The bell rang--she remembered it afterward--with a loud thrilling note. It
was what they used to call the “visitor’s ring”; not the tentative tinkle
of a neighbor dropping in to borrow a sauce-pan or discuss parochial
incidents, but a decisive summons from the outer world.
Miss Anson put down her knitting and listened. She sat up-stairs now,
making her rheumatism an excuse for avoiding the rooms below. Her interests
had insensibly adjusted themselves to the perspective of her neighbors’
lives, and she wondered--as the bell re-echoed--if it could mean that Mrs.
Heminway’s baby had come. Conjecture had time to ripen into certainty, and
she was limping toward the closet where her cloak and bonnet hung, when her
little maid fluttered in with the announcement: “A gentleman to see the
house.”
“The _House_?”
“Yes, m’m. I don’t know what he means,” faltered the messenger, whose
memory did not embrace the period when such announcements were a daily part
of the domestic routine.
Miss Anson glanced at the proffered card. The name it bore--_Mr. George
Corby_--was unknown to her, but the blood rose to her languid cheek.
“Hand me my Mechlin cap, Katy,” she said, trembling a little, as she laid
aside her walking stick. She put her cap on before the mirror, with rapid
unsteady touches. “Did you draw up the library blinds?” she breathlessly
asked.
She had gradually built up a wall of commonplace between herself and her
illusions, but at the first summons of the past filial passion swept away
the frail barriers of expediency.
She walked down-stairs so hurriedly that her stick clicked like a girlish
heel; but in the hall she paused, wondering nervously if Katy had put a
match to the fire. The autumn air was cold and she had the reproachful
vision of a visitor with elderly ailments shivering by her inhospitable
hearth. She thought instinctively of the stranger as a survivor of the days
when such a visit was a part of the young enthusiast’s itinerary.
The fire was unlit and the room forbiddingly cold; but the figure which, as
Miss Anson entered, turned from a lingering scrutiny of the book-shelves,
was that of a fresh-eyed sanguine youth clearly independent of any
artificial caloric. She stood still a moment, feeling herself the victim of
some anterior impression that made this robust presence an insubstantial
thing; but the young man advanced with an air of genial assurance which
rendered him at once more real and more reminiscent.
“Why this, you know,” he exclaimed, “is simply immense!”
The words, which did not immediately present themselves as slang to Miss
Anson’s unaccustomed ear, echoed with an odd familiarity through the
academic silence.
“The room, you know, I mean,” he explained with a comprehensive gesture.
“These jolly portraits, and the books--that’s the old gentleman himself
over the mantelpiece, I suppose?--and the elms outside, and--and the whole
business. I do like a congruous background--don’t you?”
His hostess was silent. No one but Hewlett Winsloe had ever spoken of her
grandfather as “the old gentleman.”
“It’s a hundred times better than I could have hoped,” her visitor
continued, with a cheerful disregard of her silence. “The seclusion, the
remoteness, the philosophic atmosphere--there’s so little of that kind
of flavor left! I should have simply hated to find that he lived over
a grocery, you know.--I had the deuce of a time finding out where he
_did_ live,” he began again, after another glance of parenthetical
enjoyment. “But finally I got on the trail through some old book on Brook
Farm. I was bound I’d get the environment right before I did my article.”
Miss Anson, by this time, had recovered sufficient self-possession to seat
herself and assign a chair to her visitor.
“Do I understand,” she asked slowly, following his rapid eye about the
room, “that you intend to write an article about my grandfather?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Mr. Corby genially responded; “that is, if
you’re willing to help me; for I can’t get on without your help,” he added
with a confident smile.
There was another pause, during which Miss Anson noticed a fleck of dust on
the faded leather of the writing-table and a fresh spot of discoloration in
the right-hand upper corner of Raphael Morghen’s “Parnassus.”
“Then you believe in him?” she said, looking up. She could not tell what
had prompted her; the words rushed out irresistibly.
“Believe in him?” Corby cried, springing to his feet. “Believe in Orestes
Anson? Why, I believe he’s simply the greatest--the most stupendous--the
most phenomenal figure we’ve got!”
The color rose to Miss Anson’s brow. Her heart was beating passionately.
She kept her eyes fixed on the young man’s face, as though it might vanish
if she looked away.
“You--you mean to say this in your article?” she asked.
“Say it? Why, the facts will say it,” he exulted. “The baldest kind of a
statement would make it clear. When a man is as big as that he doesn’t need
a pedestal!”
Miss Anson sighed. “People used to say that when I was young,” she
murmured. “But now--“
Her visitor stared. “When you were young? But how did they know--when the
thing hung fire as it did? When the whole edition was thrown back on his
hands?”
“The whole edition--what edition?” It was Miss Anson’s turn to stare.
“Why, of his pamphlet--_the_ pamphlet--the one thing that counts, that
survives, that makes him what he is! For heaven’s sake,” he tragically
adjured her, “don’t tell me there isn’t a copy of it left!”
Miss Anson was trembling slightly. “I don’t think I understand what you
mean,” she faltered, less bewildered by his vehemence than by the strange
sense of coming on an unexplored region in the very heart of her dominion.
“Why, his account of the _amphioxus_, of course! You can’t mean that
his family didn’t know about it--that _you_ don’t know about it? I came
across it by the merest accident myself, in a letter of vindication that
he wrote in 1830 to an old scientific paper; but I understood there were
journals--early journals; there must be references to it somewhere in the
‘twenties. He must have been at least ten or twelve years ahead of Yarrell;
and he saw the whole significance of it, too--he saw where it led to. As
I understand it, he actually anticipated in his pamphlet Saint Hilaire’s
theory of the universal type, and supported the hypothesis by describing
the notochord of the _amphioxus_ as a cartilaginous vertebral column.
The specialists of the day jeered at him, of course, as the specialists in
Goethe’s time jeered at the plant-metamorphosis. As far as I can make out,
the anatomists and zoologists were down on Dr. Anson to a man; that was why
his cowardly publishers went back on their bargain. But the pamphlet must
be here somewhere--he writes as though, in his first disappointment, he had
destroyed the whole edition; but surely there must be at least one copy
left?”
His scientific jargon was as bewildering as his slang; and there were even
moments in his discourse when Miss Anson ceased to distinguish between
them; but the suspense with which he continued to gaze on her acted as a
challenge to her scattered thoughts.
“The _amphioxus_,” she murmured, half-rising. “It’s an animal, isn’t
it--a fish? Yes, I think I remember.” She sank back with the inward look of
one who retraces some lost line of association.
Gradually the distance cleared, the details started into life. In her
researches for the biography she had patiently followed every ramification
of her subject, and one of these overgrown paths now led her back to
the episode in question. The great Orestes’s title of “Doctor” had in
fact not been merely the spontaneous tribute of a national admiration;
he had actually studied medicine in his youth, and his diaries, as his
granddaughter now recalled, showed that he had passed through a brief phase
of anatomical ardor before his attention was diverted to super-sensual
problems. It had indeed seemed to Paulina, as she scanned those early
pages, that they revealed a spontaneity, a freshness of feeling somehow
absent from his later lucubrations--as though this one emotion had reached
him directly, the others through some intervening medium. In the excess of
her commemorative zeal she had even struggled through the unintelligible
pamphlet to which a few lines in the journal had bitterly directed her. But
the subject and the phraseology were alien to her and unconnected with her
conception of the great man’s genius; and after a hurried perusal she had
averted her thoughts from the episode as from a revelation of failure.
At length she rose a little unsteadily, supporting herself against the
writing-table. She looked hesitatingly about the room; then she drew a key
from her old-fashioned reticule and unlocked a drawer beneath one of the
book-cases. Young Corby watched her breathlessly. With a tremulous hand she
turned over the dusty documents that seemed to fill the drawer. “Is this
it?” she said, holding out a thin discolored volume.
He seized it with a gasp. “Oh, by George,” he said, dropping into the
nearest chair.
She stood observing him strangely as his eye devoured the mouldy pages.
“Is this the only copy left?” he asked at length, looking up for a moment
as a thirsty man lifts his head from his glass.
“I think it must be. I found it long ago, among some old papers that my
aunts were burning up after my grandmother’s death. They said it was of no
use--that he’d always meant to destroy the whole edition and that I ought
to respect his wishes. But it was something he had written; to burn it was
like shutting the door against his voice--against something he had once
wished to say, and that nobody had listened to. I wanted him to feel that I
was always here, ready to listen, even when others hadn’t thought it worth
while; and so I kept the pamphlet, meaning to carry out his wish and
destroy it before my death.”
Her visitor gave a groan of retrospective anguish. “And but for me--but for
to-day--you would have?”
“I should have thought it my duty.”
“Oh, by George--by George,” he repeated, subdued afresh by the inadequacy
of speech.
She continued to watch him in silence. At length he jumped up and
impulsively caught her by both hands.
“He’s bigger and bigger!” he almost shouted. “He simply leads the field!
You’ll help me go to the bottom of this, won’t you? We must turn out all
the papers--letters, journals, memoranda. He must have made notes. He
must have left some record of what led up to this. We must leave nothing
unexplored. By Jove,” he cried, looking up at her with his bright
convincing smile, “do you know you’re the granddaughter of a Great Man?”
Her color flickered like a girl’s. “Are you--sure of him?” she whispered,
as though putting him on his guard against a possible betrayal of trust.
“Sure! Sure! My dear lady--“ he measured her again with his quick confident
glance. “Don’t _you_ believe in him?”
She drew back with a confused murmur. “I--used to.” She had left her
hands in his: their pressure seemed to send a warm current to her heart.
“It ruined my life!” she cried with sudden passion. He looked at her
perplexedly.
“I gave up everything,” she went on wildly, “to keep him alive. I
sacrificed myself--others--I nursed his glory in my bosom and it died--and
left me--left me here alone.” She paused and gathered her courage with a
gasp. “Don’t make the same mistake!” she warned him.
He shook his head, still smiling. “No danger of that! You’re not alone, my
dear lady. He’s here with you--he’s come back to you to-day. Don’t you see
what’s happened? Don’t you see that it’s your love that has kept him alive?
If you’d abandoned your post for an instant--let things pass into other
hands--if your wonderful tenderness hadn’t perpetually kept guard--this
might have been--must have been--irretrievably lost.” He laid his hand on
the pamphlet. “And then--then he _would_ have been dead!”
“Oh,” she said, “don’t tell me too suddenly!” And she turned away and sank
into a chair.
The young man stood watching her in an awed silence. For a long time she
sat motionless, with her face hidden, and he thought she must be weeping.
At length he said, almost shyly: “You’ll let me come back, then? You’ll
help me work this thing out?”
She rose calmly and held out her hand. “I’ll help you,” she declared.
“I’ll come to-morrow, then. Can we get to work early?”
“As early as you please.”
“At eight o’clock, then,” he said briskly. “You’ll have the papers ready?”
“I’ll have everything ready.” She added with a half-playful hesitancy: “And
the fire shall be lit for you.”
He went out with his bright nod. She walked to the window and watched his
buoyant figure hastening down the elm-shaded street. When she turned back
into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.