"Dominie," persisted the Little Red Doctor, "you can't deny that you're
old."
"Whose fault is that but yours?" I retorted.
"Don't try to flatter me," said the Little Red Doctor. "You'd have
licked my old friend, Death, in that bout you had with him, without any
help of mine. And, anyway, you were already old, then. You're a tough
old bird, Dominie. Otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here in a March
blizzard staring at the Worth mansion and wondering what really happened
there three years ago."
"Your old friend, Death, beat you that time," said I maliciously.
The Little Red Doctor chose to ignore my taunt. "Look your fill,
Dominie," he advised. "You won't have much more chance."
"Why?" I asked, startled.
"The wreckers begin on it next month. Also a nice, new building is going
up next door to it on that little, secret, walled jungle that Ely Crouch
used to misname his garden. I'm glad of it, too. I don't like
anachronisms."
"I'm an anachronism," I returned. "You'll be one pretty soon. Our Square
is one solid anachronism."
"It won't be much longer. The tide is undermining us. Other houses will
go as the Worth place is going. You'll miss it, Dominie. You love houses
as if they were people."
It is true. To me houses are the only fabrications of man's hands that
are personalities. Enterprise builds the factory, Greed the tenement,
but Love alone builds the house, and by Love alone is it maintained
against the city's relentless encroachments. Once hallowed by
habitation, what warm and vivid influences impregnate it! Ambition,
pride, hope, joys happily shared; suffering, sorrow, and loss bravely
endured--the walls outlive them all, gathering with age, from grief and
joy alike, kind memories and stanch traditions. Yes, I love the old
houses. Yet I should not be sorry to see the Worth mansion razed. It has
outlived all the lives that once cherished it and become a dead,
unhuman thing.
That solid square of brown, gray-trimmed stone had grown old honorably
with the honorable generations of the Worths. Then it had died. In one
smiting stroke of tragedy the life had gone out of it. Now it stood
staring bleakly out from its corner with filmed eyes, across the busy
square. Passing its closed gates daily, I was always sensible of a qualm
of the spirit, a daunting prescience that the stilled mansion still
harbored the ghost of an unlaid secret.
The Little Red Doctor broke in upon my reverie.
"Yes; you're old, Dominie. But you're not wise. You're very foolish.
Foolish and obstinate."
Knowing well what he meant, I nevertheless pampered him by asking: "Why
am I foolish and obstinate?"
"Because you refuse to believe that Ned Worth murdered Ely Crouch. Don't
you?"
"I do."
"Then why did Ned commit suicide?"
"I don't know."
"How do you explain away his written confession?"
"I don't. I only know that it was not in Ned Worth's character willfully
to kill an old man. You were his friend; you ought to know it as well
as I do."
"Ah, that's different," said the Little Red Doctor, giving me one of his
queer looks. "Yes; you're a pig-headed old man, Dominie."
"I'm a believer in character."
"I don't know of any other man equally pig-headed, except possibly one.
He's old, too."
"Gale Sheldon," said I, naming the gentle, withered librarian of a
branch library a few blocks to the westward, the only other resident of
Our Square who had unfailingly supported me in my loyalty to the memory
of the last of the Worths.
"Yes. He's waiting for us now in his rooms. Will you come?"
Perceiving that there was something back of this--there usually is, in
the Little Red Doctor's maneuvers--I rose and we set out. As we passed
the Worth house it seemed grimmer and bleaker than ever before. There
was something savage and desperate in its desolation. The cold curse of
abandonment lay upon it. At the turn of the corner the Little Red Doctor
said abruptly.
"She's dead."
"Who?" I demanded.
"The girl. The woman in the case."
"In the Ely Crouch case? A woman? There was never any woman hinted at."
"No. And there never would have been as long as she was alive.
Now--Well, I'll leave Sheldon to explain her. He loved her, too, in
his way."
In Gale Sheldon's big, still room, crowded with the friendly ghosts of
mighty books, a clear fire was burning. One shaded lamp at the desk was
turned on, for though it was afternoon the blizzard cast a gloom like
dusk. The Little Red Doctor retired to a far corner where he was all but
merged in the shadows.
"Have you seen this?" Sheldon asked me, pointing to the table.
Thereon was spread strange literature for the scholarly taste of our
local book-worm, a section from the most sensational of New York's
Sunday newspapers. From the front page, surrounded by a barbarous
conglomeration of headlines and uproarious type, there smiled happily
forth a face of such appealing loveliness as no journalistic vulgarity
could taint or profane. I recognized it at once, as any one must have
done who had ever seen the unforgettable original. It was Virginia
Kingsley, who, two years before, had been Sheldon's assistant. The
picture was labeled, "Death Ends Wanderlust of Mysterious Heiress," and
the article was couched in a like style of curiosity-piquing
sensationalism. Stripped of its fulsome verbiage, it told of the girl's
recent death in Italy, after traveling about Europe with an invalid
sister; during which progress, the article gloated, she was "vainly
wooed by the Old World's proudest nobility for her beauty and wealth,"
the latter having been unexpectedly left her by an aged relative. Her
inexorable refusals were set down, by the romantic journalist, as due to
some secret and prior attachment. (He termed it an "affair de court"!)
Out of the welter of words there stood forth one sentence to tempt the
imagination: "She met death as a tryst." For that brief flash the
reporter had been lifted out of his bathos and tawdriness into a clearer
element. One could well believe that she had "met death as a tryst." For
if ever I have beheld unfaltering hope and unflagging courage glorified
and spiritualized into unearthly beauty, it was there in that pictured
face, fixed by the imperishable magic of the camera.
"No; I hadn't seen it," I said after reading. "Is it true?"
"In part." Then, after a pause, "You knew her, didn't you, Dominie?"
"Only by sight. She had special charge of the poetry alcove, hadn't
she?"
"Yes. She belonged there of right. She was the soul and fragrance of all
that the singers of springtime and youth have sung." He sighed, shaking
his grizzled head mournfully. "'And all that glory now lies dimmed in
death.' It doesn't seem believable."
He rose and went to the window. Through the whorls of snow could be
vaguely seen the outlines of the Worth house, looming on its corner. He
stared at it musing.
"I've often wondered if she cared for him," he murmured.
"For him? For Worth!" I exclaimed in amazement. "Were they friends?"
"Hardly more than acquaintances, I thought. But she left very strangely
the day of his death and never came back."
From the physician's corner there came an indeterminate grunt.
"If that is a request for further information, Doctor, I can say that on
the few occasions when they met here in the library, it was only in the
line of her duties. He was interested in the twentieth-century poets.
But even that interest died out. It was months before the--the tragedy
that he stopped coming to the Library."
"It was months before the tragedy that he stopped going anywhere, wasn't
it?" I asked.
"Yes. Nobody understood it; least of all, his friends. I even heard it
hinted that he was suffering from some malady of the brain." He turned
inquiringly to the far, dim corner.