THE DOOR IS CLOSED.
Even Martha was startled by the change in him. She had hoped and prayed
for it, but had not looked for it so soon, and did not expect blithe
spirits after such despair. In deep joy he poured out his soul to her
all the evening, but never mentioned deeds or names in his tragedy.
Martha hardly thought of them. She knew from the first that this man's
soul had been nearly wrecked by some shocking deviltry, and that the
best medicine for him was complete forgetfulness. Horace felt as a
life-prisoner, suddenly set free from the loathsomest dungeon in
Turkestan, might feel on greeting again the day and life's sweet
activities. The first thought which surged in upon him was the glory of
that life which had been his up to the moment when sorrow engulfed him.
"My God," he cried to Martha, "is it possible that men can hold such a
treasure, and prize it as lightly as I did once."
He had thought almost nothing of it, had been glad to get rid of each
period as it passed, and of many persons and scenes connected with
childhood, youth, and manhood. Now they looked to him, these despised
years, persons, and scenes, like jewels set in fine gold, priceless
jewels of human love fixed forever in the adamant of God's memory. They
were his no more. Happily God would not forget them, but would treasure
them, and reward time and place and human love according to their
deserving. He was full of scorn for himself, who could take and enjoy so
much of happiness with no thought of its value, and no other
acknowledgment than the formal and hasty word of thanks, as each soul
laid its offering of love and service at his feet.
"You're no worse than the rest of us," said Martha, "I didn't know, and
very few of my friends ever seemed to know, what good things they had
till they lost 'em. It may be that God would not have us put too high a
price on 'em at first, fearin' we'd get selfish about 'em. Then when
they're gone, it turns our thoughts more to heaven, which is the only
place where we have any chance to get 'em back."
When he had got over his self-scorn, the abyss of pain and horror out of
which God had lifted him--this was his belief--showed itself mighty and
terrible to his normal vision. Never would he have believed that a man
could fall so far and so awfully, had he not been in those dark depths
and mounted to the sun again. He had read of such pits as exaggerations.
He had seen sorrow and always thought its expression too fantastic for
reality. Looking down now into the noisome tunnel of his own tragedy, he
could only wonder that its wretched walls and exit did not carry the red
current of blood mingled with its own foul streaks. Nothing that he had
done in his grief expressed more than a syllable of the pain he had
endured. The only full voice to such grief would have been the wrecking
of the world. Strange that he could now look calmly into this abyss,
without the temptation to go mad. But its very ghastliness turned his
thought into another channel. The woman who had led him into the pit,
what of her? Free from the tyranny of her beauty, he saw her with all
her loveliness, merely the witch of the abyss, the flower and fruit of
that loathsome depth, in whose bosom filthy things took their natural
shape of horror, and put on beauty only to entrap the innocent of the
upper world. Yes, he was entirely freed from her. Her name sounded to
his ears like a name from hell, but it brought no paleness to his
cheeks, no shock to his nerves, no stirring of his pulses. The loom of
Penelope was broken, and forever, he hoped.
"I am free," he said to Martha the next morning, after he had tested
himself in various ways. "The one devil that remained with me is gone,
and I feel sure she will never trouble me again."
"It is good to be free," said Martha, "if the thing is evil. I am free
from all that worried me most. I am free from the old fear of death. But
sometimes I get sad thinking how little we need those we thought we
could not do without."
"How true that sounds, mother. There is a pity in it. We are not
necessary to one another, though we think so. Every one we love dies, we
lose all things as time goes on, and when we come to old age nothing
remains of the past; but just the same we enjoy what we have, and forget
what we had. There is one thing necessary, and that is true life."
"And where can we get that?" said Martha.
"Only from God, I think," he replied.
She smiled her satisfaction with his thought, and he went off to the
pool for the last time, singing in his heart with joy. He would have
raised his voice too, but, feeling himself in the presence of a
stupendous thing, he refrained out of reverence. If suffering Hamlet had
only encountered the idea of disappearing, his whole life would have
been set right in a twinkling of the eye. The Dane had an inkling of the
solution of his problem when in anguish he cried out,
Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
But he had not followed his thought to its natural consequence, seeing
only death at the end of reasoning. Horace saw disappearance, and he had
now to consider the idea of complete disappearance with all its effects
upon him and others. What would be the effect upon himself? He would
vanish into thin air as far as others were concerned. Whatever of his
past the present held would turn into ashes. There would be no further
connection with it. An impassable void would be created across which
neither he nor those he loved could go. He went over in his mind what he
had to give up, and trembled before his chum and his father's sister,
two souls that loved him. Death would not be more terrible. For him, no;
but for them? Death would leave them his last word, look, sigh, his
ashes, his resting-place; disappearance would rob them of all knowledge,
and clothe his exit with everlasting sadness. There was no help for it.
Many souls more loving suffered a similar anguish, and survived it. It
astonished and even appalled him, if anything could now appal him, that
only two out of the group of his close friends and near acquaintances
seemed near enough in affection and intimacy to mourn his loss. Not
one of twenty others would lose a dinner or a fraction of appetite
because he had vanished so pitifully. How rarer than diamonds is that
jewel of friendship!
He had thought once that a hundred friends would have wept bitter tears
over his sorrow; of the number there were left only two!
It was easy for him to leave the old life, now become so hateful; but
there was terror in putting on the new, to which he must ally himself as
if born into it, like a tree uprooted from its native soil and planted
far from its congenial elements in the secret, dark, sympathetic places
of the earth. He must cut himself off more thoroughly than by death. The
disappearance must be eternal, unless death removed Sonia Westfield
before circumstances made return practically impossible; his experience
of life showed that disagreeable people rarely die while the microbe of
disagreeableness thrives in them.
What would be the effect of his disappearance on Sonia and her lover?
The question brought a smile to his wan face. She had married his name
and his money, and would lose both advantages. He would take his
property into exile to the last penny. His name without his income would
be a burden to her. His disappearance would cast upon her a reproach,
unspoken, unseen, a mere mist enwrapping her fatally, but not to be
dispelled. Her mouth would be shut tight; no chance for innuendoes, lest
hint might add suspicion to mystery. She would be forced to observe the
proprieties to the letter, and the law would not grant her a divorce for
years. In time she would learn that her only income was the modest
revenue from her own small estate; that he had taken all with him into
darkness; and still she would not dare to tell the damaging fact to her
friends. She would be forced to keep up appearances, to spend money in a
vain search for him, or his wealth; suspecting much yet knowing nothing,
miserably certain that he was living somewhere in luxury, and enjoying
his vengeance.
He no longer thought of vengeance. He did not desire it. The mills of
the gods grind out vengeance enough to glut any appetite. By the mere
exercise of his right to disappear he gave the gods many lashes with
which to arm the furies against her. He was satisfied with being
beyond her reach forever. Now that he knew just what to do, now that
with his plan had come release from depression, now that he was himself
again almost, he felt that he could meet Sonia Westfield and act the
part of a busy husband without being tempted to strangle her. In her
very presence he would put in motion the machinery which would strip her
of luxury and himself of his present place in the world.
The process took about two months. The first step was a visit to
Monsignor O'Donnell, a single visit, and the first result was a single
letter, promptly committed to the flames. Then he went home with a story
of illness, of a business enterprise which had won his fancy, of
necessary visits to the far west; which were all true, but not in the
sense in which Sonia took these details. They not only explained his
absence, but also excused the oddity of his present behavior. He hardly
knew how he behaved with her. He did not act, nor lose self-confidence.
He had no desire to harm her. He was simply indifferent, as if from
sickness. As the circumstances fell in with her inclinations, though she
could not help noticing his new habits and peculiarities, she made no
protest and very little comment. He saw her rarely, and in time carried
himself with a sardonic good humor as surprising to him as inexplicable
to her. She seemed as far from him as if she had suddenly turned Eskimo.
Once or twice a sense of loathing invaded him, a flame of hatred blazed
up, soon suppressed. He was complete master of himself, and his reward
was that he could be her judge, with the indifference of a dignitary of
the law. The disposal of his property was accomplished with perfect
secrecy, his wife consenting on the plea of a better investment.
So the two months came to an end in peace, and he stood at last before
that door which he himself had opened into the new future. Once closed
no other hand but his could open it. A time might come when even to his
hand the hinge would not respond. Two persons knew his secret in part,
the Monsignor and a woman; but they knew nothing more than that he did
not belong to them from the beginning, and more than that they would
never know, if he carried out his plan of disappearance perfectly.
Whatever the result, he felt now that the crisis of his life had come.
At the last moment, however, doubts worried him about thus cutting
himself off from his past so utterly, and adopting another personality.
Some deep-lying repugnance stirred him against the double process. Would
it not be better to live under his own name in remote countries, and
thus be ready, if fate allowed, to return home at the proper time?
Perhaps. In that case he must be prepared for her pursuit, her letters,
her chicanery, which he could not bear. Her safety and his own, if the
stain of blood was to be kept off the name of Endicott, demanded the
absolute cessation of all relationship between them. Yet that did not
contain the whole reason. Lurking somewhere in those dark depths of the
soul, where the lead never penetrates, he found the thought of
vengeance. After all he did wish to punish her and to see her
punishment. He had thought to leave all to the gods, but feared the gods
would not do all their duty. If they needed spurring, he would be near
to provide new whips and fresher scorpions. He shook off hesitation when
the last day of his old life came, and made his farewells with decision.
A letter to his aunt and to his friend, bidding each find no wonder and
no worry about him in the events of the next month, and lose no time in
searching for him; a quiet talk with old Martha on her little verandah;
a visit to the pool on a soft August night; and an evening spent alone
in his father's house; these were his leave-takings.
They would never find a place in his life again, and he would never dare
to return to them; since the return of the criminal over the path by
which he escaped into secrecy gave him into the hands of his pursuers.
The old house had become the property of strangers. The offset to this
grief was the fact that Sonia would never dishonor it again with her
presence. Just now dabbling in her sins down by the summer sea, she was
probably reading the letter which he had sent her about business in
Wisconsin. Later a second letter would bear her the sentence of a living
death. The upright judge had made her the executioner. What a long
tragedy that would be! He thought of it as he wandered about the lovely
rooms of his old home; what long days of doubt before certainty would
come; what horror when bit by bit the scheme of his vengeance unfolded:
what vain, bitter, furious struggling to find and devour him; and then
the miserable ending when time had proved his disappearance absolute and
perfect!
At midnight, after a pilgrimage to every loved spot in the household
shrine, he slipped away unseen and struck out on foot over the fields
for a distant railway station. For two months he lived here and there in
California, while his beard grew and his thoughts devoured him. Then one
evening he stepped somewhat feebly from the train in New York, crawled
into a cab, and drove to No. 127 Mulberry Street. The cabman helped him
up the steps and handed him in the door to a brisk old woman, who must
have been an actress in her day; for she gave a screech at the sight of
him, and threw her arms about him crying out, so that the cabman heard,
"Artie, alanna, back from the dead, back from the dead, acushla
machree." Then the door closed, and Arthur Dillon was alone with his
mother; Arthur Dillon who had run away to California ten years before,
and died there, it was supposed; but he had not died, for behold him
returned to his mother miraculously. She knew him in spite of the
changes, in spite of thin face, wild eyes, and strong beard. The
mother-love is not to be deceived by the disguise of time. So Anne
Dillon hugged her Arthur with a fervor that surprised him, and wept
copious tears; thinking more of the boy that might have come back to her
than of this stranger. He lay in his lonely, unknown grave, and the
caresses meant for him had been bought by another.
RESURRECTION.