In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of
Faxon’s bedroom, the injunction was not easy to obey. It was wonderful
luck to have found a night’s shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale,
and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place,
for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming.
He couldn’t have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington’s
intense personality--intensely negative, but intense all the same--must,
in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling.
Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry,
more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold,
and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of
perpetually treading other people’s stairs.
“I hope you’re not famished?” Rainer’s slim figure was in the doorway.
“My uncle has a little business to attend to with Mr. Grisben, and we
don’t dine for half an hour. Shall I fetch you, or can you find your way
down? Come straight to the dining-room--the second door on the left of
the long gallery.”
He disappeared, leaving a ray of warmth behind him, and Faxon, relieved,
lit a cigarette and sat down by the fire.
Looking about with less haste, he was struck by a detail that had
escaped him. The room was full of flowers--a mere “bachelor’s room,” in
the wing of a house opened only for a few days, in the dead middle of
a New Hampshire winter! Flowers were everywhere, not in senseless
profusion, but placed with the same conscious art that he had remarked
in the grouping of the blossoming shrubs in the hall. A vase of arums
stood on the writing-table, a cluster of strange-hued carnations on
the stand at his elbow, and from bowls of glass and porcelain clumps of
freesia-bulbs diffused their melting fragrance. The fact implied acres
of glass--but that was the least interesting part of it. The flowers
themselves, their quality, selection and arrangement, attested on
some one’s part--and on whose but John Lavington’s?--a solicitous and
sensitive passion for that particular form of beauty. Well, it simply
made the man, as he had appeared to Faxon, all the harder to understand!
The half-hour elapsed, and Faxon, rejoicing at the prospect of food, set
out to make his way to the dining-room. He had not noticed the direction
he had followed in going to his room, and was puzzled, when he left it,
to find that two staircases, of apparently equal importance, invited
him. He chose the one to his right, and reached, at its foot, a long
gallery such as Rainer had described. The gallery was empty, the doors
down its length were closed; but Rainer had said: “The second to the
left,” and Faxon, after pausing for some chance enlightenment which did
not come, laid his hand on the second knob to the left.
The room he entered was square, with dusky picture-hung walls. In its
centre, about a table lit by veiled lamps, he fancied Mr. Lavington and
his guests to be already seated at dinner; then he perceived that the
table was covered not with viands but with papers, and that he had
blundered into what seemed to be his host’s study. As he paused Frank
Rainer looked up.
“Oh, here’s Mr. Faxon. Why not ask him--?”
Mr. Lavington, from the end of the table, reflected his nephew’s smile
in a glance of impartial benevolence.
“Certainly. Come in, Mr. Faxon. If you won’t think it a liberty--”
Mr. Grisben, who sat opposite his host, turned his head toward the door.
“Of course Mr. Faxon’s an American citizen?”
Frank Rainer laughed. “That’s all right!... Oh, no, not one of your
pin-pointed pens, Uncle Jack! Haven’t you got a quill somewhere?”
Mr. Balch, who spoke slowly and as if reluctantly, in a muffled voice of
which there seemed to be very little left, raised his hand to say: “One
moment: you acknowledge this to be--?”
“My last will and testament?” Rainer’s laugh redoubled. “Well, I won’t
answer for the ‘last.’ It’s the first, anyway.”
“It’s a mere formula,” Mr. Balch explained.
“Well, here goes.” Rainer dipped his quill in the inkstand his uncle
had pushed in his direction, and dashed a gallant signature across the
document.
Faxon, understanding what was expected of him, and conjecturing that the
young man was signing his will on the attainment of his majority, had
placed himself behind Mr. Grisben, and stood awaiting his turn to affix
his name to the instrument. Rainer, having signed, was about to push the
paper across the table to Mr. Balch; but the latter, again raising his
hand, said in his sad imprisoned voice: “The seal--?”
“Oh, does there have to be a seal?”
Faxon, looking over Mr. Grisben at John Lavington, saw a faint frown
between his impassive eyes. “Really, Frank!” He seemed, Faxon thought,
slightly irritated by his nephew’s frivolity.
“Who’s got a seal?” Frank Rainer continued, glancing about the table.
“There doesn’t seem to be one here.”
Mr. Grisben interposed. “A wafer will do. Lavington, you have a wafer?”
Mr. Lavington had recovered his serenity. “There must be some in one
of the drawers. But I’m ashamed to say I don’t know where my secretary
keeps these things. He ought to have seen to it that a wafer was sent
with the document.”
“Oh, hang it--” Frank Rainer pushed the paper aside: “It’s the hand of
God--and I’m as hungry as a wolf. Let’s dine first, Uncle Jack.”
“I think I’ve a seal upstairs,” said Faxon.
Mr. Lavington sent him a barely perceptible smile. “So sorry to give you
the trouble--”
“Oh, I say, don’t send him after it now. Let’s wait till after dinner!”
Mr. Lavington continued to smile on _his_ guest, and the latter, as
if under the faint coercion of the smile, turned from the room and
ran upstairs. Having taken the seal from his writing-case he came down
again, and once more opened the door of the study. No one was speaking
when he entered--they were evidently awaiting his return with the mute
impatience of hunger, and he put the seal in Rainer’s reach, and stood
watching while Mr. Grisben struck a match and held it to one of the
candles flanking the inkstand. As the wax descended on the paper Faxon
remarked again the strange emaciation, the premature physical weariness,
of the hand that held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed
his nephew’s hand, and if it were not poignantly visible to him now.
With this thought in his mind, Faxon raised his eyes to look at
Mr. Lavington. The great man’s gaze rested on Frank Rainer with an
expression of untroubled benevolence; and at the same instant Faxon’s
attention was attracted by the presence in the room of another person,
who must have joined the group while he was upstairs searching for the
seal. The new-comer was a man of about Mr. Lavington’s age and figure,
who stood just behind his chair, and who, at the moment when Faxon
first saw him, was gazing at young Rainer with an equal intensity of
attention. The likeness between the two men--perhaps increased by the
fact that the hooded lamps on the table left the figure behind the
chair in shadow--struck Faxon the more because of the contrast in their
expression. John Lavington, during his nephew’s clumsy attempt to
drop the wax and apply the seal, continued to fasten on him a look
of half-amused affection; while the man behind the chair, so oddly
reduplicating the lines of his features and figure, turned on the boy a
face of pale hostility.
The impression was so startling that Faxon forgot what was going on
about him. He was just dimly aware of young Rainer’s exclaiming; “Your
turn, Mr. Grisben!” of Mr. Grisben’s protesting: “No--no; Mr. Faxon
first,” and of the pen’s being thereupon transferred to his own hand.
He received it with a deadly sense of being unable to move, or even to
understand what was expected of him, till he became conscious of Mr.
Grisben’s paternally pointing out the precise spot on which he was to
leave his autograph. The effort to fix his attention and steady his hand
prolonged the process of signing, and when he stood up--a strange weight
of fatigue on all his limbs--the figure behind Mr. Lavington’s chair was
gone.
Faxon felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man’s
exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door behind Mr.
Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon concluded that
the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to pass out. At any
rate he was gone, and with his withdrawal the strange weight was lifted.
Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette, Mr. Balch inscribing his name
at the foot of the document, Mr. Lavington--his eyes no longer on his
nephew--examining a strange white-winged orchid in the vase at his
elbow. Every thing suddenly seemed to have grown natural and simple
again, and Faxon found himself responding with a smile to the affable
gesture with which his host declared: “And now, Mr. Faxon, we’ll dine.”