“Well, it’s your own fault,” Mark replied to that, “if you make me
take advantage of you.” Winch had withdrawn his hand, which was back,
violently shaking keys or money, in his trousers pocket; and in this
position he had abruptly a pause, a sensible, absence, that might have
represented either some odd drop of attention, some turn-off to another
thought, or just simply the sudden act of listening. His guest had
indeed himself--under suggestion--the impression of a sound. “Mayn’t you
perhaps--if you hear something--have a call?”
Mark had said it so lightly, however, that he was the more struck with
his host’s appearing to turn just paler; and, with it, the latter now
_was_ listening. “You hear something?”
“I thought _you_ did.” Winch himself, on Mark’s own pressure of the
outside bell, had opened the door of the apartment--an indication then,
it sufficiently appeared, that Sunday afternoons were servants’, or
attendants’, or even trained nurses’ holidays. It had also marked the
stage of his convalescence, and to that extent--after his first flush
of surprise--had but smoothed Monteith’s way. At present he barely gave
further attention; detaching himself as under some odd cross-impulse,
he had quitted the spot and then taken, in the wide room, a restless
turn--only, however, to revert in a moment to his friend’s just-uttered
deprecation of the danger of boring him. “If I make you take advantage
of me--that is blessedly talk to me--it’s exactly what I want to do.
Talk to me--talk to me!” He positively waved it on; pulling up again,
however, in his own talk, to say with a certain urgency: “Hadn’t you
better sit down?”
Mark, who stayed before the fire, couldn’t but excuse himself.
“Thanks--I’m very well so. I think of things and I fidget.”
Winch stood a moment with his eyes on the ground. “Are you very sure?”
“Quite--I’m all right if you don’t mind.”
“Then as you like!” With which, shaking to extravagance again his long
legs, Newton had swung off--only with a movement that, now his back was
turned, affected his visitor as the most whimsical of all the forms of
his rather unnatural manner. He was curiously different with his back
turned, as Mark now for the first time saw it--dangling and somewhat
wavering, as from an excess of uncertainty of gait; and this impression
was so strange, it created in our friend, uneasily and on the spot, such
a need of explanation, that his speech was stayed long enough to give
Winch time to turn round again. The latter had indeed by this moment
reached one of the limits of the place, the wide studio bay, where he
paused, his back to the light and his face afresh presented, to let his
just passingly depressed and quickened eyes take in as much as possible
of the large floor, range over it with such brief freedom of search
as the disposition of the furniture permitted. He was looking for
something, though the betrayed reach of vision was but of an instant.
Mark caught it, however, and with his own sensibility all in vibration,
found himself feeling at once that it meant something and that what it
meant was connected with his entertainer’s slightly marked appeal to
him, the appeal of a moment before, not to remain standing. Winch knew
by this time quite easily enough that he was hanging fire; which meant
that they were suddenly facing each other across the wide space with a
new consciousness.
Everything had changed--changed extraordinarily with the mere turning
of that gentleman’s back, the treacherous aspect of which its owner
couldn’t surely have suspected. If the question was of the pitch of
their sensibility, at all events, it wouldn’t be Mark’s that should
vibrate to least purpose. Visibly it had come to his host that something
had within the few instants remarkably happened, but there glimmered on
him an induction that still made him keep his own manner. Newton himself
might now resort to any manner he liked. His eyes had raked the floor to
recover the position of something dropped or misplaced, and something,
above all, awkward or compromising; and he had wanted his companion not
to command this scene from the hearth-rug, the hearthrug where he had
been just before holding him, hypnotising him to blindness, _because_
the object in question would there be most exposed to sight Mark
embraced this with a further drop--while the apprehension penetrated--of
his power to go on, and with an immense desire at the same time that his
eyes should seem only to look at his friend; who broke out now, for that
matter, with a fresh appeal. “Aren’t you going to take advantage of me,
man--aren’t you going to _take_ it?”
Everything had changed, we have noted, and nothing could more have
proved it than the fact that, by the same turn, sincerity of desire
had dropped out of Winch’s chords, while irritation, sharp and almost
imperious, had come in. “That’s because he sees I see something!” Mark
said to himself; but he had no need to add that it shouldn’t prevent his
seeing more--for the simple reason that, in a miraculous fashion, this
was exactly what he did do in glaring out the harder. It was beyond
explanation, but the very act of blinking thus in an attempt at showy
steadiness became one and the same thing with an optical excursion
lasting the millionth of a minute and making him aware that the edge of
a rug, at the point where an arm-chair, pushed a little out of position,
over-straddled it, happened just not wholly to have covered in something
small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact, in spite of the
strong toe-tip surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift Our
gentleman, from where he hovered, and while looking straight at the
master of the scene, yet saw, as by the tiny flash of a reflection from
fine metal, _under_ the chair. What he recognised, or at least guessed
at, as sinister, made him for a moment turn cold, and that chill was on
him while Winch again addressed him--as differently as possible from any
manner yet used. “I beg of you in God’s name to talk to me--to _talk_ to
me!”
It had the ring of pure alarm and anguish, but was by this turn at least
more human than the dazzling glitter of intelligence to which the poor
man had up to now been treating him. “It’s you, my good friend, who are
in deep trouble,” Mark was accordingly quick to reply, “and I ask your
pardon for being so taken up with my own sorry business.”
“Of course I’m in deep trouble”--with which Winch came nearer again;
“but turning you on was exactly what I wanted.”
Mark Monteith, at this, couldn’t, for all his rising dismay, but
laugh out; his sense of the ridiculous so swallowed up, for that brief
convulsion, his sense of the sinister. Of such conivence in pain,
it seemed, was the fact of another’s pain, and of so much worth again
disinterested sympathy! “Your interest was then----?”
“My interest was in your being interesting. For you _are!_ And my
nerves--!” said Newton Winch with a face from which the mystifying
smile had vanished, yet in which distinction, as Mark so persistently
appreciated it, still sat in the midst of ravage.
Mark wondered and wondered--he made strange things out. “Your nerves
have needed company.” He could lay his hand on him now, even as shortly
before he had felt Winch’s own pressure of possession and detention. “As
good for you yourself, that--or still better,” he went on--“than I and
my grievance were to have found you. Talk to we, talk to we, Newton
Winch!” he added with an immense inspiration of charity.
“That’s a different matter--that others but too much can do! But I’ll
say this. If you want to go to Phil Bloodgood----!”
“Well?” said Mark as he stopped. He stopped, and Mark had now a hand on
each of his shoulders and held him at arm’s-length, held him with a fine
idea that was not disconnected from the sight of the small neat weapon
he had been fingering in the low luxurious morocco chair--it was of the
finest orange colour--and then had laid beside him on the carpet; where,
after he had admitted his visitor, his presence of mind coming back to
it and suggesting that he couldn’t pick it up without making it more
conspicuous, he had thought, by some swing of the foot or other casual
manoeuvre, to dissimulate its visibility.
They were at close quarters now as not before and Winch perfectly
passive, with eyes that somehow had no shadow of a secret left and with
the betrayal to the sentient hands that grasped him of an intense, an
extraordinary general tremor. To Mark’s challenge he opposed afresh a
brief silence, but the very quality of it, with his face speaking, was
that of a gaping wound. “Well, you needn’t take _that_ trouble. You see
I’m such another.”
“Such another as Phil-----?”
He didn’t blink. “I don’t know for sure, but I guess I’m worse.”
“Do you mean you’re guilty-----?”
“I mean I shall be wanted. Only I’ve stayed to take it.”
Mark threw back his head, but only tightened his hands. He inexpressibly
understood, and nothing in life had ever been so strange and dreadful to
him as his thus helping himself by a longer and straighter stretch,
as it were, to the monstrous sense of his friend’s “education.” It had
been, in its immeasurable action, the education of business, of which
the fruits were all around them. Yet prodigious was the interest, for
prodigious truly--it seemed to loom before Mark--must have been the
system. “To ‘take’ it?” he echoed; and then, though faltering a little,
“To take what?”
He had scarce spoken when a long sharp sound shrilled in from the outer
door, seeming of so high and peremptory a pitch that with the start it
gave him his grasp of his host’s shoulders relaxed an instant, though to
the effect of no movement in _them_ but what came from just a sensibly
intenser vibration of the whole man. “For _that_!” said Newton Winch.
“Then you’ve known-----?”
“I’ve expected. You’ve helped me to wait.” And then as Mark gave an
ironic wail: “You’ve tided me over. My condition has _wanted_ somebody
or something. Therefore, to complete this service, will you be so good
as to open the door?”
Deep in the eyes Mark looked him, and still to the detection of no
glimmer of the earlier man in the depths. The earlier man had been what
he invidiously remembered--yet would _he_ had been the whole simpler
story! Then he moved his own eyes straight to the chair under which
the revolver lay and which was but a couple of yards away. He felt his
companion take this consciousness in, and it determined in them another
long, mute exchange. “What do you mean to do?”
“Nothing.”
“On your honour?”
“_My_ ‘honour’?” his host returned with an accent that he felt even as
it sounded he should never forget.
It brought to his own face a crimson flush--he dropped his guarding
hands. Then as for a last look at him: “You’re wonderful!”
“We _are_ wonderful,” said Newton Winch, while, simultaneously with the
words, the pressed electric bell again and for a longer time pierced the
warm cigaretted air.
Mark turned, threw up his arms, and it was only when he had passed
through the vestibule and laid his hand on the door-knob that the
horrible noise dropped. The next moment he was face to face with two
visitors, a nondescript personage in a high hat and an astrakhan collar
and cuffs, and a great belted constable, a splendid massive New York
“officer” of the type he had had occasion to wonder at much again in the
course of his walk, the type so by itself--his wide observation quite
suggested--among those of the peacemakers of the earth. The pair stepped
straight in--no word was said; but as he closed the door behind them
Mark heard the infallible crack of a discharged pistol and, so nearly
with it as to make all one violence, the sound of a great fall; things
the effect of which was to lift him, as it were, with his company,
across the threshold of the room in a shorter time than that taken
by this record of the fact. But their rush availed little; Newton was
stretched on his back before the fire; he had held the weapon horribly
to his temple, and his upturned face was disfigured. The emissaries
of the law, looking down at him, exhaled simultaneously a gruff
imprecation, and then while the worthy in the high hat bent over the
subject of their visit the one in the helmet raised a severe pair of
eyes to Mark. “Don’t you think, sir, you might have prevented it?”
Mark took a hundred things in, it seemed to him--things of the scene,
of the moment, and of all the strange moments before; but one appearance
more vividly even than the others stared out at him. “I really think I
must practically have caused it.”