The offices of Dunwoodie, Bramwell, Strawbridge and Cohen were supplied
with a rotunda in which Jones sat waiting, and Jones loved to sit and
wait.
Since the musician's tenement had crumbled and the soul of the violinist
had gone forth, gone to the unseen assessors who pityingly, with
indulgent hands, weigh our stupid sins, since then a week had passed.
During it, a paper signed by the dead had been admitted by the living, a
prisoner had been discharged and for no other imaginable reason than
because he had killed nobody, Lennox became a hero.
New York is very forgetful. Lennox sank back into the blank anonymity to
which humanity in the aggregate is eternally condemned and from which,
at a bound, he had leaped. The papers were to tell of him again, but
casually, without scareheads, among the yesterdays and aviators in
France. That though was later.
Meanwhile an enigma remained. Very heroically a young man had done
nothing. Hurrah and good-bye! The calciums of curiosity turned on an
obscure fiddler who, after murdering another young man, had succeeded in
bilking the chair.
But why had he killed him? That was the enigma, one which would have
been exciting, if the solution had not been so prompt and so tame. At
the proceedings which resulted in Lennox' discharge, it was testified
that Angelo Cara had been temporarily deranged.
The testimony, expertly advanced by a novelist who was not an expert,
the reporters grabbed before the court could rule it out. The grabbing
was natural. The decedent's declaration had been made to Jones who,
though not an alienist, was the teller of tales that have been
translated into every polite language, including the Japanese, which is
the politest of all. Moreover, have not the mendacious been properly
subdivided into liars, damned liars and expert witnesses? To Verdun with
the lot! Mr. Ten Eyck Jones was certainly not an expert, but certainly
too he was somebody, he was a best-seller and in the way we live now,
the testimony of the best-seller is entitled to every editorial respect.
The court might rule his testimony out, city editors saluted it.
Jones' little invention did wash therefore and, in the washing, poured
balm by the bucket over the father of the murdered man.
Then, gradually, like everything else, except war and the taxes, both
murderer and murdered were dropped in the great dust-bin of oblivion
that awaits us all.
In the rotunda, meanwhile, Jones sat kicking his heels. It was in the
morning, and always in the morning Jones was invisibly at work. Now, his
routine upset, loathingly he kicked his heels. But Jones had ways of
consoling himself that were very commonplace.
I am doing all the evil I can, he vindictively reflected, and it was
with the comfort of his animosity about him that, ultimately, he was
shown into an office--bright and, on this May forenoon, very airy--that
gave on Broad Street.
Dunwoodie, twisting in a chair, glared at him.
"Ecce iterum Crispinus!" Jones tritely began. "What price retainers
to-day?"
"I hoped to God I had seen the last of you," Dunwoodie, with elaborate,
old-fashioned courtesy, replied.
Jones, disdaining to be asked, drew a chair.