(From _The Century Magazine_)
Gideon extinguished the flame wherewith he had lit his pipe; he
dropped the match tidily behind the wallflowers, and looked about
him with quiet, but incredulous, joy. Standing at the door of the
cottage, his head was stooped a little beneath the lintel, partly
from actual necessity and partly in a courteous gesture of apology to
this exquisite scene in which only children or delicately formed and
tinted women might appear appropriate and untarnished. Above him the
freshness of the honey-colored thatch contrasted pleasantly with the
rose-purple of ancient brick; the watery sheen of the upper windows
reflected a few hanging strands of straw, like gilded seaweed observed
in the profundity of a wave. Inclosed by its clipped hedge, the garden
lay like a small square pool of flowers drawn together in concentrated
brightness, as if many larger and grosser gardens had been melted into
one and poured into this narrow space. Across the green a dew pond
reversed the sky to another pool, and permitted Gideon’s vision to
plumb without fatigue the utmost depth of the empyrean.
Gideon was a tall old man; his age was perhaps seventy. His face had
more of the falcon than the eagle in its lines; the beaked nose, the
bony setting of the large bright eyes, the hollowed cheek and temple,
were all carved and polished to a pattern sufficiently bold, but light
and restless and uneasy. His eyes were gray; his hair, which had once
been reddish, had now the faintly yellowed whiteness of flax; it rose
steeply to a crest above his brow. The garments which he wore hung
somewhat awkwardly upon his emaciation--an emaciation suggesting
austerity rather than weakness. The correct and shabby tweeds were
excellent in themselves, molded to fit with easy perfection the scene
and circumstance, but although they clothed with tolerable grace
the mortal form of Gideon, they did not fit his soul. You saw him
preferably in rusty black, with a hat remotely Spanish, and a cloak;
decidedly the soul of Gideon wore a black cloak. And indeed at this
very moment, within the cottage, Caroline was brushing just such a
cloak preparatory to putting it away forever with beautiful cakes of
gum camphor crumbling like soft and fragrant ice among its mysterious
folds.
Gideon turned and entered the cottage; the rooms appeared deliciously
chilled and shadowed by the green orchard to the east. Avoiding the
larger chamber, where Caroline whisked fantastic garments into the
bland, golden obscurity of a tulip-wood chest of drawers, he turned
into the kitchen and surveyed its cool and ordered colors with minute
approval. It was a room decorous and subtly bright, a place for the
concoction of junkets and cherry pies. Gideon sighed with pleasure; it
was a miracle that he, a lawless, bitter man, should have imagined this
room and made it. Of course there had been the skeleton ready to his
hand--the stone floor, the beams, the fireplace--but he had breathed
upon cold ashes, and they had flowered like a domestic rose.
Caroline had climbed the steep little stairs to the attic; he could
hear portmanteaus bumping about overhead like huge frolicsome beasts;
he had a sudden picture of the trim, pink-faced servant surrounded by
portmanteaus and kit-bags, labeled in dusty, barbaric scarlet, enormous
in the gloom. He reflected with satisfaction that all his papers
were already neatly pigeon-holed in his grandfather’s desk and his
mother’s boule cabinet; Caroline was merely rummaging among ponchos and
sombreros.
Slowly, with a fastidious, yet sensual, savoring of his delights,
Gideon entered the other room and strolled down its entire length,
stopping here and there to touch the lovely surface of wood perversely
satin-skinned, or velvet worn and rosy as immemorial lichen. Here
again was something more than human in the happy confluence of various
times and manners; he had seen these objects scattered in obscure
exile among the Victorian ineptitudes of his mother’s vast drawing
rooms, or lately huddled ignominiously in storage warehouses; he had
purchased some of them carelessly at the ragged ends of the earth, and
now they were gathered together under the green and glazing twilight of
the apple trees to make a miraculous whole. He had bought a cottage,
knocked down a partition or two, and engaged a certain number of
pantechnicon vans; he had expected the place to be comfortable and
rather absurd, and by some curious necromancy of chance it was grave
and exquisite. It was as if it had always been so, and his. Between
open windows, his desk was flooded by calm radiance.
As he fingered the firmly packed bundles of letters, bound with
pink legal tape, or more sentimentally confined by blue ribbons, he
considered the future with approval. It was eminently fitting; it was,
indeed, inevitable. How, save under conditions of the most shining
peace, could he hope to relax into that judicial clarity of mind so
necessary to his great project? The hardships, the astringent horrors
of his past career, had precisely steeled his hand to execution; it
now remained for a poor, but honest, gentleman to judge the culprits
before killing them, and Gideon was acutely aware of the propriety of
being equitable to begin with, if only to augment the pleasure of being
savage in the final sentence, the final act of revenge.
He stared retrospectively down the lurid vista of the last twenty-five
years, his mind’s eye blinking, for all its falcon look, in the full
chemical glare of recollection. There had been, quite literally,
singularly little sunlight in the vista, and that little had quivered
to a tropical intensity removed by several continents from this
subaqueous glimmer stained by apple trees. But mostly, he remembered,
things had happened at night; that was, perhaps, the reason he
had achieved so flattering and profitable a reputation as special
correspondent.
Special! Oh, very special indeed! For who but Gideon would have been
clever enough to be forever on the spot, the often bloody and unhealthy
spot, where things were happening at night? What other nocturnal
vigilance had so well observed, what vitriolic pen recorded, alike the
curious minutiæ and the vast apocalypse of life? From the beginning to
the end of that bewildering vista he had contrived to see the event
strangely, and to make the strangeness vivid by his words. Also, he
had advanced in wisdom and cunning; he recalled with contempt how
crudely he had daubed hell-fire and sanguine upon his earlier efforts.
In ninety-eight, when he had seen the _Maine_ intemperately uncurl a
million fronds of brilliance against the plushy dark, he could not,
telling the dreadful thing beheld, curdle the reader’s veins as now his
lightest, coolest whisper curdled them. The latest of all his writings,
the wry, amused account of Lenine stretched upon his crimson upholstery
under the great glass bell like some horrible wax flower, blooming
through unnatural, and electric, days, that was excellent, that was art.