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 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."