And now, the quarter-century past, he was quit of restraints, of
delicacies and decencies; now he was free of galling secret vows
and public scruples. The very last of the Pennimans had died twenty
years ago in the person of old Joseph; Gideon had kept his promise to
Millicent, and Millicent herself had been dead for twenty-five years.
He was free to turn that intricate and fiery engine, his mind, upon the
people he had hated and had, for a measured space of time, striven to
forget. At first, after his wife’s death, he had acidly regretted his
promise to her--the promise given to the expiring appeal of her large
blue eyes, but never ratified by their wedded spirits in this world
or the vaguer one into whose ambiguities she had at once departed. He
had kept the promise because it was a promise; he had been totally
untrammeled by sympathy for its purpose or its beneficiaries. He had
spared the Pennimans for a score of years; he had not written a book,
no, not so much as an epitaph upon any of them until two decades had
yellowed the latest of their tombs. It had been a hellish bore, but
now he was glad he had refrained. The long and lenten abstinence from
revenge had but given edge to his appetite and sharpened his powers to
austere perfection.
Gideon drew a dozen slim and pointed pencils from a drawer of the desk;
upon its dark-amber surface he placed a formidable pile of copy paper.
The book loomed before his happy contemplation, tremendous, Protean,
monstrous, yet alluring. A book, but not alone a book; a mighty chase,
a dexterous unmasking, a trial, and an execution. And Gideon, at once
Justice incarnate and the instrument of Justice, Gideon must be both
judge and executioner. The book was to be a headsman’s ax, savage,
medieval, elegant, and efficient. Then, picturing a row of Penniman
faces upon the spikes of Temple Bar, Gideon smiled a slight abstemious
smile.
Apart from fancies, however charming, the facts were these; he reviewed
them swiftly, leaning back luxuriously in a chair whose polished curves
were as velvet to his neuralgic bones. The book was a debt to his own
soul, long overdue, heavy with accretion of interest. He had waited,
for Millicent’s darling and ridiculous sake, until all kith and kin
of hers were moldered into complete indifference. She had desired to
shield them from anger and annoyance, for surely their fatted, gelded
souls were incapable of pain; she had interposed her threadbare little
body between their torpor and his vengeance. Very well; it had been so,
but now he would remember it all, and set it down, and verily the page
should shrivel beneath the fire of his revelation. Though they skulked
in their sepulchers, shrouded in this their last cowardice, he would
burn them out of oblivion; the flame of their destruction should ascend
forever, purified and fervent, sweet in the nostrils of the brave. He
would tell the tale; he would release that holy indignation which for
so long had made his heart a fever.
Milly--that foolish nickname wherein her family, with characteristic
impertinence, had clothed the golden pallor of her girlhood! If Gideon
pronounced her name, he enriched the vowels with a foreign inflection
which made it more Melisande than Millicent. That was her proper
appellation, that long soft veil of sound, fitting her sallow-flaxen
beauty with an enduring garment.
She, who had lain so long asleep in his heart, should be brought forth
once more into the wide, bright chamber of his mind; he would look
at her in the unpitying glare of that illumination. She would stand,
willowy and disarming, lovely and ineffectual, beside the solid, stolid
forms of her murderers, the Pennimans. Gideon would look at them all;
the Pennimans would tremble and grow pale, they would even grow thin
perhaps; Millicent would smile. It would not be the smile of her later
days, painted narrow and colorless by despair; it would be the smile of
the beginning, of hope and casual courage and unconsidered joy. Gideon
ground his teeth, thinking how the Pennimans had destroyed her gaiety
and trust. She had loved her father and mother; she had even loved the
unspeakable Ambrose, with his long nose and liquid, languid eyes; by
love she had been broken and undone.
Of course they had opposed the match; they were obstructive by instinct
and conviction, and Gideon, who had refused to be a barrister in order
to write for the lesser journals, was sufficiently above them in family
and below them in fortune to irritate their every prejudice. His wit
inflamed their mental tissues like cayenne pepper; his tongue was gall
and vinegar. They resented his height and were half afraid of his
hair, which was never properly brushed; he seemed an enigma designed
to insult them; his doing could not be other than wrong, but his mere
being was the radical error. Gideon knew that, and the reflection
soothed him; it meant that he had always, even without trying, done his
best to please them: his best must always fail with the Pennimans, and
he was glad he had not tried too hard. Millicent had tried too hard,
and, in foredoomed endeavor, been destroyed.
He had been a strange son-in-law for the Pennimans; he had fluttered
that dove-cote with a vengeance. Fat pigeons they were, and Ambrose
with the melting gaze of a turtle above his little waistcoat’s curve.
And Millicent among them, white and fluttering, with her perpetual
olive branch: she was truly a dove!
Without the Pennimans, pecking and obese, how far might they not have
flown together, Gideon and Millicent, the falcon and the dove! God
knew she had always wanted to be free; God had known it all along,
in fact, and that was Gideon’s quarrel with God, second only to his
quarrel with the Pennimans. For the Deity, frequently invoked by that
pious family, had apparently been moved by their flatteries rather than
by Gideon’s dignified silence; God had not saved Millicent even at the
last minute: he had, by allowing her to die, given her back to the
Pennimans. Gideon, who had never believed in God, found this impossible
to forgive; in his indignation he realized that he was a Christian.
The Pennimans, outrageous to the last, had always blamed him for his
wife’s death; they had pecked her into shreds while he was cynically
examining the Spanish-American War. They had not even taken the
trouble to cable news of her illness; he had returned to find her _in
extremis_. Gideon was frantic; the Pennimans were sorrowful and mildly
complacent. They expressed surprise at his reappearance, and disgust at
what they were pleased to term his neglect. Millicent had, apparently,
been killed by the absence of a husband whose presence had always,
according to the Pennimans, constituted a criminal menace to her health
and sanity. The bronze door of the Penniman vault shut firmly upon her
mortal remains; the family, in solemn conclave, decided that Gideon was
sailing for South Africa with Milly’s blood upon his hands. Gideon knew
that their own hands were dabbled in her innocence.
Gideon found the South African War a personal convenience, but against
the Pennimans he was very bitter, and his amazing despatches, colored
and brilliant with hate, were only a partial relief to his feelings.
He found it impossible to dislike the Boers with the authentic fervor
so desirable in a special correspondent; quite deliberately he dipped
his pen into his private gall before writing, and his passionate
loathing for a respectable family at Wimbledon fired half England to
a pure flame of patriotism. But it was all very unsatisfactory and
rather troublesome, this inner pretense that Cronje and Wessels were in
reality Mrs. Penniman and Ambrose. His despatches were devoured raw by
the popular appetite, but he himself went hungry; he starved for his
revenge. Gideon, remembering those days, laughed heartily. How fierce
he had been, and how frustrate!
The sunlight fell across his dusky golden desk, and still he
remembered, and did not write. That was twenty-five years ago, and
this was England, and he was old, but neither frustrate nor starving.
The Gideon of the Transvaal had been a widowed Gideon of forty-odd,
bereaved and raging--a Gideon who had but just observed the wife of
his romantic youth go down to the grave shrunken to premature decay,
quenched in body and soul, the clear flame withered, the bright stem
trodden underfoot. For a long and parching term of years he had beheld
her obliquely in the flawed mirror of her dying face; later he had shut
his eyes while she slept in his heart. Now he looked at her again, in
the cool and blessed light of these windows, in the peace of this quiet
room; she was a girl again, and beautiful. But Millicent had always
been beautiful.
It was the other Pennimans who had been ugly; how ugly he shuddered to
recall. He drew a packet of papers toward him. These were photographs
of the criminals, letters from Milly, letters from Ambrose, his own
wild scrawls. Gideon adjusted his spectacles.