Lavington’s having) brought them to tall gate-posts, an illuminated
lodge, and an avenue on which the snow had been levelled to the
smoothness of marble. At the end of the avenue the long house
loomed through trees, its principal bulk dark but one wing sending
out a ray of welcome; and the next moment Faxon was receiving a
violent impression of warmth and light, of hot-house plants, hurrying
servants, a vast spectacular oak hall like a stage-setting, and,
in its unreal middle distance, a small concise figure, correctly
dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly unlike his rather florid
conception of the great John Lavington.
The shock of the contrast remained with him through his hurried
dressing in the large impersonally luxurious bedroom to which he had
been shown. “I don’t see where he comes in,” was the only way he could
put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington’s
public personality into his host’s contracted frame and manner. Mr.
Lavington, to whom Faxon’s case had been rapidly explained by young
Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality
that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of
scent on his evening handkerchief. “Make yourself at home—at home!”
he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete
inability to perform the feat he urged on his visitor. “Any friend of
Frank’s ... delighted ... make yourself thoroughly at home!”
II
In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of
Faxon’s bedroom, the injunction was not easy to obey. It was wonderful
luck to have found a night’s shelter under the opulent roof of
Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But
the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and
unwelcoming. He couldn’t have said why, and could only suppose that
Mr. Lavington’s intense personality—intensely negative, but intense
all the same—must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner
of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was
tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in
from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the
prospect of perpetually treading other people’s stairs.
“I hope you’re not famished?” Rainer’s slim figure was in the doorway.
“My uncle has a little business to attend to with Mr. Grisben, and we
don’t dine for half an hour. Shall I fetch you, or can you find your
way down? Come straight to the dining-room—the second door on the left
of the long gallery.”
He disappeared, leaving a ray of warmth behind him, and Faxon,
relieved, lit a cigarette and sat down by the fire.
Looking about with less haste, he was struck by a detail that had
escaped him. The room was full of flowers—a mere “bachelor’s room,”
in the wing of a house opened only for a few days, in the dead middle
of a New Hampshire winter! Flowers were everywhere, not in senseless
profusion, but placed with the same conscious art he had remarked in
the grouping of the blossoming shrubs that filled the hall. A vase of
arums stood on the writing-table, a cluster of strange-hued carnations
on the stand at his elbow, and from wide bowls of glass and porcelain
clumps of freesia-bulbs diffused their melting fragrance. The fact
implied acres of glass—but that was the least interesting part of
it. The flowers themselves, their quality, selection and arrangement,
attested on some one’s part—and on whose but John Lavington’s?—a
solicitous and sensitive passion for that particular embodiment of
beauty. Well, it simply made the man, as he had appeared to Faxon, all
the harder to understand!
The half-hour elapsed, and Faxon, rejoicing at the near prospect of
food, set out to make his way to the dining-room. He had not noticed
the direction he had followed in going to his room, and was puzzled,
when he left it, to find that two staircases, of apparently equal
importance, invited him. He chose the one to his right, and reached,
at its foot, a long gallery such as Rainer had described. The gallery
was empty, the doors down its length were closed; but Rainer had said:
“The second to the left,” and Faxon, after pausing for some chance
enlightenment which did not come, laid his hand on the second knob to
the left.
The room he entered was square, with dusky picture-hung walls. In its
centre, about a table lit by veiled lamps, he fancied Mr. Lavington
and his guests to be already seated at dinner; then he perceived that
the table was covered not with viands but with papers, and that he had
blundered into what seemed to be his host’s study. As he paused in the
irresolution of embarrassment Frank Rainer looked up.
“Oh, here’s Mr. Faxon. Why not ask him——?”
Mr. Lavington, from the end of the table, reflected his nephew’s smile
in a glance of impartial benevolence.
“Certainly. Come in, Mr. Faxon. If you won’t think it a liberty——”
Mr. Grisben, who sat opposite his host, turned his solid head toward
the door. “Of course Mr. Faxon’s an American citizen?”
Frank Rainer laughed. “That’s all right!... Oh, no, not one of your
pin-pointed pens, Uncle Jack! Haven’t you got a quill somewhere?”
Mr. Balch, who spoke slowly and as if reluctantly, in a muffled voice
of which there seemed to be very little left, raised his hand to say:
“One moment: you acknowledge this to be——?”
“My last will and testament?” Rainer’s laugh redoubled. “Well, I won’t
answer for the ’last.’ It’s the first one, anyway.”
“It’s a mere formula,” Mr. Balch explained.
“Well, here goes.” Rainer dipped his quill in the inkstand his uncle
had pushed in his direction, and dashed a gallant signature across the
document.
Faxon, understanding what was expected of him, and conjecturing that
the young man was signing his will on the attainment of his majority,
had placed himself behind Mr. Grisben, and stood awaiting his turn to
affix his name to the instrument. Rainer, having signed, was about to
push the paper across the table to Mr. Balch; but the latter, again
raising his hand, said in his sad imprisoned voice: “The seal——?”
“Oh, does there have to be a seal?”
Faxon, looking over Mr. Grisben at John Lavington, saw a faint frown
between his impassive eyes. “Really, Frank!” He seemed, Faxon thought,
slightly irritated by his nephew’s frivolity.
“Who’s got a seal?” Frank Rainer continued, glancing about the table.
“There doesn’t seem to be one here.”
Mr. Grisben interposed. “A wafer will do. Lavington, you have a wafer?”
Mr. Lavington had recovered his serenity. “There must be some in one
of the drawers. But I’m ashamed to say I don’t know where my secretary
keeps these things. He ought, of course, to have seen to it that a
wafer was sent with the document.”
“Oh, hang it——” Frank Rainer pushed the paper aside: “It’s the hand
of God—and I’m hungry as a wolf. Let’s dine first, Uncle Jack.”
“I think I’ve a seal upstairs,” said Faxon suddenly.
Mr. Lavington sent him a barely perceptible smile. “So sorry to give
you the trouble——”
“Oh, I say, don’t send him after it now. Let’s wait till after dinner!”
Mr. Lavington continued to smile on his guest, and the latter, as if
under the faint coercion of the smile, turned from the room and ran
upstairs. Having taken the seal from his writing-case he came down
again, and once more opened the door of the study. No one was speaking
when he entered—they were evidently awaiting his return with the
mute impatience of hunger, and he put the seal in Rainer’s reach, and
stood watching while Mr. Grisben struck a match and held it to one of
the candles flanking the inkstand. As the wax descended on the paper
Faxon remarked again the singular emaciation, the premature physical
weariness, of the hand that, held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had
ever noticed his nephew’s hand, and if it were not poignantly visible
to him now.
With this thought in his mind, Faxon raised his eyes to look at
Mr. Lavington. The great man’s gaze rested on Frank Rainer with an
expression of untroubled benevolence; and at the same instant Faxon’s
attention was attracted by the presence in the room of another person,
who must have joined the group while he was upstairs searching for the
seal. The new-comer was a man of about Mr. Lavington’s age and figure,
who stood directly behind his chair, and who, at the moment when Faxon
first saw him, was gazing at young Rainer with an equal intensity of
attention. The likeness between the two men—perhaps increased by the
fact that the hooded lamps on the table left the figure behind the
chair in shadow—struck Faxon the more because of the strange contrast
in their expression. John Lavington, during his nephew’s blundering
attempt to drop the wax and apply the seal, continued to fasten on him
a look of half-amused affection; while the man behind the chair, so
oddly reduplicating the lines of his features and figure, turned on the
boy a face of pale hostility.
The impression was so startling Faxon forgot what was going on about
him. He was just dimly aware of young Rainer’s exclaiming: “Your turn,
Mr. Grisben!” of Mr. Grisben’s ceremoniously protesting: “No—no; Mr.
Faxon first,” and of the pen’s being thereupon transferred to his own
hand. He received it with a deadly sense of being unable to move, or
even to understand what was expected of him, till he became conscious
of Mr. Grisben’s paternally pointing out the precise spot on which he
was to leave his autograph. The effort to fix his attention and steady
his hand prolonged the process of signing, and when he stood up—a
strange weight of fatigue on all his limbs—the figure behind Mr.
Lavington’s chair was gone.
Faxon felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man’s
exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door behind Mr.
Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon concluded
that the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to pass out. At
any rate, he was gone, and with his withdrawal the strange weight was
lifted. Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette, Mr. Balch meticulously
inscribing his name at the foot of the document, Mr. Lavington—his
eyes no longer on his nephew—examining a strange white-winged orchid
in the vase at his elbow. Everything suddenly seemed to have grown
natural and simple again, and Faxon found himself responding with a
smile to the affable gesture with which his host declared: “And now,
Mr. Faxon, we’ll dine.”
III
“I wonder how I blundered into the wrong room just now; I thought you
told me to take the second door to the left,” Faxon said to Frank
Rainer as they followed the older men down the gallery.
“So I did; but I probably forgot to tell you which staircase to take.
Coming from your bedroom, I ought to have said the fourth door to the
right. It’s a puzzling house, because my uncle keeps adding to it from
year to year. He built this room last summer for his modern pictures.”
Young Rainer, pausing to open another door, touched an electric button
which sent a circle of light about the walls of a long room hung with
canvases of the French impressionist school.
Faxon advanced, attracted by a shimmering Monet, but Rainer laid a hand
on his arm.
“He bought that last week for a thundering price. But come along—I’ll
show you all this after dinner. Or _he_ will rather—he loves it.”
“Does he really love things?”
Rainer stared, clearly perplexed at the question. “Rather! Flowers and
pictures especially! Haven’t you noticed the flowers? I suppose you
think his manner’s cold; it seems so at first; but he’s really awfully
keen about things.”
Faxon looked quickly at the speaker. “Has your uncle a brother?”
“Brother? No—never had. He and my mother were the only ones.”
“Or any relation who—who looks like him? Who might be mistaken for
him?”
“Not that I ever heard of. Does he remind you of some one?”
“Yes.”
“That’s queer. We’ll ask him if he’s got a double. Come on!”
But another picture had arrested Faxon, and some minutes elapsed before
he and his young host reached the dining-room. It was a large room,
with the same conventionally handsome furniture and delicately grouped
flowers; and Faxon’s first glance showed him that only three men
were seated about the dining-table. The man who had stood behind Mr.
Lavington’s chair was not present, and no seat awaited him.
When the young men entered, Mr. Grisben was speaking, and his host,
who faced the door, sat looking down at his untouched soup-plate and
turning the spoon about in his small dry hand.
“It’s pretty late to call them rumors—they were devilish close to
facts when we left town this morning,” Mr. Grisben was saying, with an
unexpected incisiveness of tone.
Mr. Lavington laid down his spoon and smiled interrogatively. “Oh,
facts—what _are_ facts? Just the way a thing happens to look at a
given minute.”
“You haven’t heard anything from town?” Mr. Grisben persisted.
“Not a syllable. So you see ... Balch, a little more of that _petite
marmite_. Mr. Faxon ... between Frank and Mr. Grisben, please.”
The dinner progressed through a series of complicated courses,
ceremoniously dispensed by a stout butler attended by three tall
footmen, and it was evident that Mr. Lavington took a somewhat puerile
satisfaction in the pageant. That, Faxon reflected, was probably
the joint in his armor—that and the flowers. He had changed the
subject—not abruptly but firmly—when the young men entered, but Faxon
perceived that it still possessed the thoughts of the two elderly
visitors, and Mr. Balch presently observed, in a voice that seemed to
come from the last survivor down a mine-shaft: “If it _does_ come, it
will be the biggest crash since ’93.”
Mr. Lavington looked bored but polite. “Wall Street can stand crashes
better than it could then. It’s got a robuster constitution.”
“Yes; but——”
“Speaking of constitutions,” Mr. Grisben intervened: “Frank, are you
taking care of yourself?”
A flush rose to young Rainer’s cheeks.
“Why, of course! Isn’t that what I’m here for?”
“You’re here about three days in the month, aren’t you? And the rest of
the time it’s crowded restaurants and hot ballrooms in town. I thought
you were to be shipped off to New Mexico?”
“Oh, I’ve got a new man who says that’s rot.”
“Well, you don’t look as if your new man were right,” said Mr. Grisben
bluntly.
Faxon saw the lad’s color fade, and the rings of shadow deepen under
his gay eyes. At the same moment his uncle turned to him with a renewed
intensity of attention. There was such solicitude in Mr. Lavington’s
gaze that it seemed almost to fling a tangible shield between his
nephew and Mr. Grisben’s tactless scrutiny.
“We think Frank’s a good deal better,” he began; “this new doctor——”
The butler, coming up, bent discreetly to whisper a word in his ear,
and the communication caused a sudden change in Mr. Lavington’s
expression. His face was naturally so colorless that it seemed not so
much to pale as to fade, to dwindle and recede into something blurred
and blotted-out. He half rose, sat down again and sent a rigid smile
about the table.
“Will you excuse me? The telephone. Peters, go on with the dinner.”
With small precise steps he walked out of the door which one of the
footmen had hastened to throw open.
A momentary silence fell on the group; then Mr. Grisben once more
addressed himself to Rainer. “You ought to have gone, my boy; you ought
to have gone.”
The anxious look returned to the youth’s eyes. “My uncle doesn’t think
so, really.”
“You’re not a baby, to be always governed on your uncle’s opinion. You
came of age to-day, didn’t you? Your uncle spoils you ... that’s what’s
the matter....”
The thrust evidently went home, for Rainer laughed and looked down with
a slight accession of color.
“But the doctor——”
“Use your common sense, Frank! You had to try twenty doctors to find
one to tell you what you wanted to be told.”
A look of apprehension overshadowed Rainer’s gaiety. “Oh, come—I
say!... What would _you_ do?” he stammered.
“Pack up and jump on the first train.” Mr. Grisben leaned forward and
laid a firm hand on the young man’s arm. “Look here: my nephew Jim
Grisben is out there ranching on a big scale. He’ll take you in and be
glad to have you. You say your new doctor thinks it won’t do you any
good; but he doesn’t pretend to say it will do you harm, does he? Well,
then—give it a trial. It’ll take you out of hot theatres and night
restaurants, anyhow.... And all the rest of it.... Eh, Balch?”
“Go!” said Mr. Balch hollowly. “Go _at once_,” he added, as if a closer
look at the youth’s face had impressed on him the need of backing up
his friend.
Young Rainer had turned ashy-pale. He tried to stiffen his mouth into
a smile. “Do I look as bad as all that?”
Mr. Grisben was helping himself to terrapin. “You look like the day
after an earthquake,” he said concisely.
The terrapin had encircled the table, and been deliberately enjoyed by
Mr. Lavington’s three visitors (Rainer, Faxon noticed, left his plate
untouched) before the door was thrown open to re-admit their host.
Mr. Lavington advanced with an air of recovered composure. He seated
himself, picked up his napkin, and consulted the gold-monogrammed menu.
“No, don’t bring back the filet.... Some terrapin; yes....” He looked
affably about the table. “Sorry to have deserted you, but the storm has
played the deuce with the wires, and I had to wait a long time before I
could get a good connection. It must be blowing up for a blizzard.”
“Uncle Jack,” young Rainer broke out, “Mr. Grisben’s been lecturing me.”
Mr. Lavington was helping himself to terrapin. “Ah—what about?”
“He thinks I ought to have given New Mexico a show.”
“I want him to go straight out to my nephew at Santa Paz and stay there
till his next birthday.” Mr. Lavington signed to the butler to hand the
terrapin to Mr. Grisben, who, as he took a second helping, addressed
himself again to Rainer. “Jim’s in New York now, and going back the day
after to-morrow in Olyphant’s private car. I’ll ask Olyphant to squeeze
you in if you’ll go. And when you’ve been out there a week or two, in
the saddle all day and sleeping nine hours a night, I suspect you won’t
think much of the doctor who prescribed New York.”
Faxon spoke up, he knew not why. “I was out there once: it’s a splendid
life. I saw a fellow—oh, a really _bad_ case—who’d been simply made
over by it.”
“It _does_ sound jolly,” Rainer laughed, a sudden eagerness of
anticipation in his tone.
His uncle looked at him gently. “Perhaps Grisben’s right. It’s an
opportunity——”
Faxon looked up with a start: the figure dimly perceived in the study
was now more visibly and tangibly planted behind Mr. Lavington’s chair.
“That’s right, Frank: you see your uncle approves. And the trip out
there with Olyphant isn’t a thing to be missed. So drop a few dozen
dinners and be at the Grand Central the day after to-morrow at five.”
Mr. Grisben’s pleasant gray eye sought corroboration of his host, and
Faxon, in a cold anguish of suspense, continued to watch him as he
turned his glance on Mr. Lavington. One could not look at Lavington
without seeing the presence at his back, and it was clear that, the
next minute, some change in Mr. Grisben’s expression must give his
watcher a clue.
But Mr. Grisben’s expression did not change: the gaze he fixed on his
host remained unperturbed, and the clue he gave was the startling one
of not seeming to see the other figure.
Faxon’s first impulse was to look away, to look anywhere else, to
resort again to the champagne glass the watchful butler had already
brimmed; but some fatal attraction, at war in him with an overwhelming
physical resistance, held his eyes upon the spot they feared.
The figure was still standing, more distinctly, and therefore more
resemblingly, at Mr. Lavington’s back; and while the latter continued
to gaze affectionately at his nephew, his counterpart, as before, fixed
young Rainer with eyes of deadly menace.
Faxon, with what felt like an actual wrench of the muscles, dragged
his own eyes from the sight to scan the other countenances about the
table; but not one revealed the least consciousness of what he saw, and
a sense of mortal isolation sank upon him.
“It’s worth considering, certainly——” he heard Mr. Lavington
continue; and as Rainer’s face lit up, the face behind his uncle’s
chair seemed to gather into its look all the fierce weariness of old
unsatisfied hates. That was the thing that, as the minutes labored by,
Faxon was becoming most conscious of. The watcher behind the chair was
no longer merely malevolent: he had grown suddenly, unutterably tired.
His hatred seemed to well up out of the very depths of balked effort
and thwarted hopes, and the fact made him more pitiable, and yet more
dire.
Faxon’s look reverted to Mr. Lavington, as if to surprise in him a
corresponding change. At first none was visible: his pinched smile was
screwed to his blank face like a gas-light to a white-washed wall. Then
the fixity of the smile became ominous: Faxon saw that its wearer was
afraid to let it go. It was evident that Mr. Lavington was unutterably
tired too, and the discovery sent a colder current through Faxon’s
veins. Looking down at his untouched plate, he caught the soliciting
twinkle of the champagne glass; but the sight of the wine turned him
sick.
“Well, we’ll go into the details presently,” he heard Mr. Lavington
say, still on the question of his nephew’s future. “Let’s have a cigar
first. No—not here, Peters.” He turned his smile on Faxon. “When we’ve
had coffee I want to show you my pictures.”
“Oh, by the way, Uncle Jack—Mr. Faxon wants to know if you’ve got a
double?”
“A double?” Mr. Lavington, still smiling, continued to address himself
to his guest. “Not that I know of. Have you seen one, Mr. Faxon?”
Faxon thought: “My God, if I look up now they’ll _both_ be looking at
me!” To avoid raising his eyes he made as though to lift the glass to
his lips; but his hand sank inert, and he looked up. Mr. Lavington’s
glance was politely bent on him, but with a loosening of the strain
about his heart he saw that the figure behind the chair still kept its
gaze on Rainer.
“Do you think you’ve seen my double, Mr. Faxon?”
Would the other face turn if he said yes? Faxon felt a dryness in his
throat. “No,” he answered.
“Ah? It’s possible I’ve a dozen. I believe I’m extremely
usual-looking,” Mr. Lavington went on conversationally; and still the
other face watched Rainer.
“It was ... a mistake ... a confusion of memory ...” Faxon heard
himself stammer. Mr. Lavington pushed back his chair, and as he did so
Mr. Grisben suddenly leaned forward.
“Lavington! What have we been thinking of? We haven’t drunk Frank’s
health!”
Mr. Lavington reseated himself. “My dear boy!... Peters, another
bottle....” He turned to his nephew. “After such a sin of omission I
don’t presume to propose the toast myself ... but Frank knows.... Go
ahead, Grisben!”
The boy shone on his uncle. “No, no, Uncle Jack! Mr. Grisben won’t
mind. Nobody but _you_—to-day!”
The butler was replenishing the glasses. He filled Mr. Lavington’s
last, and Mr. Lavington put out his small hand to raise it.... As he
did so, Faxon looked away.
“Well, then—All the good I’ve wished you in all the past years.... I
put it into the prayer that the coming ones may be healthy and happy
and many ... and _many_, dear boy!”
Faxon saw the hands about him reach out for their glasses.
Automatically, he made the same gesture. His eyes were still on the
table, and he repeated to himself with a trembling vehemence: “I won’t
look up! I won’t.... I won’t....”
His fingers clasped the stem of the glass, and raised it to the level
of his lips. He saw the other hands making the same motion. He heard
Mr. Grisben’s genial “Hear! Hear!” and Mr. Balch’s hollow echo. He said
to himself, as the rim of the glass touched his lips:
“I won’t look up! I swear I won’t!——” and he looked.