’t see myself as his heir. It’s—it’s too like a fairy tale.”
The doctor laughed, a rallying, good-humored note.
“Try and do it. Good practice—and what’s wrong in it? See the thing sensibly. Why shouldn’t you have the money rather than a museum or a lot of scrubby-headed foundlings? You'd do better with it, make it reach further. You’re a man of education and intelligence, and your sister, Miss Harmon, is cut out for a philanthropist. Can’t you see her making that money useful in the world?”
The boy caught eagerly at this, his vexed brows smoothing.
“Oh, yes, Mary. Mary would do wonders with it. She’s often said——”
The other interrupted:
“If he’d only ask you to Hinterland, you could do a lot with him there. He hasn’t said anything about it yet?”
“Not a word—and they’ll be going soon. Adamson told me so one day when he was here.” He switched off to the secretary as a change of subject. “Adamson’s a fine chap, isn’t he?”
Gaynes made no reply to this encomium. His thoughts were traveling, rushing toward potentialities that might become realities at Hinterland,
“Perhaps he'll ask Miss Harmon this afternoon. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t. He has people. up there. I’ve seen it in the papers—house parties that stay for weeks. They say it’s a wonderful place—a big camp with everything, right in the heart of the wilderness.” His voice lost its brisk appreciation and softened into envious longing: “Gee, I wish I had your chance! I’d get there, and I’d have him eating out of my hand before I left.”
Frank saw reprobation in the words and defended himself with flushed urgence:
“But, Gaynes, I can’t hound him. I can’t ask him to ask me. In the first place, it’s not just a gentleman’s job, and in the second, he’s the kind that hates to be pushed, and he’d see through it, too. A rich man like that has had too many parasites hanging about not to be wise to their ways.”
Gaynes, leaning against the window frame, looked musingly into the street.
“Um,” he murmured. “The parasite ways aren’t the kind. It’s subtler methods.” He turned back to the boy, his face, with its thin, chiseled fineness, coolly composed. “If he should ask you, try and work me in—a friend, a sick man needing a holiday. One more won't matter to him. And I can be useful to you—I can help.”
rank looked as if he did not relish the suggestion,
“Perhaps I can. He’s very generous. Can’t you tell me the subtler methods?”
The other gave a light laugh.
“No, they’re instinctive—can’t be taught. Try and work it. It'll be worth your while.”
Frank said no more. His creed was to avoid all that was unpleasant, and to solicit an invitation to Hinterland for Gaynes was not to his taste. If they were invited and Gaynes should be included, it would be very delightful, for Frank, albeit restive under the doctor’s authoritative guidance, still thought him the most brilliant and dashing of men.
A door slammed, a light step came up the passage, and Lottie appeared. She had been out shopping, ranging up and down Sixth Avenue for a pair of silk gloves. It had taken the best part of the afternoon, many shops had been visited, gloves priced, fingered, and relinquished on the chance of a better bargain. On the stairs, she had not been able to resist opening the package and now held the gloves loose in her hand, a possession to eye critically and touch with appreciation. She looked very young, the ingénue of the foreign family, her blond hair tied at the nape of her neck with a black ribbon, the curly ends like shavings of gold.
At the sight of Gaynes, she stopped on the threshold, a sudden film of pink coloring her face.
“Oh!” she said, and, dropping her eyes to the gloves, which had suddenly lost their importance, murmured in embarrassment, “I’ve been out on Sixth Avenue—up and down—buying gloves. It takes hours. Everything’s so expensive.”
Frank suggested a cooling drink, and they moved into the dining room, Lottie withdrawing to help Lucia make some lemonade. The small room, its one window facing a brick wall, was dimly lit, the brightness from the parlor slanting across its waxed floor, striking gleams from the china and silver on the sideboard. Presently the girl came back carrying a tray with glasses and a beaded pitcher of lemonade. She set it down on the table and, breathing quickly as if she had been hurried, dropped into a chair. Gaynes swept the room with an idly roving glance which moved to her face, lingered there an instant, then passed on. The flush that had colored it at the sight of him had concentrated in two rosy patches on her cheeks; against the black edges of her blouse, her neck was as white as curds.
Frank found the brew unsatisfactory. She had been stingy with the lemons, and it ought to have some strawberries—a few; they looked pretty and gave a taste. He would doctor it himself, and he took the pitcher and went back to the kitchen. As he passed through the doorway, a curious, waiting stillness fell on the two at the table, the girl sitting erect staring before her as if hypnotized, the doctor with an intent sidelong eye on the entrance to the hall. Frank’s footsteps sounded unnaturally loud, thump, thump, on the strained quiet. The doctor moved, leaned forward, and laid his hand on hers, ice cold and trembling.
“Dearest!” he whispered.
She quivered at the touch and made an effort to draw the hand away.
“Don’t—don’t!” she breathed, alive now in every fiber, raising her eyes to his, then dropping them, shrinking before his glance that alarmed and enthralled her. “Don’t please! If Frank should hear!”
“But he can’t. He’s in the kitchen. Silly little darling, always so full of fears! You’re like a wild bird that can’t be caught. Don’t draw away from me as if you don’t like me.”
“Silly little darling always so full of fears! You’re like a wild bird that can’t be caught.”
He edged his chair closer, and she cowered back against the arm of hers, through the mask of her scared child’s face the woman showing, rising to meet the call of life.
“I don’t, I don’t—but, oh, Mel, if any of them should find out! If Mary should——” She stopped, choked, a small, fragile body shaken by new and devastating emotions.
“Mary won't know—not yet, anyhow. Some day, of course, we'll tell her, when I get that position I spoke of,”
“Yes, some day,” she murmured.
It was a day that loomed so darkly in her thought that she could not contemplate it, a day of defiance, of her will opposed to Mary’s. Gaynes saw the trouble in her face and leaned nearer, whispering, weaving the spell:
“What does it matter to us if she should object? Isn't it our affair? What’s wrong about being engaged, Lottie dear, when we love one another, truly love one another as we do—we do!”
He reached out and gathered her into his arms, feeling her fluttering reluctance melt into acquiescence. But her lips still gave out their feeble protests, small sounds of remonstrance.
“No—please, Mel, you mustn’t!”
Then she ceased and rested quiet against his heart. He rubbed his cheek on hers and, bending,. brushed his lips against the roseleaf skin, tracing a pattern of kisses over its resilient softness.
Frank’s step sounded in the hall and they sprang back to consciousness and deception. Gaynes began to talk about a samovar on the sideboard, his voice slightly raised, his eyes on her downbent face, compelling and cold.
When they returned to the parlor, she sat on the sofa, trying on her gloves. She pressed them on her hands, studying the effect with a fond approval. Frank, looking out of the window, suddenly called:
“Oh, I say—come quick! Here’s Mary returning in state.”
They all ran, Lottie with a squeal and a slide along the floor, her hands upheld to keep the new gloves from contaminating contact. Crowded into the window, they looked down on the motor gliding luxurious to the curb. They gloated on it—its glossy finish, its unmarred, flawless splendor, the liveries of the two men, immovable as automatons on the front seat. Wayfarers drew up to look; small boys ran and stood entranced before the hooded secrets of the engine.
“What a car!” breathed Frank, and then fell silent, absorbed in the spectacle of Mary saying good-by.
They were facing the door in an expectant group when she entered. She looked gay and alert, enthusiastic descriptions on her lips. Then she saw Gaynes, and her face fell.
“Did he ask you to Hinterland?” shot out Frank.
“No, he asked us to tea on Tuesday.” She took off her hat and threw it on the sofa. She was intensely annoyed by Gaynes’ presence, by the check to her high spirits, but especially by the fact that she had to add more to the invitation. She gave it out with a grudging slowness: “He asked Doctor Gaynes, too.”
CHAPTER IV.
For some days after his interview with Denby, Adamson saw little of his employer, Blatch, preparatory to the summer move to Hinterland, was occupied with business affairs, and also was making one of his occasional incursions into the social world he despised and yet did not entirely neglect. It was not till Monday evening that the young man found an opportunity to disclose what he had discovered about Melville Gaynes.
This opportunity came at the end of dinner, when, the servants withdrawn, it was Blatch’s custom to linger over his coffee and discuss matters of mutual interest with his secretary. The two men sat opposite one another at a table divested of its cloth in the English fashion, its polished mahogany surface gleaming with reflections like dark ice. From the tapestried wall, sconces diffused pale auras that lay in patches on the woven fabric. The room, vast and high, receded in darkling indistinctness, night hovering in its corners, circling its central brightness with an encroaching, cloudy rim. Under a yellow gush of candlelight, the table looked like a boat freighted with a sparkling cargo, floating between shadowy shores.
Adamson said his say, uncomfortable in the doing, his glance steady on the face opposite. It was, as ever, unrevealing. Blatch, looking withered and shrunken as a mummy in the Italian chair that rose in golden whorls over his head, listened with expressionless attention. He liked to put in his coffee a spoonful of brandy in which a lump of sugar had been burned. He always did this himself, and as Adamson spoke, he was occupied with it, his hands, the veins showing like waxed cords, delicately balancing the spoon and setting the match to the brandy.
“And what, my dear boy, if I may venture to ask, induced you to take this trouble—to go so far as to investigate the character of the young man?”
Adamson’s uneasiness increased. He could read nothing from Blatch’s face, yet he knew from past experience that no one more resented interference or meddling. Steeled against what might be coming, he spoke with a boyish embarrassment:
“Well, I took it because of you. I didn’t suppose you’d thought much about him—just taken him on trust as a friend of Frank Harmon’s. And I didn’t like him—felt from the start there was something wrong about him. He could try to butt in here and be a nuisance—might have to be kicked out.”
Blatch, watching the sapphire flame flickering on the sugar, smiled.
“A kindly intention, as yours always are. You have my thanks for it. I'll lay your warning to heart.” He paused; then said: “Look at the color of that flame. It’s as pure as the blue in the rainbow.”
Adamson, greatly relieved, heaved a deep breath, upon which a vague “beautiful” was ejected,
Blatch continued to watch the flame with a rapt intentness.
“There are only a few perfect blues—the sky, some flowers, water in certain lights, and these little tongues of fire.” The flame, as if called to a last energy by the words, shot up, trembled in transparent beauty, and died. Blatch poured the burned brandy into his cup. “Do you think Frank Harmon knows what this man really is?”
The flame shot up, trembled in transparent beauty, and died. Blatch poured the burned brandy into his cup. “Do you think Frank Harmon knows what this man really is?”
The question gave Adamson the opportunity he wanted—to show the Harmon children ignorant of Gaynes’ character.
“No, not for a moment. He’s only a boy, and he’s strange to the country and its people.”
“Boys such as he, brought up in Europe, an older, more exotic civilization, are often more sophisticated than one would guess.”
“Not this boy. I’ve talked to him several times. He’s nothing more than a kid, a stupid kid in many ways. Gaynes has dazzled him.”
“But Miss Harmon—she’s older, and women have keener instincts in such matters. I don’t think you could call her stupid.”
Adamson’s color deepened. There was a suppressed urgence in his voice:
“Of course no one could. But a girl like that, of that character, doesn’t see such things. She doesn’t like Gaynes—she’s hinted it more than once—but she couldn’t guess what he really is because she’s too fine. Women of her kind don’t suspect—not because they’re stupid, but because there’s too much goodness in them to see evil.”
“Yes, yes,” the other nodded, staring at the table, as if pondering the young man’s words. “No doubt that’s the case—too highminded to understand such a person as our friend the doctor. You evidently have formed a very flattering opinion of her?”
The question, in its sudden directness, upset Adamson’s composure. To hide his confusion, he reached for the box of cigarettes on the side of the table. His fingers, feeling among them, were clumsy; his hand, stretched for the silver alcohol lamp, was unsteady. As he bent to the flame, the cigarette between his lips, Blatch shot a glance at him, piercingly sharp and sly.
The tip caught, bloomed into a fiery glow. Adamson took a deep inhalation, blew out a long thread of smoke, and said:
“I certainly have, Mr. Blatch. She seems to me a very unusual person.”
He would like to have said more, to have broken out into praise of her, but it was too soon. He did not know what she felt, did not want to declare himself as a suitor for Mary Harmon till he was surer of his ground. Through the cigarette smoke, he looked at Blatch and saw him sipping his coffee, over the cup’s rim his somber, animal eyes fixed on space. Then the cup came to rest on the saucer with a clear tinkle, and silence fell.
Silences were habitual between them. In the four years of Adamson’s residence, he had become so used to them that they passed unnoticed, filled with his thoughts. This one, however, contained an element of constraint, roused in the young man a vague unease, as if its veil lay, deceptively quiet, over troubled currents. He found himself disturbed by the thin, smothered noises from the street; he cleared his throat, and the sound ripped the stillness with a jagged tear. He wanted to start out, gayly and debonairly, on a new subject, and could think of nothing to say, his brain numbed, his thoughts scattered. Blatch suddenly pushed back his chair and rose, breaking the spell. With one hand on the table, he surveyed his companion over the candle shades, slightly smiling, suave and benign.
“My dear boy, I thank you again for your efforts in my behalf. Through them and other favors—I recognize you less as a secretary than a friend. In my time I’ve collected a good many things—beautiful and rare—but not friends, as you know. I’ll wish you good night.”
Adamson spent the rest of the evening in the library trying to work, but pausing at intervals to think over these words. They intrigued him, for he had never before been addressed by Blatch in this manner—thanked, commended on occasion, but never so frankly offered the hand of fellowship. Were the Harmon children, with the memories they had evoked, melting the shell of Blatch’s bitterness, or was he growing old, breaking up, his steely fiber disintegrating to a softness that was decay?
Adamson’s suite was at the back of the house and, walking down the passage to it, he passed the sitting room where Blatch generally spent his evenings alone. The door was open, and the young man had a glimpse, vivid as a picture, of his employer sitting by a shaded lamp playing solitaire. A flood of light lay over the table and along the top of his head, turning the smooth gray hair to a silvery crest. He was not looking at the cards, but, with his small, knotty hands outspread on the table edge, was staring into the shadows of the room. Slightly hunched, his fingers separated like claws, his head sunk into his collar, he had a look of tranced, breathless brooding.
Adamson passed on, carrying the impression on his inner vision like a photograph, conscious that the man, in his huddled pose with his ruminant stare, looked like some animal, some half-human animal—for the moment he could not think which one it was. Then it came to him—a monkey. He had noticed the resemblance before, but never so clearly—the wrinkled forehead, the bright, wistful eyes, the intent expression, which was at once melancholy and malign.
Near his own door, he encountered Tom issuing from Blatch’s bedroom. Tom was an old man, nearly seventy, tall and large-boned, round-shouldered now, his once sandy hair streaked with white. Years in the employment of a master he served with the devotion of the antique world had transformed him from the rough-and-ready Irishman into the quietly efficient, unobtrusively competent head of the household. His manner was impersonally respectful, subdued to a mild deference, matching the invariable secretive stolidity of his face. This had a bleached look, the skin’s pallor accentuated by large brown freckles, the lips, cracked and dry, closing with difficulty over prominent teeth. It seemed as if all color and individuality had been trained out of him by a quarter century with Blatch, but every one in the house knew him as a power. Adamson had long ago discovered that there was fire and humor under his dry crust, and had come to recognize an element of nobility in the silent old servant.
At sight of the young man, he stopped and spoke in a low voice:
“Did you see himself as you passed?”
“Yes, but not to speak to. I just went by.”
“He was playin’ solitaire, maybe?”
“Yes, that’s what he was doing—at least he had the cards laid out.”
Tom nodded, dropping his eyes to the floor, where they rested in a vaguely troubled stare.
“He’s been at it again lately, every evening, far into the night. He hasn't done that now for years.”
Adamson saw that the old man was worried and wondered at solitaire being a cause for disturbance.
“Why shouldn’t he play it? Do you mean it indicates something—that he’s upset in any way?”
Tom raised his eyes, slowly drawing his long upper lip over his teeth.
“When you say ‘upset,’ you’ve got the right word. When he’s easy, jogging along comfortable, he doesn’t want the cards; he reads.”
“Then he isn’t easy?”
The old man turned toward him with a sudden movement.
“Mr. Adamson, he hasn’t been easy since the Harmon children came. They’ve what you might call churned him up; he’s done things he hasn’t done for twenty-five years. It’s the past, sir. They’ve brought it back to his mind. I wish they’d stayed where they were.”
Adamson couldn’t second this; the world had changed its face for him since the Harmon children had come. He thought Tom might be getting crotchety, objecting to any change in the smooth routine.
“Don’t you think, in the end, it may be a good thing—give him an interest that he needs?”
“That might be a good thing, but they won't give it to him. It’s memories they bring, Mr. Adamson, and that’s bad for him. He’s not himself, sir; he’s changed. This solitaire! Years ago, when we started on the travels, he’d play it for hours, all night—in the ship’s cabin, by the fire with the wild beasts roarin’ round us in the jungle. He couldn’t fix his mind on anything then; he can’t fix it now.”
There was a moment’s silence, broken by Adamson:
“I wouldn’t worry about it, Tom. We'll be going to Hinterland soon. That always puts him in good shape.”
“Yes, and maybe it'll pass. God knows I hope so! I hate to see it. It brings back days I hate to remember.”
“Of course it'll pass; it’s only a phase. He'll get used to the Harmons and then forget—take them as an amusement which will be an excellent thing for him.”
“It would, sir, the best thing.” He made a move to go, then looked at Adamson in hesitating question. “It’s not my business to bother you, sir, but the young people coming so strange and unexpected took me like a shock. I’d never have told you if it hadn’t been for that, but I was knocked out with the surprise of it. I’m not so young as I was, and for the time that’s left me, I’ve got to take care of himself the way I’ve done for twenty-five years.”
Adamson smiled, though his heart was touched.
“You did just right, Tom. We’re partners in the same enterprise—taking care of himself. If you’re anxious about anything, come to me and we'll talk it over. But I’m not looking for any trouble and don’t you. It was bound to give him a jar for a while, but when you get to Hinterland, you'll see he'll calm down. Good night.”
CHAPTER V.
Though no one but the Harmons and Gaynes had been invited to the tea party, the house was flower-decked as for a festival. Such entertainment as Blatch had offered them had always been enhanced with these ceremonial touches, as if to pay the last fine compliment to their humble state. His manner added to the impression. While he was wont to meet his own world with a disconcerting hauteur, to the Harmons he was all gentle courtesy, so frankly glad to see them, so devoid of formality, that Adamson recalled what Tom had said of his once being genial and jolly. The warmth of his welcome extended even to Gaynes, who, thus encouraged, lost his cautious deference and became almost swaggering.
There was no swagger about the Harmons. In the hushed, splendid setting they moved gingerly, looking small and shabby in their rusty black. Lottie and Frank showed a tendency to cling together, listening respectfully to their host’s remarks. They never could feel at home with him or in the place, and they found it exceedingly irksome to award him the attention they would like to have given to their surroundings.
Mary alone was herself, unshaken in some innate stability of poise, which made her always. sure, always unabashed. Adamson, watching her, thought she moved in a plane above the material, maintained her being in the clear heights of spirit. Wherever she was, she would harmonize, because she had no disturbing sense of self. She was as serenely simple among the rich man’s grandeurs as in her own apartment, her manner to Blatch as free from self-consciousness as it was to the little maid Lucia.
“It’s only soul that’s real to her,” the lover thought. “She doesn’t see bodies.”
After a wandering tour at Blatch’s heels, pausing in solemn groups to listen to him as if he were the custodian of a museum, they passed into the picture gallery. Adamson had hoped here to have a word with Mary, but Blatch took her under his wing, drawing her away to halt before his favorite pictures. The secretary found himself with Lottie and Frank on his hands, Gaynes moving about studying the canvases with the air of a connoisseur.
Lottie, dropped on a velvet settee, followed him with guarded glances.
Lottie, dropped on a velvet settee, followed him with guarded glances. She thought he had comported himself gallantly, had noted with a proprietor’s approval his debonair assurance. She wished that the others would go and that he and she could have a jolly time here alone, commenting on the pictures, giggling together. When Adamson addressed her, she moved her eyes with a startled quickness and gave a vacant smile, then remembered her feet in their low-heeled pumps and cotton stockings and tucked them under the settee.
Blatch and Mary had stopped before a picture, hot with sun and color. It was his Fortuny, and they fell into talk of Spain, where the Harmons had lived for some years. She grew animated, her memories flashing back to brilliant days under such cobalt skies among such leathern, sun-browned hills, in antique, high-walled towns. He had never before heard her speak in this way, reveal her response to the beauty that was all he now loved, and he listened nodding in surprised approval.
“You and I ought to be good friends,” he said. ‘We worship the same gods. We have a higher vision than the mass—have eyes where it is blind.”
Her glance met his with a flash.
“Isn't it strange? It makes you feel so solitary sometimes. You see things that are lovely and wonderful and you want to share your thrill with some one, and there’s no one who cares or understands.”
“Have you been solitary?”
She gave a little deprecating shrug.
“Oh, not really. I only meant in that way—people not liking what you do. After a while, you keep your thrills to yourself.”
“Those among whom you’ve lived have not thrilled with you?”
It was a question, and as a question, it contained no criticism of the dead. But she was discomfited in finding an answer that would explain and not draw any slightest shade of perfection from those whose memories were sacred.
“I can’t say that, but my people were so occupied; there were so many practical matters always coming up. And my parents were so engrossed in each other—and in us—that they had no time and no enthusiasm for anything else. They responded to beauty that way—the best way.”
There was a slight pause. Then he said musingly:
“You're not like them.”
“Oh, not at all,” she answered in quick negation. “They were both so handsome. You know. You saw them when they were young.”
“I didn’t mean in looks alone. I meant in character.”
She lifted her chin and eyed him, almost saucily, in smiling challenge. She was not in the least afraid of him, had felt at ease from their first meeting, knew none of the timidities of Frank and Lottie. It was as if he and she shared some mutual bond of kind and comprehension, deep calling unto deep.
“How can you tell about my character? You’ve only known me since April.”
“My dear young lady, I’m an old man and I’ve spent my life observing, standing back from the procession looking on. It’s sharpened my faculties, made them very keen. No, you’re not like either of them. Now the younger ones—Lottie and Frank—are. They’re like your mother.”
She nodded; it was true, beyond contesting. But why, if it were, should she feel a slight cloud obscure the moment’s brightness? There was surely nothing in the words to suggest it—it must be her own imagining—but nevertheless it seemed to her that there was a faint, veiled hint of disparagement in his tone. She looked up, met his melancholy, considering eyes—and remembered. If he had been an unsuccessful suitor, there might still be a residue of bitterness left.
They gathered in the library for tea, Blatch asking Mary to officiate at the table where the urn and service were set. As she took her place, the others stood about, their talk lively and gay, the early embarrassment gone. Blatch was in high spirits, rallying Lottie on her rosy looks, encouraging Frank to a boyish expansiveness. They grew almost noisy, Gaynes coming to the fore with a loud laugh, his swagger emphasized. Adamson wondered at Blatch; he had seen him wither with a glance a far less assertive guest.
Thinking over it afterward, Adamson decided that Blatch, with the great surprise in his mind, had directed the conversation. At any rate, it gravitated to summer vacations and a picture of the heated term in New York. The Harmons had listened in open amazement when Blatch had sprung the surprise—an invitation to Hinterland for July and August.
There was a breath-held moment, a pause while they grasped it, then thanks, gratitude, acceptance. Frank was effusive; Lottie stammered inarticulate, like a child stricken to stuttering delight by an unexpected toy. Adamson saw Mary, her cup upheld on its way to her lips, transfixed in wonder. She had not looked for it, but Frank’s manner, with its over-emphasis, told Adamson that the boy had; the light of a goal achieved was in his face. And then came the anticlimax, the coping stone that fell on the young man’s contentment like a brick on a flower—Gaynes was included, Gaynes must come, too.
Adamson had an instant impression of them like people in a tableau—Blatch’s look bent gracious on the doctor; the triumphant flash of Frank’s glance as it sought his friend; Lottie, very still, gazing at the floor; Mary putting her cup down, pushing it into place on the tray, moving the china with careful fingers, her face hardened as if a frosty breath had congealed its tissues.
Adamson had to fight to control his angry amazement, drew back from them, unable to trust his voice. A confused racing of resolutions ran through his head—the desperate resort of expostulation when he got Blatch alone, an excuse invented to cancel the invitation. He tried to think of something, staring into the flower-filled fireplace, hearing Blatch behind him describing Hinterland—its wild isolation, the great log house he called his camp, the long trip into the silences of the North. Their questions crowded in, eager, interspersed with comments. They would follow their host; he wanted to be there to welcome them. Then came advices about clothes, about luggage; he would send them some light trunks which could be carried in the canoes; transportation would be given them with full directions, It was all to be done en prince.
They left in the mellow end of the afternoon, the motor waiting at the curb to take them home. Their farewells dropped gay on the soft air, a lingering trail of happy phrases, Blatch answering from the doorway. They could hardly wait till the car had started to let their bottled ecstasies break out. Mindful of the men on the front seat, they leaned together, their heads close, low-toned sentences crossing like the play of swords. Lottie curled an arm inside Mary’s, squeezing up against her, babbling about clothes, and Frank, his neck craned out of his collar, clawed at her knee. If she was not equally exhilarated, they didn’t care. She mightn’t like Gaynes’ being included—and that was what made her so glum; the only fact they saw was that the great hope had fructified. They were going! They were launched on an adventure of which this passage in the motor, bearing them forward with a rich, luxurious smoothness, was as a prelude, the beginning of a progress that was to lead on to ever-augmenting delights.
Blatch came back from the doorway to find Adamson in the library. The young man, with time to consider, had realized that any protest was as much as his position was worth, but his face showed a gloomy abstraction. If his employer noticed it, he gave no sign, pausing at the chimneypiece to look at an orchid upheld in a slender vial of iridescent glass. Its blossoms hung in a delicate cluster, speckled and patterned, like a group of evilly beautiful winged creatures come to rest on the branch.
He murmured an admiring phrase, touched the blooms with a caressing finger, and said:
“Well, that part of the summer program is satisfactorily arranged. You will see about their tickets, please, and give them full instructions.”
He took a chair and, drawing it near the hearth, dropped into it, his eyes moving over the banked gray-blue hydrangeas that filled the fireplace. Further directions for the trip occupied him for some minutes. He went over it in detail, thought of small comforts. The journey was always made as smooth for his guests as the country traversed would permit, and it was evident that he wanted the Harmon children to do it as luxuriously as thought and money could devise.
The instructions being long, Adamson sat at the desk jotting down notes. When he had finished, he looked up for more orders. There was a pause before Blatch spoke:
“You no doubt wonder at my invitation to the doctor?”
Adamson was surprised. It was not Blatch’s custom to call attention to his perverse actions. The chance was propitious, and the young man answered:
“I certainly was, after what I told you.”
“If you hadn’t told me, I probably wouldn’t have asked him. But forewarned is forearmed. Knowing what I do, there need be no apprehensions about Doctor Gaynes. And why should there be any? Possibly a touch of free, open-air life, a closer contact with nature, may have a beneficial effect upon him. He looks too city-bred. Health and morals have an intimate connection.”
“Undoubtedly,” said the young man dryly. “But, nevertheless, I’m sorry your altruism went so far.”
Blatch turned from his contemplation of the hydrangeas. He was smiling, and the smile deepened his wrinkles, made his face look like a grinning gnome’s in a grotesque carving.
“Not all altruism, my dear Adamson; you give me too much credit. I figure in it. This young man’s a doctor and, I should say, by no means a fool. Couple that with something you know of me.” He touched himself lightly on the chest. “My heart—a troublesome organ. Two summers ago, you may remember an attack I had and a twenty-four-hours wait while Gabriel went to Norcross for a doctor.”
Adamson remembered well. It had been a grisly experience; he and Tom had thought Blatch dying.
“I told you afterward, Mr. Blatch, that it would be wisdom to have a doctor at Hinterland. I’m glad you’ve decided to take one. But why Gaynes? There are numberless men of experience and ability who would have jumped at the chance.”
The other shrugged.
“Yes, and that’s the kind I hate—important, watchful, full of restraints and warnings. I couldn’t stand it; I must be king in my own castle. Gaynes suits me better. I can keep him in his place.”
Adamson made no answer. He knew the futility of argument and, smothering a sigh, took up the practical matter of their own departure.
“I’d better see about the rest of the transportation to-morrow. As I understand it, we go on Saturday, the servants on Thursday or Friday.”
“Thursday, I’ve told Tom. I leave on Saturday.”
The accented pronoun struck the young man’s ear, and he looked up. Blatch had turned again to the fireplace, his shoulders hunched, his head drooped forward.
“When do I go?” Adamson asked. “In advance with the household?”
“You don’t go at all.”
Amazed, Adamson stared at the motionless, unrevealing back:
“Don’t go! You mean remain here in town?”
Blatch gave a stifled sigh as if the subject wearied him. Then, his pose unchanged, he said quietly:
“I’ve decided to dispense with your services. I don’t need a secretary.”
The young man rose, unbelieving. He never, in his darkest imaginings, had foreseen such a possibility. The words fell from his lips in the stammered phrases of bewilderment:
“But—but—I don’t understand, sir. You’ve never suggested such a thing. What’s the reason? Have I—er—done—have I neglected anything—made any mistakes? Have I——”
The other interrupted him with an irritated gesture:
“Of course not, my dear boy, nothing of that kind. No necessity to go into it. It’s as I say—I don’t need a secretary. My man of business and myself—— I want nothing more.”
Adamson was staggered. Anger at so sudden and sweeping a dismissal was overwhelmed by astonishment.
“You do need me,” he blurted out. “You can’t get on without some one to do my work.”
Blatch turned with a catlike suddenness, a flash of fierce authority in his eyes.
“Leave that to me. I know what I need and I’m going to get it.” The flash subsided as quickly as it had come. He settled himself more comfortably, hitching his chair toward the young man, his face charged with a kindliness so different from its expression of a moment before that Adamson could not believe he had seen aright. “For some time I’ve been contemplating this move. It’s for your sake. You're too good to waste on such work as this; you must find a wider field, match your energies with your peers. You're shriveling here in this dead backwater, with the great current of life sweeping by. I do a wrong to keep you. I'll help you to your proper place, be the lever that pushes you upward. But you must get there—you must go.”
He rose, turning to look again at the orchid, his glance lingering on its fantastic petals as if reluctant to leave them.
“Mr. Blatch,” said Adamson, “if this is your reason, I have the right to put in my objection to it. Suppose I find it to my liking, to my interest, to remain here with you. Suppose, for the sake of certain advantages I get here, I am willing to forego those greater chances. And that’s my position. Considering which, isn’t it better for both of us to let things stay as they are?”
Blatch moved to the doorway. He paused there, thought a moment, then answered:
“No. I came to this decision some time ago, and I’m resolved to abide by it. Your term of employment will expire when I leave. During the rest of the summer—till October—your salary will be paid. Employ that time in deciding what line you want to follow. Any influence that I may have, any assistance that I can offer, will be yours to the fullest measure of my gift. But I want no more reference to the subject of your going, no talk, no arguments. The matter is closed between us.”
CHAPTER VI.
A few days later, Adamson called on Mary Harmon. He brought with him the tickets for the trip and the complete directions—a first night in Toronto, a second in the lumber town of Norcross, from there to St. Hilaire, the frontier settlement whence the last lap of the journey was made by water. Their guides and canoes would be waiting. If the weather was inclement, they were to stay over till it cleared. There was a wretched little hostelry in St. Hilaire where Blatch kept a suite of rooms for such contingencies. It was all very full and explicit; Adamson had typed it from his notes.
He had made an appointment and found Mary awaiting him in the parlor, shorn of its intimate belongings, as a tenant had been found for the flat. It was late afternoon, and she was alone, sewing by the front window. He thought she looked tired and smaller than ever, a slip of a woman, her body, against the support of the chair, slim and limp as a piece of dark drapery thrown across it.
He explained his errand, and she listened, now and then murmuring an appreciation of Blatch’s thoughtfulness. Then he gave her the page of typewriting, and she conned it over, her head bent. Adamson’s eyes touched her profile and slid to her hand, brown against the white paper. It looked like a child’s, the fingers pointed and delicate. He thought of taking it, holding it between his, pressing his lips to it. She asked a question, and he heard his voice husky, stirred, and shifted his glance to the floor. Now, with his position gone, he was more than ever pledged to silence. It was not the man’s rôle to speak till he could provide for the woman he wanted.
But there was other matters on his mind that he had to tell her. She must know something of the doctor; not all—it was too ugly a story for such ears—but sufficient to put her on her guard and to pass on to Frank. He was thinking how to begin when she dropped the paper to her lap and said:
“It’s perfectly wonderful, every detail thought out. Mr. Blatch is like a genie in ‘The Arabian Nights.’ There’s just one thing I wish he hadn’t done—asked Dr. Gaynes.”
So he told her—a sketchy outline, but enough to make her understand. She listened with frowning brows and as he concluded said:
“Thanks for telling me. I felt it without anything definite to go on—something about his manner, something false. It’s been hard for us, this coming into a new country with everything so different. Hard for the younger ones, I mean. They want companions and they don’t know how to choose them.”
It was evident that the news had disturbed her, and he hated to see it, to think of her, and her unfriended ignorance, having to cope with such problems. He would like to have taken her then and there into his arms, bound and girdled her with their protection, put the bulwark of his body between her and every trouble. Instead, he had to sit where he was, talking like an elderly acquaintance, guarding even his glances.
“I’ve told you,” he said, “because I felt you had to know. Gaynes oughtn’t to come here or be the companion of your brother.”
“No—no—of course not. I’ve spoken to Frank about him several times. But he laughs at me—says I don’t understand men. He’s so young, Frank, only a child, and he thinks Doctor Gaynes is so brilliant and——” She stopped, caught by a sudden thought. “But Mr. Blatch—doesn’t he know? Surely you’ve told him?”
Adamson had to explain, and it was not easy; he had to say more of his employer than he thought fitting even to Mary Harmon. He laid stress on the heart weakness, and when she asked the obvious question—why hadn’t a more suitable person been found?—could only fall back on a reiteration of Blatch’s peculiarities. He saw that she was puzzled, trying to understand a nature at once so despotic and so perverse. It showed him the situation from a stranger’s viewpoint, baffling in its contradictions, and rewoke a wish that had risen at intervals since the tea party. It rose now, stronger than ever, finding expression in quick, unpremeditated words:
“I wish you weren’t going.”
She turned on him, her long eyebrows arched in amused astonishment.
“Why, Mr. Adamson, what a very uncomplimentary remark!”
He tried to excuse it and blundered about—he’d expressed himself badly, it wasn’t what he meant to say, and so forth and so on. To his fear that she would take him for a boor was added a discomfiting sense of disloyalty to Blatch. He looked so uncomfortable that she came to his rescue, a little mischievously:
“Perhaps you’re afraid Mr. Blatch will have too much on his hands with such a party. But we'll be good. We won't bother him. As for Doctor Gaynes—now I know, it’s all right. I'll break his influence over Frank, and you'll help me. He’ll listen to you; he admires you immensely.”
“Unfortunately I won’t be there.”
She gave a startled ejaculation and turned to him. The dismay in her face was so moving that the young man averted his eyes, those words he must not say pressing for utterance. Stillness rested between them, a stillness under which emotion swelled like the crest of a wave. She broke it, the pained surprise of her face finding an echo in her voice:
“But why? You always go. You told me so—Mr. Blatch told me so.”
He had to explain that, too. While he did it, she sat, motionless and erect, a dark shape, her head showing in blurred outline against the oblong of the window. That her spirit sank as he spoke was plain; she did not have to say that she was disappointed. His dismissal had been one of the ugliest shocks of his life; now it shifted to a new adjustment, gained a vital value, for it showed her as ranged on his side. Even if she did not love yet, she cared. It was in her glance, kindled to a hurt partisanship, in her comments, which revealed a first disapproval of Blatch.
Adamson found himself in the unexpected position of defending his chief. It was only another evidence of the old man’s thought for other people, his invariable desire to help them on. She wouldn’t have it, gave forth murmurous disagreements—it was too drastic; he could have waited till the autumn; no one had a right to turn off a trusted employee without warning.
“And you explain all the odd things he does by saying he’s so eccentric. That seems to me too lenient, making excuses for him as if he were a child or a lunatic.”
The young man was so filled and running over with gladness that he laughed.
“You're not fair to us or to him, When you know him better, you'll see. Under that hard surface there are splendid things, big and generous. Of course he is difficult and he is queer.” He remembered the cause of Blatch’s queerness, and his fluency suffered a check. She was listening expectantly, and he had to go on: “Years ago, he had a long illness and a hard time financially. He began as an artist, you know, and had a fierce struggle. Then came the money falling from the sky. It was too much of a good thing, the horn of plenty spilling out an avalanche, and it showed up people in a way that embittered him, made him shrink into his shell. He’s proud and highstrung, and he reacted—well, the way you see.”
“Yes. I can understand. Everybody, because you’ve got money, suddenly smiling on you—it would make you hard and bitter. Doctor Gaynes told me about the fortune. It’s a strange story, like a novel.”
Adamson could not resist a question:
“Did you never hear it till Gaynes told you?”
She leaned toward him with a little movement of confidence.
“Mr. Adamson, I’ll tell you the truth—I knew almost nothing about Mr. Blatch till I came here. Of course he was a friend of my father’s and mother’s. I do remember hearing them speak of him, but very little. You see they, with their fuller life—children, and all the moving about, and money troubles in the last years—they’d grown away from things here. I think they d almost forgotten their early days in this country.”
She looked into his face to see if he understood, had accepted the excuse she was offering for her parents’ dereliction. Adamson then realized that it was as Denby had suspected—Alice Brunel had buried the past, had hidden from her daughter, possibly from her husband, the part that Blatch had played in her girlhood.
When he rose to go, the sky over the houses opposite was flushed with sunset. From the walls, the mirrors caught its glow, reflecting a lucent brightness, and along the bared parquet it cast a gleaming polish. But in the narrow hall, between a line of shut doors, it was almost dark. The hall door was the last, and he walked ahead, Mary’s step behind.
Echoing his, it struck on his ear light as a child’s, a soft tread that followed, relying on him, confident of his leadership. For some reason unknown to himself, the fancy caused a resurgence of his former instinct against her going. It rose with an insistence so sudden and imperative that he was startled. He wanted to urge her to give it up, to stay there, to stay near him, where he could watch over her. He told himself that it was a selfish desire for her presence and, turning at the door, saw her face, a pale oval above the blackness of her dress, and the shine of her upraised eyes. He held out his hand in farewell, felt hers inside it, small and soft, and pressed it, swallowing the words that would have begged her not to go. What he substituted were the conventional good-bys of the polite young man to the well-bred young lady and then, stumblingly:
“It’s—it’s—too bad I shan’t be there. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I knew you were going. but in the autumn we'll meet again. And it would be awfully nice if you’d write me—just a line now and then—to let me know how things are going at Hinterland.”
She said she would and then murmured something—it sounded apologetic—about her letters; and before she had finished, her voice died away, her upraised glance shifting from his. But he had no position, no position. The two words ran like an accompaniment, harsh and dominating, to a sweet and thrilling strain. Not yet, not till he was able to take care of her. He dropped her hand. The only way to keep from speaking was to go.
She went slowly back into the parlor and stood there, her arms fallen to her sides, her eyes gazing before her. Her face looked almost blank, a slight smile on her lips. She felt a sense of still contentment, as if she had entered a place whence all that had ever troubled her was forever shut out. An upwelling of happiness rose from some inmost center of being, making her suddenly aware of the beauty of life, that she was a part of it, had slipped into adjustment with an infinite, encompassing harmony.
CHAPTER VII.
Life at Hinterland was even more entrancing than the Harmon children had expected. The journey, carrying them farther and farther from the peopled ways, penetrating deeper into the North’s solemn beauty, had been a progress of unfolding wonderments and delight. When, after the last day’s long canoe trip, they emerged upon the lake, held in the evening hush, its farther shores lost beyond the horizon’s rim, they were awed, feeling that they had broken upon the primeval world.
Hinterland lay on the lake’s edge in a clearing, groups of pine trees guarding its entrance, the forest dark at its back. From the shore, its wharfs extended into water that, until Blatch’s coming, had known only the light pressure of canoes. His motor boats had brought the first note of a new, mechanical age into these virgin solitudes, woke echoes never roused before with the panting of their engines.
The house was a large, rambling log building, furnished like the lodge of a frontiersman, heads of elk and caribou on the walls, fur rugs on the board floors. Above the wide-mouthed hearths, where birch wood blazed at night, hung the long-barreled rifles and powderhorns of the voyageurs and coureurs des bois who had once ranged the wilderness in the service of the great company. On the upper story were a series of great chambers fitted with an effect of rude simplicity which was only a mask for a carelessly contrived comfort.
The clearing was extensive—rock and root had been blasted out with dynamite—turfed about the house and extending on its outer edges into a natural wildness of moss and bracken. Here and there tents were pitched, outdoor shelters and resting places, each furnished with a couch of sapin boughs, layer of twigs on layer of twigs, the whole topped by a pile of scarlet cushions. Against this background of studied roughness moved a throng of men, matching it in their swarthy picturesqueness, guides, voyageurs, Indians. They had been called from their hardier occupations to the employment of the rich man, lavishly paid to add to the ease of his summer playtime.
To the Harmons it was all wonderful, amazing, unlike anything they had ever known. Each day’s happening was a new adventure; even the nights were magical, lit with the pale arc of the aurora. They fished and walked, boated and paddled. They went on picnics, a string of canoes behind the launch, skirting the shore till they came to a river, then, in the canoes, sliding up the gleaming channel. Large birds floated across the sky; the leap of a deer sounded from the underbrush; the silvery spring of a fish cracked the water’s mirror. Once they saw a facteur’s canoe going down through the chain of lakes from the Hudson Bay country beyond. It was long, manned by a line of men, the facteur, fat and red-faced, in the stern. The paddles rose and fell in rhythmic unison, the men with each stroke expelling their breath in a concerted whistling sound. The light craft shot like an arrow, ripping a tear across the glassy lake, with a crystal crumble at its bow and a crystal seam in its wake—barbaric, thrilling, a wild messenger from the mysterious North.
Mary, with a secret joy at her heart, had bloomed into a darkly glowing gypsy. Lottie spoke to her about it.
“You're really growing pretty,” she said, with the condescension of the acknowledged family beauty, and Mary could only blush and be pleased.
She wanted to be pretty now. At night, when she saw her face in the glass, with a dusky color in the cheeks and her eyes star-bright, she smiled back at it, unashamed of her vanity. She had had a short letter from Adamson and had replied with a long one, the thought of his answer running like a strain of music through the passing days. When it came, she read it in her own room, the door locked that no eye might spy on her telltale face and the trembling of her hands.
She had spoken to Frank about Gaynes, and, after all, up here in the open with plenty of exercise and amusement, Gaynes was not nearly as bad as he had been in town. He had toned down his patronizing swagger and was, on the whole, rather quiet and unobtrusive. Frank had received her warnings with irritation. She had no definite data to give, and he pounced on that, hiding the fact that Adamson’s being her informant had impressed him. In his heart he was beginning to have misgivings; “playing the game” had become exceedingly repellent to him. Blatch liked them all without any game being played, had been extraordinarily kind to them, was giving them the time of their lives—that was enough. If he wanted to do more, he could, but Frank wouldn’t play for it.
Gaynes had only once broached the subject, soon after they came, and the boy had flamed out into angry disgust; since when the doctor had said no more about it. But he had not been the same, less expansive, at times almost morosely preoccupied. Frank thought that it might indicate a change of heart, that he was beginning to see the bad taste, the indecency of it, and was properly repentant.
Lottie, viewing Gaynes from her own especial angle, noticed none of these changes. When he was with her, he was as he had been, the devoted betrothed. They had fewer chances of meeting than they had had in town. A ramble by the lake’s edge, an encounter in the hall, a moment of surreptitious whispering on the balcony, were the best they could snatch from days filled with amusements in which all shared. And Lottie, to her own surprise, was glad that it was so. The romance still had its glamour, but the fear of discovery was so omnipresent that it hung, an extinguisher, ever ready to descend and quench the glamour forever.
Also, a happening one afternoon, when the sky lowered and an excursion had been postponed, had frightened her to a desperate caution. She had been reading in one of the tents when Gaynes had joined her. Mary was indoors, Frank gone fishing, and Blatch talking to his men on the wharf. All accounted for, Gaynes had felt safe and, taking a seat beside her, launched, low-voiced, upon the pleasant business of courtship. It had been the first real interview they had had since their arrival, sentiment alternating with a practical survey of a future together. The girl’s guilty unease had vanished before the rainbow vision, and they had talked it back and forth, laughing the low laugh of lovers over their secret.
A step outside the tent, the faintest crack of a twig under a pressing foot, had struck them to silence, eye on eye. The girl had clutched at him, and, with a warning gesture, he had loosened her hold and tiptoed to the tent door. Blatch’s figure, the back toward him, was moving slowly away toward the house. If the step had been his, it was impossible that he had not heard.
He had loosened her hold and tiptoed to the tent door. Blatch’s figure, the back toward him, was moving slowly away toward the house.
Gaynes had turned back, pale under his tan, and gone to Lottie. Through the open flap, she had seen Blatch and was trembling like a leaf. Her scared eyes hung on him like a dog’s on its master, and he had to whisper reassurances—it was only one of the guides; they were passing back and forth all the time; Blatch had been going to the house. But he was alarmed, and Lottie was in terror. She forgot all about love, could think of nothing but Blatch telling Mary, of a dreadful scene, of the summer spoiled.
But it couldn’t have been Blatch, for nothing came of it. At dinner that evening, he was unusually merry and very attentive to Lottie. He harked back to the old subject of her resemblance to her mother, and they commented on it feature by feature, Lottie coming back to bloom and quiescence. But it took her several days to recover her poise, and she avoided Gaynes, kept even her eyes from looking his way. As the scare passed, she registered a vow to make him agree to her telling Mary, and then neglected doing it. It meant an argument, perhaps a quarrel, and they were having such a good time!
It was at this juncture that Mary’s horizon developed a first small cloud, She was uncomfortable about Blatch. He was keyed to a higher tension than he had been in town, showed an occasional rasped quickness of temper, an uncertainty of mood. Something was disturbing him, and she was afraid it might be their presence, the efforts he was making for their amusement. Her room was near his, and twice, waking in the depths of night, she had seen the light of his window falling across the darkness. She had attempted to ask him of his wakefulness and had been laughed away from the subject, seeing at once that it was distasteful to him. Then she had tried Tom, meeting him one evening in the upper hall. Was it usual for Mr. Blatch to stay awake till two and three in the morning? And she had told about the light.
The old man had glanced at her and then looked away, hitching his bent shoulders.
“He ain’t what you'd call a good sleeper,” he said dryly.
“But he isn’t like that all the time, is he? He couldn’t stand it. He'd break down.”
“No, miss, he’s more wakeful lately than he’s been in some years.”
“One would think he’d be better here, in the open air all day and with so much exercise.”
“Yes, miss, it would be what one might expect.”
The old man smoothed some clothes he carried over his arm. She could make nothing of his face, leathern dry and pale under its freckles.
“He doesn’t seem to like it spoken of.”
He looked at her quickly, the raised lids revealing eyes charged with warning.
“Oh, no, no, miss. Mr. Blatch never likes to be—er—well—what he’d call interfered with. Not that I’m saying so. It’s him—it’s his way of thinking. He’s a bit crusty about such things.”
She nodded, staring beyond him, and as she gazed, he shot a stealthy glance at her thoughtful face.
“I was wondering if we—so many people, young and sometimes noisy—bothered him, got on his nerves. But he says there are always visitors here in summer and a great deal going on.”
She shifted her eyes to him, anxiously questioning. He again hitched up his shoulders, looking past her down the hall.
“Yes, miss, there generally are. We've had many more here than we have now—a houseful last August.”
That was all she got out of Tom.
A few days after this, something occurred that still further increased her discomfort and that she mentioned in a letter to Adamson. She was beginning to feel sure that they had an ill effect upon Blatch and to figure in her mind about the advisability of shortening their visit. With Tom unapproachable, she thought Adamson could be relied upon to tell her the truth.
They had been on a picnic up one of the smaller rivers and were preparing to leave, the guides stamping out the fire and gathering up the baskets, the young men drawing the canoes to the landing place. Blatch’s especial guide was a half-breed called Gabriel, who had been in his service since Hinterland was built, a tall, spare man who wore a red bandanna tied over his head and small gold rings in his ears. He had the Indian characteristics of a noiseless tread and an imperturbably gravity, his face as darkly stolid as if cut out of stone. He knew no English, using the French patois and speaking only when the occasion demanded it. Blatch valued him above any of his outdoor staff and showed him a special favor.
Lottie, who had shared the host’s canoe, came sliding down the bank to get in. As she poised for the step, the guide, invariably sure-footed, slipped on the mud at the water’s edge, tilting the canoe, and Lottie was saved from a tumble into the stream only by clutching his shoulder. Her peals of laughter were cut short by the voice of Blatch, furious, unrecognizable. He poured forth a stream of French at the half-breed, his face contorted with rage, the paddle raised in his hand.
Her peals of laughter were cut short by the voice of Blatch, furious, unrecognizable. He poured forth a stream of stream of French at the half-breed, his face contorted with rage, the paddle raised in his hand.
It was a horrible moment. Mary thought he was going to strike the man and made a step forward. The outburst fell on their gayety disrupting as a thunderbolt. Lottie’s laughter was stilled as by a hand clapped on her mouth; on the shore beyond, the others stood stricken in gaping amaze. Gabriel seemed the least moved, looking at Blatch without anger, but with a set intentness of observation.
Then it was over; Blatch dropped the paddle and told Lottie to get in. She was too frightened to do anything but obey. As he turned to pick up a cushion, Mary saw that his face was darkly flushed and beaded with perspiration, but he offered no explanation or apology, hopping nimbly into his place in the bow. There was silence as the file of canoes dropped down the stream, everybody numbed by an overshadowing discomfort. Later on, when they tried to talk from boat to boat, their encountering eyes were full of a scared consciousness.
The next morning Mary wrote the letter to Adamson, and presently it was forgotten.
A few days later, at breakfast, Blatch proposed a new excursion, a trip across the lake to an old Hudson Bay Company’s fort on the opposite shore. This fort, of which they had already heard a good deal, was one of the features of the region. Its picture had figured in the New York papers—snapshots taken by guests, descriptive paragraphs beneath. It had been built in the declining days of the great company, occupied for a space, and then abandoned. Blatch had found it still solid under the assault of years, had bought and repared it, and now used it as a hunting lodge to which his house parties made week-end visits. No stay at Hinterland was complete without a few days spent in the fort, and the Harmons had been expectantly waiting for their turn to come.
It was a long run in the launch, and on the way Blatch entertained them with its history, built up on such fragmentary data as he had been able to obtain. French and English had fought under its walls; Indian attacks had held its garrison in siege. No one knew the tragedies it had witnessed, the deeds of heroism, unrecorded and forgotten, that had taken place within its grim inclosure.
“And now,” he said, “it has fallen upon peaceful days, become a bivouac of pleasure-seekers like ourselves. A good way to end—a violent heyday and then an old age devoted to the entertainment of youth and beauty—not unlike my own.”
As the boat drew near the place, he told the man at the helm to lay to near the wharf. They could see it from the water, as there was not time enough to land to-day and it was kept locked, the keys at Hinterland. The launch, with lessened speed, drew in toward a small pier and then stopped, Blatch rising with the extended hand of a showman.
The shore jutted out in a rounded promontory, a narrow neck in the rear joining it to the mainland. Close to the water’s edge, approached by a short flight of steps, the fort rose, a squat stone bulk, looming, flat-topped, from encircling trees. A wide doorway broke its façade, flanked by two windows, the glass showing behind bars. To the left, an outside staircase led to an upper door, smaller and sunk in the masonry of the wall not far below the jut of the roof. This door gave on an inner gallery, a feature of many of the old forts. Originally the whole place had been surrounded by a stockade, which had disappeared long ago and which Blatch had not restored, as it shut out the light. He had done a good deal to the inside, adjusting it to his purpose while retaining its original character; but they would see for themselves when they went there.
On the way home, he suggested the coming week-end for their visit. This was Thursday; they could go on Saturday, staying over till Monday or longer if they liked. He would go across himself to-morrow and open it for the servants, who would follow and make it ready. They could keep the servants or not as they chose; other parties of young people generally wanted to dispense with them—thought it more fun to wait on themselves, more like a real taste of the wild. Of course they didn’t want the servants, were clamorous about it, and he confessed a relief in the decision, as they were a good deal of bother and got in one’s way.
The next morning he sent them on a fishing trip in the large launch. He would take the dory with Gabriel, go over the fort, and open it. He saw them off, standing on the wharf’s end and waving his hand, and when they returned, he was there waiting for them. Lottie was full of anxious questions as to the condition of the fort. She seemed afraid something might have happened to it that unfitted it for occupancy. But he assured her that it was in excellent condition, just now in process of airing, to-morrow to be victualed for their coming.
That night after dinner, he put the finishing touch on their visit to Hinterland. It came upon them as a bolt from the blue, with little or no introduction, merely a call upon their attention to acquaint them with a matter he had been considering for some time.
“It may be a surprise to you,” he said, “I think it will be, though there have been signs of it—portents in the sky. But you, disinterested and guileless, have probably not seen them.”
They had no idea what was coming, even Frank, with the idea planted in his mind. And when they heard, they stood dumfounded. That day Blatch had made a new will, leaving his entire fortune, with the exception of a few bequests to employees, to the three Harmon children. Tom had already witnessed it, and Gaynes was asked to add his signature.
After they had gone upstairs, Frank and Lottie stole into Mary’s room. She could not get them out; they sat on the side of the bed, sparkling-eyed, crimson-cheeked, babbling, whispering.
She had some trouble in making them understand that being Blatch’s heirs did not mean a radical change of circumstances.
She had some trouble in making them understand that being Blatch’s heirs did not mean a radical change of circumstances. She would take nothing from him, not if he insisted; she would keep her independence, as they would theirs. Lottie wanted to know if being some one’s heir meant that you had to live in his house, and was relieved to hear that there was no such obligation. Frank, with a contrite gnawing in his conscience, said he hoped the old chap would live on for ages, and meant it.
It was past midnight when she pushed them out, still garrulous, hanging to the doorpost to exchange last whispers. When she was in bed, sleep refused to come, and she lay with a seething brain, her thoughts flying out like vibrations from a dynamo. Sitting up in the gray dawn to reach for her watch, she saw through the uncurtained pane the yellow gleam of light from Blatch’s window.
TO BE CONCLUDED IN THE SEPTEMBER NUMBER.