THE QUEST OF THE OBESE GENTLEMAN
Nothing short of the direct interposition of Providence can be held
to explain the premature chancing into Gilead’s hands one morning of
an ex-official copy of the _Daily Post_. The thing might have happened
on any other morning in the year and signified nothing; it happened,
_as_ it happened, on the one and only morning on which it could
signify a great deal. He invariably read the _Times_ at breakfast, and
the other paper, or Nestle’s report on it, on his arrival at the
office. Providence, desiring his independent notice of this particular
issue, found occasion therefore to slip under his nose a copy of it,
brought in, and forgotten, by some casual acquaintance who had sought
him for a moment on a personal matter.
He might not have looked at it even then, had he not chanced--chanced,
mark you--in rising to reach for the marmalade, to tread on an iron
tack.
Now there was no reason, other than a providential one, why the tack
should have been there; no reason why it should have stood up
awkwardly on its head; none why its point should have penetrated the
only thin place in the young gentleman’s pump. That all these things
happened, with the result that, in the start and clutch he gave, he
knocked over the _Daily Post_ and stooped to pick it up again, can be
ascribed to supernatural design and to that alone.
As he sat down, shin over thigh, to pluck the obtrusive nail from his
sole, his eye was caught by an advertisement prominent in the Agony
Column of the paper he held in his left hand:--
“_To Psychisis. Old gentleman suffering from obesity desires
disintegration and reconstitution on normal lines. Superfluous flesh
given away to the needy. No Shylocks need apply._”
Gilead, having extracted the nail, read the advertisement again, and
chuckled. It was of the order _Facetiæ_, of course. Wags not
infrequently would thus parody the incredible absurdities of cults and
cranks, or even invent wilder ones in a mere frolic of animal spirits.
He had come across quite a number of such hoaxes in his long
experience of the paper. There had been, for instance, the two ladies
who, studying the endurance of physical pain, desired the co-operation
of another in arranging for a series of private experiments on human
subjects; there had been the duet of lone bachelors, depressed by
London Sundays, who invited suggestions as to how best to pass their
time in any agreeable way not involving energy, and those other two
who, being without the capacity to work, invited some wealthy
philanthropist to provide them with annuities and a cottage in the
country meet to their leisured tastes. There had been the despairing
gentleman who coveted a society and a friendship unfranked by whiskies
and sodas, which disagreed with him, and the practising barrister who
had offered an equitable mortgage of his body (heart excepted) in
return for an accommodation. Finally there had been the demand for a
man willing to demonstrate his personal pliability on an old English
rack, Star Chamber pattern, and who had been recommended, by an
admirable touch, to be ‘short to start with.’
Of such palpably was the obese gentleman, with his superfluous flesh,
and Gilead was on the point of laying him aside, with a parting grin,
when his gaze was caught and riveted on an advertisement which
appeared just under the one in question:--
“_Middle-aged gentleman, recommended to chop wood for obesity two
hours daily, seeks cheerful refined companion to work beside him away
from home. Honorarium by arrangement. Address Winsom Wyllie:_ 048391
_Daily Post_.”
Now we all must have observed how advertisements, though of an
exceptional and esoteric cast, are gregarious in character. That is to
say, if some strange want appears advertised on a particular day,
there will be sure to be others of its kind in company, and that
without any editorial provision, and despite the fact that nothing of
its sort, maybe, has occurred for weeks. Here one obese gentleman led
to another, and undesignedly, one might feel sure. It was simply that
adiposity was in the air, like a germ, and affected not individuals
but communities. It made no difference that an obvious sincerity spoke
from the second advertisement--no difference to the principle, I mean.
As to its effect upon _one_ reader, it was simply for the moment
paralysing.
WINSOM WYLLIE! Those who have followed the career of our young
philanthropist will not have forgotten the name of that detestable
scoundrel, the persecutor of the beautiful amanuensis. It was
peculiar, one must admit--a name not likely to be borne by more than a
single person in the world. So thought Gilead, as, with a deep sigh,
he struggled out of his stupefaction and reread the lines.
Winsom Wyllie! So the brazen wretch had confessed himself, and
unblushingly, at the last. It was well. If unlimited wealth, if a soul
of righteous indignation, were of any avail against the forces of
malignancy, he should be hounded surely to his doom. The means were
here; the way alone was the question.
It must not be supposed that during all these long months Gilead had
been content to relegate this matter to the shelf of discarded things.
Quietly and unobtrusively he had kept it alive in his mind, had
prosecuted cautious enquiries, had caused a persistent watch to be
kept on the little house on Knight’s Hill; and, if all his efforts had
proved in vain, he had been at least able to find comfort in the
conviction that the villain, true to his name, had scented danger and
studied discretion by obliterating himself. And now here he was come
out into the light of day, and boldly affirming his existence in the
face of any whom it might concern. The advertisement was nothing less
than a challenge and a defiance. Well, the gage, he should find, would
be taken up.
But it was necessary, of course, to move with the extremest caution
and circumspection. Nothing, in the first place, must be said about
the matter to Miss Halifax, lest the shock should bring on again one
of those cataleptic seizures with which it was associated; nor could
he think himself justified in revealing, unauthorized, to her fiancé
the details of so delicate and painful a story. No, alone and
single-handed he must encounter the man on his own ground, betraying
nothing of his purpose until that purpose was accomplished. The
villain must be overthrown, disposed of for good and all, ere ever the
girl should learn of the shadow that had finally been removed from her
life.
He finished his breakfast in a very thoughtful mood, and by the end of
it had come to a definite resolve. These two must get married with as
little delay as possible. There could be no better means for disposing
once and for all of Mr Winsom Wyllie and his unwelcome attentions. He
himself might discover and expose the scoundrel; to provide Vera with
a legitimate protector was to render him innocuous for ever more. Yes,
it must be done and at once; there was no reason in the world for
delaying a consummation so sensible and so happy.
Before starting for the office Gilead took up the paper yet once more
to study the advertisement, and this time with a fine ironic laughter.
He recalled very well, he believed, certain descriptive epithets
applied by the young lady to her persecutor. He had been “unusual and
sinister”; he had been “endowed with a demoniac energy”; he had been
“a dangerous man,” affecting piratic emblems. And here he was after
all grown fat, confessed of middle age, and recommended by his doctor
to chop wood in order to reduce his bulk! O, to what base passes would
not constitution bring us! Picturesqueness, romance, attractiveness,
even, of the diabolic cast--we were each one of us in such matters at
the mercy of our stomachs. No doubt this same spider, indolently
watchful in his web, had waxed plump and round through too much
feeding and too little exercise.
Agreeable to his steadfast purpose, Gilead found both the secretary
and amanuensis in his room when he reached the Agency. Somewhat
high-strung as he was and sensitive to impressions, he seemed
conscious of an atmosphere as it were of strain, expectancy,
anxiety--he knew not what to call it, but attributed it, whatever it
was, to his own suppressed emotions. However, sitting down with the
best air of detachment he could muster, he called upon Nestle for his
report.
“I have run down the column, sir,” answered the secretary. “There is
nothing whatever in it to detain or interest you.”
Did his own feelings mislead him, or was there a hint of tremor in the
young man’s voice, a flush of increased colour on his cheek, which
belied the easy assurance of his words? He decided, at once and
definitely, that the suspicion was born of nothing but his own excited
fancy. For the rest he was reassured to find that Miss Halifax herself
had evidently passed by the advertisement unnoticing. Had her eyes
encountered it, all his chivalrous intent would have been balked at
the outset.
“O! very well, Nestle,” he said. “There _is_, as it happens, a certain
advertisement--but you could not have been expected to attach any
importance to it from our point of view. Only, as it chanced, I saw a
copy of the _Daily Post_ this morning before I reached the office,
and--” He broke off, lay back in his chair, drew and emitted a long
breath, smiled, and addressed himself resolutely to the two before
him. “That is all nothing,” he said, “to the case which is just now
most prominently in my mind. It affects our mutual relations, as it
does my most earnest wishes. I want you two to eschew diffidence, to
eschew formality, to allow me to speak with the freedom engendered of
our long and happy intercourse, and to suggest your arranging a date
for your marriage with as little delay as possible.”
Having got it out, he rose to his feet. Miss Halifax at the same
moment rose hurriedly to hers. Her face was white; her beautiful eyes
seemed to have gathered in an instant dark shadows about them.
“Our marriage!” she whispered; and then her breath caught.
Gilead laughed, half protestingly, half melancholy.
“Is it such an appalling prospect?” he said. “You must not allow
yourselves to doubt that, for my poor practical part, I will soften
its acerbities to you by the best means in my power. Our intimacy, my
long debt to you both, will rob that assurance of any suggestion of
impertinence or ostentation. I want to see you both settled and happy;
I am impatient for the end; and, if I have my reasons, they can hardly
be less trenchant ones than your own. I ask you to marry, and to marry
soon. If you consider any part of this obligation yours, and desire to
liquidate it, there are the means most calculated to give me delight
in the settlement. Now I am going to leave you alone to talk the
matter over; nor do I intend to refer to it again until invited by
yourselves--with the assurance, I shall trust, that you have decided
to conform to my wishes.”
He took up his hat, crossed the room, patted the secretary kindly and
cheerily on the shoulder, bowed to Miss Halifax and went out.
For minutes after he had left, the two stood silent and transfixed. At
length the secretary raised his face with a groan.
“He saw it--the advertisement,” he said. “My God, what a fatality!”
She began to laugh in a mirthless unnatural way, and stopped as
suddenly.
“Yes, he must have seen it,” she said. “What does it mean? What will
he do? We oughtn’t to doubt, I suppose, unless he is going to be
untrue to himself for the first time in his life. But he won’t, of
course; and then--what will come of it all?”
She gasped, and then laughed again hysterically.
“And our marriage! O, it is too ridiculous! Herbert, for pity’s sake
say something in reason!”
“Reason or no reason spells nothing but our ruin,” he answered
dejectedly. “His resolution is set, and it must give us away. I
understand its purpose well enough; he thinks our marrying will put
that--that other finally out of court.”
“But what other?” she said. “In heaven’s name, what other?”
He laughed, even more hollowly than she had.
“God knows!” he said. “The devil has hoist us with our own petard.”
She passed her hand across her eyes in great grief and misery.
“Well,” she said, with a quivering sigh, “we can’t complain; and I
don’t. It is not often a woman is given such an education for the
natural evil in her. I think it teaches me to welcome the punishment I
have striven so hard to avoid. I shall be clean at last in my shame.
Let me be the one to confess it to him, that I may drink the cup to
its dregs. My suffering after all is worse than yours.”
“Is it? Why?”
“Cannot you guess? Because I have learned to love him, Herbert, with
all my heart and soul, and because I must kill before his eyes the
thing he has honoured.”
“Kill! you don’t mean--”
“O, don’t look so scared! That would be a hateful, a selfish return
for all his gentleness and nobility--to curse my love with a heritage
of undeserved remorse. But I must kill his trust for ever--O, my dear,
I must, I must!”
In sudden uncontrollable anguish she threw herself into her chair, and
flinging her arms over the desk, buried her face in them.
In the meantime Gilead, returning to his chambers, set himself to
concoct an epistle, at once guarded and alluring, to the obese one. It
was a delicate task, and one or two trials were needed before he could
satisfy himself as to the suitable form. This, finally, was the answer
he despatched:--
“Mr George Barnwell” (the name occurred to him somehow, without
suggesting any associations) “presents his compliments to Mr Winsom
Wyllie, and, having noticed that gentleman’s advertisement in the
_Daily Post_, begs to offer himself as a candidate for the post in
question. Mr G. B. thinks that he may lay claim to the qualifications
desired. He has been well educated; he has seen something of life; he
has learnt from his Montaigne that Silence and Modesty are qualities
very serviceable in conversation. Finally, he may boast, he believes,
of being capable of his hands, and he is quite willing to refer the
question of the honorarium to the test of his capacities.”
He gave his address poste-restante at the nearest office, and settled
down to await in some trepidation, the possible reply.
Likely enough none would arrive. A berth which, though only temporary,
offered itself so easy and so uncompromising, must attract hundreds of
those poor out-at-elbows gentilities who were for ever prowling in
search of such occupations as their respectable inexpertness could
stomach. It shamed Gilead to think of his seeking to take the bread
out of the mouth of any poverty so mean and forlorn; only his sense of
desperate necessity urged him into competition with it. It were surely
better that one pride should hunger than that a villain should go
unmasked, a problematic murderer be allowed to pursue his nefarious
course with impunity.
Still his application might, probably would, be unsuccessful; and in
that case, what then? There would be nothing for it--an undesirable
alternative--but to put the police on the track of the advertiser.
For that day and the next he lay close, not going near the Agency;
and, on the third morning, there was a telegram awaiting him at the
post-office. He opened it, somewhat nervously, and read:--
“_Offer accepted provisionally. Be ten to-morrow morning at Church
Army Home, Unemployed Yard, Coldbath Lane, Brixton. W.W._”
So, after all, he was chosen! Fervently he hoped that he would not be
found wanting. And that thought had its necessary corollary in
another. What was he going to do when he met Mr Winsom Wyllie face to
face? Why, apparently, a thing which he had never done in his life
before--chop wood.
It seemed quite paralysing, astounding. He had never until this moment
thought out his course of action, and here was the problem actually
squaring up to him. He had to chop wood--that was the only fact
immediately plain to his comprehension. True the man had behaved
vilely in intention to an unhappy young woman dependent on him; true
that same young woman had, by her own confession, accused him of
coercing her father into making a testament in his favour, and of
afterwards tempting that parent opportunely to his doom. But that was
all conjecture, and however morally irrefutable, not a particle of
legal evidence existed to substantiate the charge. Legally, indeed,
the heir’s position seemed unassailable. He had been left the property
conditionally, and the conditions had resulted in his favour. By the
provisions of the will, since the young lady had failed to marry him
within the year, he was become the sole and indisputable beneficiary.
And what else?
Nothing else. Vague surmises, shadowy charges--what was there in them
all? Gilead was worldling enough to know that there was never yet a
disappointed legatee who did not hint darkly of undue influences or
mental irresponsibility. That a testator did not do what was expected
of him was no ground for action in the eye of the law.
Did this chivalrous spirit, therefore, shrink at the last from its
self-imposed Quest? Not for a moment. The Law to Gilead was nothing
but a sifter of evidence. It took no cognizance of obscure motives,
but decided on the facts before it, with which facts any clever
counsel could juggle as with balls or handkerchiefs. Mr Winsom Wyllie
might, legally, be altogether unassailable; the fact remained that he
was enjoying a small fortune to the possession of which another was by
every moral right entitled. That was enough for the Paladin.
Or was he so enjoying it? That same afternoon Gilead paid another
visit to Somerset House--only to find that the will, so far as he
could discover, remained yet unproved. He was puzzled; but on the
whole reassured. Surely this delay argued some remorse, at least some
hesitation, on the part of the legatee? Or did it imply a reluctance
in him to take that step which must put his coveted victim for ever
beyond the reach of his arts and solicitations? Whichever way, nothing
but advantage could accrue from his ascertaining that wealth, and the
power which it bestows were engaged, and sternly, on the side of the
young lady. The warning, for the best of its value, should not be
thrown away upon such a man, so audacious and yet so wary.
Ten o’clock the following morning found Gilead punctual to his
appointment in Coldbath Lane, Brixton. It was not a prepossessing
neighbourhood, nor was the day exhilarating. Under a cloudy sky
brooded an atmosphere of sticky humidity. The squalor of a deep-London
slum was represented by everything in the way of dreariness but its
swarming life. Here were the dull dwelling-houses, the tawdry shops,
the costers’ barrows, the stench of fish frying in rancid grease. Only
the human congestion was less--nothing in comparison. A postman, with
a flaccid bag, suggestive of a lean correspondence, over his shoulder,
directed him to the yard for the unemployed--directed him dubiously,
too, knowing that want often strutted in strange guises. Gilead
knocked on the closed gates, and waited.
An asthmatic sound of sawing, which had been audible within, ceased,
resumed itself like an arrested cough, stopped again, and, after an
interval, a slow heavy footstep approached.
“Who’s there?” asked a weary voice.
“George Barnwell,” answered Gilead. “I have come punctual to your
appointment, sir.”
A clock, indeed, at the moment sounded the hour. It took the strokes
deliberately, yet not so deliberately as the unseen stranger took
Gilead’s statement. He appeared to ponder it exhaustively. Gilead
could hear him through the keyhole breathing like a man asleep and
gently snoring.
“Well,” said the voice at last. “I suppose I had better let you in.”
The alternative had occurred to Gilead, but he thought it politic to
remain silent. There was the sound of a bar clanking down, of a
laboured sigh, and one side of the gate opened, just a jealous
aperture, through which the applicant caught glimpse of a doleful
yard, with a woodshed at its further end, a block or two for chopping
on, as many three-legged stools, a sawyer’s trestle, and everywhere in
littered confusion chips, billets and indiscriminate debris of timber.
“Come in, can’t you,” said the voice, peevishly, and Gilead, slipping
through, found himself face to face with Mr Winsom Wyllie.
He was in an undress of grey flannel. His braces were discarded; his
shirt, open and collarless, drooped in moist folds; his trousers
sagged down over his boots, almost concealing them. Behind, he bore a
much greater resemblance to an exhausted elephant than to any sinister
figure of melodrama. Nor was his obverse prepossessing. A lugubrious,
ponderous man, who took his fleshiness badly; a man who might have
figured for an over-blown clown, seeing how his grizzled hair stood up
from his scalp and his whiskers out from his jaws; a man with a
ridiculous lachrymose mouth, a man whose voice had suety tears in it,
a man who seemed to pity himself profoundly--such was the general
impression conveyed to Gilead. The creature’s adiposity, he was no
less convinced, was no local rising. It was a general upheaval, and
nothing short of a change of constitution would suffice to reduce it.
The stranger, Gilead once entered, closed the gate with a fretful slam
and put up the bar. Then he turned to regard his visitor--the visitor
thought morosely.
“H’m!” he said at last, wearily mopping his brow. “I have committed
myself, and I must go through with it, I suppose. Do you know, young
man, what decided my choice of you out of--my God, I don’t dare recall
the number!--myriads?”
Gilead disclaimed any consciousness of exclusive merit.
“It was the Montaigne,” said the stranger. “I want cheering, I want
sympathy, I want self-forgetfulness; I do _not_ want irresponsible
chatter. The possession, in a refined mind, of qualities suitable to
my needs seemed to speak from your reply, and from your reply alone.
Can you chop wood?”
“I must not say I cannot,” said Gilead modestly; “because I have never
tried.”
“No matter,” said the stranger dispiritedly. “So long as your presence
and example stimulate _me_ to exertion, my purpose is served. I will
be frank with you. The weight upon my bones exactly symbolises another
upon my conscience” (Gilead’s lips tightened). “The two are so
associated, in fact, that, with every ounce of flesh I may lose, my
conscience will be correspondingly and automatically lightened. A
return to reasonable proportions would make me a happy man.”
Gilead regarded the speaker steadily. What despicable villainy was
this, to be so cowed and humbled under the superstition that his
personal bulk was directly attributable to his crimes! So he read the
implication; and he could have laughed, in another mood, over the
retributions exacted by self-indulgence. But that Winsom Wyllie, the
sinister, the demoniac, the masterful, should have resolved himself
into this! Well, all wickedness was vanity, but he had not thought to
encounter a vanity quite so abject.
The stranger turned heavily, and, motioning Gilead to accompany him,
slouched towards the rearward shed.
“Yes,” he said, “my thoughts weigh me down; they are too much for my
single endurance; that was why I wanted a companion to distract me
from them--to take me out of myself.”
There were a couple of blocks and stools standing ready, with
bill-hooks and a plentiful supply of logs waiting to be split. The
stranger took his seat, and Gilead, divesting himself of his coat,
followed his example. The other observed him with a doleful curiosity.
“This is new to you,” he said. “I daresay you are wondering how I come
to have the run of the place. It is closed, as a matter of fact, from
lack of patronage by the unemployed, who nevertheless themselves
declare that they are as numerous and deserving as ever. I hired it
for a week, stipulating that my personal labour should be set against
the rent. If you want to spare your fingers, don’t hold your billet
like that. Watch me.”
For several minutes he hewed and laboured in a perfect frenzy of
energy, and only desisted when he was streaming from every pore.
“Ha!” he said. “I lard the lean earth, like--like whom?”
“Falstaff, I think,” said Gilead.
The stranger looked at him with a slightly stimulated but still rueful
curiosity.
“You are a reader,” he said; “you answer to your own description in
other respects. Why do you call yourself George Barnwell?”
“Why not?” said Gilead stiffly.
“A common thief and highwayman?”
“I never thought of that,” said Gilead unguardedly.
“Didn’t you?” said the stranger languidly--“a pseudonym, as I thought,
and not a very well-chosen one. Now, would you mind telling me--?”
“Assumed, I confess,” said Gilead.
“The guess was mine,” said the stranger. “Your clothes, your
bearing--ah, well! You conceal something?”
“My name.”
“Anything else?”
“My object, perhaps.”
“Indeed? Is not this frankness, now, to be mutual?”
“It was partly,” said Gilead, “that I wished to investigate a very
curious affair. I am a seeker after the truth, a--if I may so put it,
a practical psychologist. My sole scruple was that, in applying for
the post, I risked deposing a more deserving, because a more needy,
candidate.”
“The money was no object to you then?”
“None whatever.”
The other nodded with some melancholy gratification.
“The indifference shall be reciprocal,” he said. “It shall be none to
me. Indeed I could no longer think of insulting your psychology by any
suggestion of payment.”
“Very well,” said Gilead. “I have no wish to tax your conscience in a
fresh matter. What its sensitiveness decrees is sure to be right.”
He spoke with fathomless irony; but, at the word conscience, the
stranger seized his bill-hook and set to chopping again with a
violence that was simply destructive.
“‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt!’” he gasped presently,
pausing in a state of semi-collapse.
He groaned, wrung his brow, and squatting, sunk upon himself like an
unbaked cottage loaf, heaved a dismal sigh and looked up.
“Since we are established on these very intimate and confidential
terms,” he said, “tell me frankly, how does my size strike you?”
“All of a heap,” said Gilead shortly.
The other moaned.
“But less of a heap than when you first entered--O, yes! be candid and
admit it.”
“Why, surely,” began Gilead, with some indignation, “you are not
expecting--”
“When one is excruciatingly conscious of his every ounce avoirdupois,”
interrupted Mr Wyllie miserably, “he knows, if it is no more than a
button that has burst off his waistcoat. Something, however
insignificant, has gone. The question is, how long will it take to run
off the whole?”
“More than a week,” said Gilead. “You’ll have to hire another
yard--several yards; or else adopt other means.”
“It is strange,” said Mr Wyllie, almost weeping, “that the canker of a
corroding conscience should, instead of devouring, blow some men out!”
“It’s the case with the oak-gall,” said Gilead. “Irony is absurd in
commenting on the ways of Nature.”
The stranger glanced at him rather balefully, and resumed his chopping
but languidly.
“I don’t know, after all, that you’ll suit me,” he said.
“Never mind about that at present,” said Gilead. “The business of the
honorarium being waived, this becomes a mere friendly accommodation.”
“But it’s just the friendliness I question,” answered the stranger,
aggrieved.
He laboured for a little in a sullen silence, while Gilead, totally
forgetful of his own inactivity, watched him, pursuing his thoughts
the while.
“Brixton,” he said abstractedly, “is not Norwood; but it neighbours on
it.”
“I perceive,” snapped the other, “that you are quite a traveller.”
Gilead hardly heard him. He was speculating as to how he could most
tellingly introduce the subject of his mission.
“There are butterflies,” he said suddenly and firmly, “in the Zermatt
Valley.”
“There are also, I believe,” said Mr Wyllie, “owls in Athens and coals
at Newcastle.”
He paused in his labour, and glooming round, in a dismally sarcastic
spirit, encountered the eyes of the young man fixed keenly on him.
“Well, sir,” he said; “what then?”
“If wood-chopping failed to reduce your fat,” said Gilead distinctly,
“you might try butterfly hunting.”
“O! might I?”
“And mountain-climbing.”
“Indeed?”
“The pursuit of unprotected females is also, doubtless, conducive to
an active state of body.”
“This may be pleasantry--”
“While a murderous assault or so on a few trusting old gentlemen might
help to take something out of you.”
Mr Wyllie uttered an exclamation, half rose, and sank down again with
a flabby smile.
“I would merely suggest St. Niklaus in the Zermatt Valley as a
suitable headquarters to such operations,” said Gilead. “Do you know
the place at all?”
His companion shook his head.
“This humour, young gentleman,” he said, “is, I presume, of the new
order. I confess it is beyond my perhaps old-fashioned understanding.”
His tone was extremely lofty and courteous, but he appeared, in spite
of it, to wax suddenly very wroth.
“What did you mean, sir,” he cried, “by your allusion to unprotected
females?”
“I refer you to your own conscience, sir,” answered Gilead, as
loftily.
“My conscience, sir,” said the stranger, “acquits me of any but the
most consistently chivalrous attitude, the most respectful, the most
diffident even towards the sex.”
“Then to what,” said Gilead, aghast before this enormous dissembling,
“do you attribute its burden, which corresponds, by your own
confession, with that upon your bones?”
“Now is this depravity or innocence,” cried the stranger,
apostrophising space, “that can discover no pretext for self-reproach
in any courses but those of libertinism?” He faced about on his stool,
puffing and gasping: “I owe it to myself; I owe it more to the
spotless fame of another,” he said, “that this gross slander should
not pass unrefuted. You appear to be a reader, sir. Tell me, have you
ever read ‘Night-Lights’?”
“No,” said Gilead, astonished.
“‘The Glow-worm in the Grass’?”
“No.”
“‘The Evanescence of Evadne’?”
“No.”
The stranger, with a supreme effort, sat up.
“A reader!” he exclaimed scornfully--“a reader! And you will be
telling me next, I suppose, that you have never even heard of Cornelia
Cox!”
“I am bound to confess that I never have,” said Gilead.
The stranger smacked his bill-hook into the block before him, and,
with a mighty struggle, got to his feet.
“What?” he cried hoarsely: “Cornelia, the one, the peerless, the
incomparable, the first novelist of her age--and he does not even know
her name! O, in what nethermost depths of darkness is not the
philistine of our generation capable of enclosing himself! Not to have
heard of Cornelia Cox!”
“Sir,” said Gilead, rising, nettled, in his turn, and moved to an
instant resolution. “I am sorry that my ignorance offends you. But
though I am uninformed as to the lady’s name and works, I can claim
some knowledge of another romancer which may both startle and disturb
you. I allude, sir, to Mr Winsom Wyllie.”
“Well,” said the stranger, for the first time coolly--“what of him?
_I_ did not write the book, nor, I trust, are you presuming to
attribute its authorship to Miss Cox?”
“Book? Authorship?” cried Gilead, staring.
“Certainly,” said the other. “You did not guess? But your ignorance
was excusable in that case. Yes, sir, I confess, reciprocating your
confidence, that my name also was assumed. I had particular
reasons--as who would not have--for concealing my own in a public
advertisement of such a character, and I signed with the first that
occurred to my memory. It was taken from a popular feuilleton which I
had observed in the hands of a young lady by whom I happened to sit
months ago in the twopenny tube. ‘_Winsom Wyllie, Ladykiller_’--that
was, if I remember rightly, the title of the tale, and I borrowed it
haphazard in my emergency.”
Gilead, like one in a dream, put his hand to his brow.
“Would you--would you mind telling me,” he said, “what is your real
name?”
“I have no reason to be ashamed of it, sir,” said the stranger. “It is
Bundy--Emmanuel Bundy.”