The need of lucre never looms so large
As when 'tis gotten in some devious way:
It mitigates the blackness of the charge
That every nether level yielded pay.
The man who dares e'en to the prison's marge
Should bring back what he went for--or should stay!
The need of lucre never looms so large
As when 'tis gotten in some devious way.
Men can o'erlook the stain upon the targe,
If from its boss the jewel shoots its ray;
Or blood upon the pirate's sable barge
Covered by silks' and satins' bright array--
The need of lucre never looms so large
As when 'tis gotten in some devious way.
--_Rondels of the Curb_.
Morning passed to noon, and the day aged into afternoon, before Amidon
rose from the deep sleep which (according to Le Claire's prediction)
followed his evening with her and the professor. With that odd sense
of bewilderment which the early riser feels at this violation of habit,
he went into the cafe for his belated breakfast. Impatient to finish
the meal so that he might haste to the promised interview, he studied
the menu, and with his eye scouted the room for a waiter--failing to
bestow even the slightest glance on a man seated opposite. This fact,
however, did not prevent the stranger from scrutinizing Amidon's face,
his dress, and even his hands, as if each minutest detail were vitally
important. He even dropped his napkin so as to make an excuse for
looking under the table, and thus getting a good view of Florian's
boots. Finally he spoke, as if continuing a broken-off conversation.
"As I said a while ago," he remarked, "Browning falls short of being a
poet, just as a marble-cutter falls short of being a sculptor. You
were quoting _Love Among the Ruins_, as the train stopped at Elm
Springs Junction; or was it _Evelyn_----"
Amidon's eyes, during this apparently aimless disquisition, had been
drawn from his meal to the speaker. He saw an elderly gentleman,
clothed in the black frock-coat and black tie of the rural lawyer of
the old school. His eyes shot keen and kindly glances from the deep
ambush of great white brows, and his mouth was hidden under a snowy
mustache. His features made up for a somewhat marked poverty of shape
by a luxuriance of ruddy color, the culminating point of which was
to be found in the broad and fleshy nose. His voice, soft and gentle
when he began, swelled out, as he spoke, into something of the
orator's orotund. When Amidon looked at him, the speaker returned
the gaze in full measure, and leaning across the table, pointed his
finger at his auditor, and slowly uttered the words, "--as--the
train--stopped--at--Elm Springs Junction!"
"Why, Judge Blodgett!" exclaimed Amidon, "can this be you?"
"Can it be I?" exclaimed the judge. "Can it be me! No difficulty
about that. Never mind the handshaking just yet--after a while, maybe.
When it comes to the can-it-be part, how about you? How about the past
five years, and Jennie Baggs keeping a place for you every meal for all
this time, up to the present hour? I tell you, Florian, letting me
down in that case of Amidon versus Cattermole, without a scrap of
evidence, and getting me licked by a young practitioner who studied in
my office, was bad--was damnable; but an only sister, Florian! and not
one word in five years!"
"She's well, then, Jennie is?"
"She's as well, Florian, as a woman with the sorrow you've brought to
her, and the mother of two infants, can be. But why do you ask?--why
do you ask?--why is it necessary to go through the work of surplusage
of asking?"
"Children, eh?" said Florian. "Good for Jennie! And how's Baggs?"
"Oh, Baggs, yes--why, Baggs has come through it all with his health
about unimpaired, Baggs has! But no Baggs court of inquiry is going to
switch me off the examination I'm now conducting; and I tell you, Mr.
Amidon, you can't dodge me. What double life took you away from home,
and property, and everything?"
"Judge Blodgett," said Mr. Amidon, in that low voice which, with the
English language as the medium of communication, is known as the
danger-signal the world over, "the term 'double life' has a meaning
which is insulting. Don't use it again."
"Well, well, Florian," said the judge, evidently pleased, "sustaining
the motion to strike that out, the question remains. You aren't
obliged to answer, you know; but you know, too, what not answering it
means."
"Judge," said Amidon, after a long pause, "to say that I don't know
where I have been, or what I have been doing, since June
twenty-seventh, 1896, until yesterday morning when I came to my senses
in a moving sleeping-car, won't satisfy you; but it's the truth."
The judge looked off toward the ceiling in the manner of a jurist
considering some complex argument, but was silent.
"Now I have found a way," said Amidon, "of having all this explained.
Come with me, and let's find out. There may be complications; I may
need your help. You are the one man in all the world that I was just
wishing for."
"Complications, eh?" said the judge. "Well, well! Let us see!"
And now he dropped into the old manner so well known to his companion
as his office style. Piece by piece, he drew from Amidon his story.
He dropped back to previous parts of the narrative, and elicited
repetitions. He slurred over crucial points as if he did not see their
bearing, and then artfully assumed minute variations of the tale, but
was always corrected.
"The prosecution is obliged to rest its case," said he, at last.
"You're not crazy, or all my studies in diseases of the mind have done
me no good. Your story hangs together as no fiction could. To believe
you, brands us both as lunatics. Come on and let's see what your
mesmerist frauds have to say. As a specialist in facts, I'm a drowning
man catching at a straw. Come on: mesmerism, or astrology, or Moqui
snake-dance, it's all one to me!"
Up the stairs again, this time with Judge Blodgett, warily snuffing the
air, and shy of both Bohemia and Benares. Into the presence of Madame
le Claire, now gowned appropriately for the morning, and
looking--extraordinary, it is true, with her party-colored hair and
luminous eyes--but not so jungly as when she greeted the despairing
sight of Amidon the night before.
"Madame, and sir," said the judge, "as Mr. Amidon's friend and legal
adviser, I am here to protect his interests."
"So! Goot!" said the professor. "Bud te matter under gonsideration is
psychical, nod beguniary. Howefer, if you are interested in te realm
of te supliminal, if you care for mental science----"
"Sir," said the judge, "I may almost claim to be a specialist (so far
as a country practitioner is permitted to specialize) in senile and
paretic dementia, since I had the honor to represent the proponents in
the will case of Snoke versus Snoke. But it's only fair to say that I
regard hypnotism as humbug--only fair."
"Goot, goot!" said the professor delightedly. "To temonstrate to an
honest ant indellichent skeptic, is te rarest of brifileches. Ve vill
now broceed to temonstrate. Here is our friendt Herr Amidon avokened
in a car after fife years of lostness; he has anodder man's dotes,
anodder man's dicket, letters--unt all. He gomes to Madame le Claire
ant Blatherwick. He is hypnotized out of te Amidon blane of being, ant
into anodder. He is mate to gife himself avay. Now ve vill broceed to
dell aboudt his life since he vas lost--is it a dest, no?"
"Huh!" snorted the judge.
"Go on," cried Amidon; "tell me the story!"
"Vell," said the professor, "for four veeks after you left Elm Springs
Chunction, you vandered--not, Clara?"
"Wandered," said Clara, "and to so many places that I can't remember
them. Then you found oil, or traces of it--I can't get that very
plainly--on a farm at Bunn's Ferry, Pennsylvania; and bought an option
on the farm. Then you opened an office in Bellevale, and have been
there in the oil business ever since.
"How's he been doin' financially?" interjected the judge.
"He has made a fortune," said Clara. "I believe him to be one of the
principal men of the town, socially and in a business way. He didn't
tell me this, but we think the circumstances seem to indicate it."
"Te saircumstances," said the professor, filling a pause, "show it."
"How is it," said the judge, "that no one has ever heard of his
Bellevale career out in Hazelhurst, if he's so prominent? We read, out
there, and once in a while one of us goes outside the corporation."
"His name," said Madame le Claire, "in Bellevale is not Florian Amidon."
"What is it?" cried Amidon. "Tell it to me!"
Madame le Claire restrained him with a calm glance.
"It is Eugene Brassfield," said she.
"It is your own dotes," cried the professor gleefully, "your own
dicket, your own gorrespondence!"
Amidon was feeling in his breast-pocket for something. He withdrew his
hand, holding in it a letter, and looked from it to Madame le Claire
questioningly.
"Oh, yes!" said she, not quite in her usual manner, "it's yours. It's
from Miss Elizabeth Waldron, of Bellevale, your affianced wife."
"Aha!" said the judge. "Now will you get mad when I speak of a double
life? Engaged, hey?"
"I never saw the--the lady in my life," was the reply; "so how can I
be--can I be--engaged to her?"
"In te Amidon blane of gonsciousness," said the professor, "you are
stranchers. In te Brassfield pairsonality, you are:--_Gott im Himmel_,
you are stuck on her, stuck on her--not, Clara? Vas he not gracey?
Only Clara cut it short in te temonstration; but as a luffer, in te
Brassfield blane, you are vot you call hot stuff."
"You had better read the gentlemen your notes," said Madame le Claire
coldly. "And please excuse me. I hope to see you both again." And
with a sinuous bow, she swept from the room.
Blodgett, keenly analytical, lost no word of the professor's notes.
Florian sat with the letter from Miss Waldron in his hand, lost in
thought. Sometimes his face burned with blushes, sometimes it paled
with anxiety. His eyes ran over the letter full of sweet ardors; and
when he thought of replying to them--or leaving them unanswered--his
brow went moist and his heart sick. What should he do? What could he
do?
When they returned to the hotel, the judge was in a fever of excitement.
"I tell you, Florian," said he, "I believe the professor is right about
this. It seems that there are precedents, you know--cases on all-fours
with yours. When I went to the telephone, up there, I called up Stacy
and Stacy's and asked 'em to get me Dun's and Bradstreet's report on
your Bellevale business. It ought to be up here pretty soon. There
may be something down there worth looking after, and needing attention."
"Perhaps," groaned Amidon. "Do you know that I'm engaged----"
"One of the things I referred to," said the judge.
"--to a lady, down there, whom I shouldn't know if I were to meet her
out in the hall? If I go back to Hazelhurst, she is put under a cloud
as a deserted woman--to say nothing of her feelings. And if I go back
to Bellevale--my God, Judge, how can I go back, and take my place in a
society where every one knows me, and I know nobody; and be a lover to
a girl who may be--anything, you know; but who has the highest sort of
claims on me, and a nature, I'm sure, capable of the keenest suffering
or pleasure--how can I?"
"Message, sir, from Stacy and Stacy," said a messenger boy at the door.
Judge Blodgett tore open the envelope, and read the telegraphic reports.
"M--m--m----Y--e--es," said he. "It'll take diplomacy, Florian,
diplomacy. But, if these reports are to be trusted, and I guess they
are, you've got about ten times as much at Bellevale as you have at
Hazelhurst. And, as you say, the lady has claims. As an honorable
man--an engaged man, who has received the plighted troth of a pure
young heart--and a good financier, this Bellevale life demands
resumption at your hands. Prepare, fellow citizen, to meet the
difficulties of the situation."