When Adam strayed
In Eden's bow'rs,
One little maid
Amused his hours.
He fell! But, friend,
I leave to you
Where he'd have dropped
Had there been two!
--_Paradise Rehypothecated_.
"Now, Florian," said Judge Blodgett, as they sat in Amidon's rooms,
"search yourself, and see if you don't feel a dreamy sense of
familiarity here in these rooms--the feeling that the long-lost heir
has when he crawls down the chimney as a sweep and finds himself in his
ancestral halls, you know."
"Never saw a thing here before," said Amidon, "and have no feeling
except surprise at the elegance about me, and a sneaking fear that
Brassfield may come in at any time and eject us. The fellow had taste,
anyhow!"
"Didn't you recognize anything," went on the judge, "in the streets or
buildings or the general landscape?"
"Nothing."
"Nor in the young lady? Wasn't there a sort of--of music in her voice,
like long-forgotten melodies, you understand--like what the said heir
notices in after years when his mother blunders on to him?"
"Well," said Florian, "her voice is musical, if that's what you
mean--musical and low, and reminds one of the sounds made by a great
master playing his heart out in the lowest notes of the flute; but it
is so far from being familiar to me that I'm quite sure I never heard a
voice like it before."
The judge strode up and down the room perturbedly.
"Why," said he, "it's enough to make a man's hair stand!"
"It does," said Amidon. "What can I say to her?"
"You haven't a piece of property here," said the judge, going on with
the matters uppermost in his mind, "that you could successfully
maintain replevin for, if anybody converted it. They'd ask you on
cross-examination if it was yours, and you'd have to say you didn't
know! And there's a world of property, I find. They could take it all
away from you without your knowing it, if they only knew. Have you any
course mapped out--any plans?"
"To a certain extent, yes," said Florian. "I shall call on her this
evening."
"For help, yes," said the judge. "She must bring Brassfield up, so
that we can find out about some property matters."
"I don't mean that," said Amidon. "I must call on Miss
Waldron--Elizabeth."
"And neglect----" began the judge.
"Everything," said Florian firmly. "This is something that concerns my
honor as a gentleman. While it remains in its present state, I can't
bother with these property matters. Have I an office?"
"Have you!" said the judge. "Well, just wait until you see them."
"And an office force?"
"Confidential manager named Stevens, as per the notes,"; said Judge
Blodgett. "Bookkeeper, assistant bookkeeper and stenographer. Tried
to pump 'em and got frozen out. Yes, you've got an office force."
"Well, then," said Amidon, "we'll go down there in the morning, and
I'll tell this man Stevens--is that what you call him?--to show you all
through the books and things--going to buy or take a partnership, or
something. Then we can go through the business together. We can do it
that way, without being suspected, can't we?"
"Maybe," meditatively, "maybe we can. Take a sort of invoice, hey?
But don't you think we'd better have Brassfield on the witness-stand
for a while this evening? A sort of cramming--coaching--review, on the
eve of trial, you know?"
"No, no!" answered Florian. "No more of that, if it can be avoided."
The judge stroked his mustache in silence for a time.
"See here," asked he finally, "what did we bring madame and the
professor down here for, anyway, I'd like to know?"
"I know," said Amidon, "but, somehow, I feel like getting along without
it if I can. As little of her--of their--services as possible, Judge,
from now on."
"Oh!" said the judge, in a tone of one who suddenly sees the situation;
"all right, Florian, all right. Maybe it's best, maybe it's best.
Abnormal condition, as the professor says, and all that; effect on the
mind, and one thing and another. Yes--yes--yes!"
"If I have any duties to perform here, Judge, you must help me to keep
straight. I've never had much tendency to go wrong, you know, but that
was for lack of temptation, don't you think, Blodgett?"
"Well, well, Florian, I can't say as to that; can't say. Yes--and say!
You'll want to go over to the Waldron residence this evening. I'll
take you out and show you the house. By George! It must seem
extraordinarily odd to walk about among things you are supposed to know
like a book, and to be, in fact, a perfect stranger. Dante could have
used that idea, if it had occurred to him."
"An idea for Dante, indeed!" thought Amidon, as he walked toward the
house, which, from afar, the judge had pointed out to him. "For the
_Inferno_: a soul thrown into a realm full of its friends and enemies,
its loves and hates, shorn of memory, of all sense of familiarity, of
all its habits, stripped of all the protection of habitude. For the
_Inferno_, indeed!--Now this must be the house, with the white columns
running up to the top of the second story; crossing the ravine and
losing sight of it for a few minutes makes even the house look
different. Outside, I can get accustomed to it, in this five-minute
inspection. But, inside--oh, to be invisible while I get used to it!
Well, here goes!"
"Ding-a-ling-ting-ting!" rang the bell somewhere back in the recesses
of the house, and the footsteps of a man approached the door. Amidon
was frightened. He had expected either Elizabeth herself, or a maid to
take his card, and was prepared for such an encounter only. A little
dark, bright-eyed man opened the door and seized his hand.
"Why, Brassfield, how are you?" he exclaimed. "Heard you'd got back.
Sorry I couldn't meet you in New York. Got my telegram, I suppose?"
"I just called," said Amidon, "to see Miss Waldron."
"Oh, yes!" said the little man; "nothing but her, now. But she isn't
here. Hasn't been for over a week. Nobody here but me. Can't you
stay a while? Say, 'Gene, we put Slater through the lodge while you
were gone, and he knows he's in, all right enough. Bulliwinkle took
that part of yours in the catacombs scene, and you ought to have heard
the bones of the early Christians rattle when he bellered out the
lecture. 'Here, among the eternal shades of the deep caves of death,
walked once the great exemplars of our Ancient Order!' Why, it would
raise the hair on a bronze statue. And when, in the second, they
condemned him to the Tarpeian Rock, and swung him off into space in the
Chest of the Clanking Chains, he howled so that the Sovereign Pontiff
made 'em saw off on it, and take him out--and he could hardly stand to
receive the Grand and Awful Secret. Limp as a rag! But impressed?
Well, he said it was the greatest piece of ritualistic work he ever
saw, and he's seen most of 'em. Go to any lodges in New York?"
"No," said Amidon, who had never joined a secret order in his life,
"and do you think we ought to talk these things out here?"
"No, maybe not," said the Joiner; "but nobody's about, you know. Come
in, can't you?"
"No, I must really go, thank you. By the way," said Florian, "where
does Miss--er--I must go, at once, I think!"
"Oh, I know how it is," went on his unknown intimate; "nothing but
Bess, now. Might as well bid you good-by, and give you a dimit from
all the clubs and lodges, until six months after the wedding. You'll
be back by that time, thirstier than ever. By the way, that reminds
me: the gang's going to give you a blow-out at the club. Kind of an
_Auld lang syne_ business, 'champagny-vather an' cracked ice,' chimes
at midnight, won't go home till morning, all good fellows and the rest
of it. Edgington spoke to you about it, I s'pose?"
"Only in a general way," replied Amidon, wondering who and what
Edgington would turn out to be. "I don't know yet how my engagements
will be----"
"Oh, nothing must stand in the way of that, you know," the little man
went on. "Why, gad! the tenderest feelings of brotherly---- Oh, you
don't mean it! But I mustn't keep you. Bessie told me that the plans
for your house have come. She's got 'em over there, now. I say, old
man, I envy you your evening. Like two birds arranging the nest.
Sorry you can't come in; but, good night. And, say! Your little
strawberry blonde is in town! Wouldn't that jar you?"
"Heavens!" ejaculated Amidon. "How am I ever to get through with this?"
The genuine agony in Florian's tones fixed the attention of the little
man, and seemed to arouse some terrible suspicion.
"Why, 'Gene," said he, "you don't mean that there's anything in this
blonde matter, do you, that will---- By George! And she's a sister of
one of the most prominent A. O. C. M.'s of Pittsburg--and you remember
our solemn obligation!"
"No," said Amidon, "I don't!"
"What! You don't!"
"No!" said Florian. "I've forgotten it!"
"Forgotten it!" said his questioner, recoiling as if in horror.
"Forgotten it! And with the sister of the Past Sovereign Pontiff of
Pittsburg Lodge No. 863! I tell you, Brassfield, I don't believe it.
I prefer to think you're bughouse! Cracked! Out of your head! But,
'Gene," added his unknown brother, in a stage-whisper, "if there has
been anything between you and anything comes up, you know, Jim Alvord,
for one, knowing and understanding your temptations--for the strawberry
blondes are the very devil--will stand by you until the frost gathers
six inches deep on the very hinges of---- Say, Mary's coming in at the
side door. Good night! Keep a stiff upper lip; stay by Bess, and I'll
stay by you, obligation or no obligation. 'F. D. and B.', you know:
death, perhaps, but no desertion! So long! See you to-morrow."
And Amidon walked from the house of his unfamiliar chum, knowing that
his sweetheart but once seen was waiting in her unknown home for him to
come to her, and had as a basis for conversation the plans for their
house. He could imagine her with the blue-prints unrolled, examining
them with all a woman's interest in such things, and himself discussing
with her this house in which she expected him to place her as mistress.
And the position she thought she held in his heart--vacant, or---- He
leaned against a fence, in bewilderment approaching despair. His mind
dwelt with horror on the woman whom he could think of only under the
coarse appellation of the strawberry blonde. Was there a real crime
here to take the place of the imagined putting away of Brassfield?
Brassfield! The very name sickened him. "Strawberry blondes, indeed!"
thought Florian; and "Brassfield, the perjured villain!" Certain names
used by the little man in the wrong house came to him as having been
mentioned in the notes of the professor and the judge. Alvord, the
slangy little chap who took so familiar an attitude toward him--this
was the judge's "ministerial" friend! Yet, had there not been mention
of "ritualistic work" and "Early Christians" in his conversation? And
this woman of whom he spoke,--it took no great keenness of perception
to see that the "strawberry blonde" must be the "child of six or eight
years" whom he had called "Daisy," and sometimes "Strawberry!" Here
was confirmation of Alvord's suspicion, if his allusion to the
violation of an "obligation" expressed suspicion. Here was a situation
from which every fiber of Amidon's nature revolted, seen from any
angle, whether the viewpoint of the careful banker and pillar of
society, or that of the poetic dreamer waiting for his predestined mate.
In a paroxysm of dread, he started for the hotel. Then he walked down
the street toward the railway station, with the thought of boarding the
first train out of town. This resolve, however, he changed, and I am
glad to say that it was not the thought of the fortune of which Judge
Blodgett had spoken that altered his resolution, but that of the letter
which greeted his return to consciousness as Florian Amidon, and the
image of the dark-eyed girl with the low voice and the strong figure,
who had written it, and who waited for him, somewhere, with the roll of
plans. So he began searching again for the house with the white
columns; and found it on the next corner beyond the one he had first
tried.
Elizabeth sat in a fit of depression at the strangeness of Mr.
Brassfield's conduct--a depression which deepened as the evening wore
on with no visit from him. She sprang to her feet and pressed both
hands to her bosom, at the ring of the door-bell, ran lightly to the
door and listened as the servant greeted Mr. Brassfield, and then
hurried back to her seat by the grate, and became so absorbed in her
book that she was oblivious of his being shown into the room, until the
maid had retired, leaving him standing at gaze, his brow beaded with
sweat, his face pale and his hands unsteady. The early Christian had
entered on his martyrdom.