_In which Professor Nicolovius drops a Letter on the Floor, and
Queed conjectures that Happiness sometimes comes to Men wearing a
Strange Face._
Queed sat alone in the sitting-room of the Duke of Gloucester Street
house. His afternoon's experiences had interested him largely. By subtle
and occult processes which defied his analysis, what he had seen and
heard had proved mysteriously disturbing--all this outpouring of
irrational sentiment in which he had no share. So had his conversation
with the girl disturbed him. He was in a condition of mental unrest,
undefined but acute; odds and ends of curious thought kicked about
within him, challenging him to follow them down to unexplored depths.
But he was paying no attention to them now.
He sat in the sitting-room, wondering how Nicolovius had ever happened
to think of that story about the Fenian refugee.
For Queed had been gradually driven to that unpleasant point. While
living in the old man's house, he was, despite his conscientious
efforts, virtually spying upon him.
The Fenian story had always had its questionable points; but so long as
the two men were merely chance fellow-boarders, it did as well as any
other. Now that they lived together, however, the multiplying
suggestions that the old professor was something far other than he
pretended became rather important. The young man could not help being
aware that Nicolovius neither looked nor talked in the slightest degree
like an Irishman. He could not help being certain that an Irishman who
had fled to escape punishment for a political crime, in 1882, could have
safely returned to his country long ago; and would undoubtedly have kept
up relations with his friends overseas in the meantime. Nor could he
help being struck with such facts as that Nicolovius, while apparently
little interested in the occasional cables about Irish affairs, had
become seemingly absorbed in the three days' doings of the United
Confederate Veterans.
Now it was entirely all right for the old man to have a secret, and keep
it. There was not the smallest quarrel on that score. But it was not in
the least all right for one man to live with another, pretending to
believe in him, when in reality he was doubting and questioning him at
every move. The want of candor involved in his present relations with
Nicolovius continually fretted Queed's conscience. Ought he not in
common honesty to tell the old man that he could not believe the Irish
biography, leaving it to him to decide what he wanted to do about it?
Nicolovius, tramping in only a few minutes behind Queed, greeted his
young friend as blandly as ever. Physically, he seemed tired; much dust
of city streets clung to his commonly spotless boots; but his eyes were
so extraordinarily brilliant that Queed at first wondered if he could
have been drinking. However, this thought died almost as soon as it was
born.
The professor walked over to the window and stood looking out, hat on
head. Presently he said: "You saw the grand parade, I suppose? For
indeed there was no escaping it."
Queed said that he had seen it.
"You had a good place to see it from, I hope?"
Excellent; Miss Weyland's porch.
"Ah!" said Nicolovius, with rather an emphasis, and permitted a pause to
fall. "A most charming young lady--charming," he went on, with his note
of velvet irony which the young man peculiarly disliked. "I hear she is
to marry your Mr. West. An eminently suitable match in every way. Yet I
shall not soon forget how that delightful young man defrauded you of the
editorship."
Silence from Mr. Queed, the question of the editorship having already
been thoroughly threshed out between them.
"I, too, saw the gallant proceedings," resumed Nicolovius, retracing his
thought. "What an outfit! What an outfit!"
He dropped down into his easy chair by the table, removed his straw hat
with traces of a rare irritation in his manner, put on his black skull
cap, and presently purred his thoughts aloud:--
"No writer has yet done anything like justice to the old soldier cult in
the post-bellum South. Doubtless it may lie out of the province of you
historians, but what a theme for a new Thackeray! With such a fetish
your priestcraft of the Middle Ages is not to be compared for a moment.
There is no parallel among civilized nations; to find one you must go to
the Voodooism of the savage black. For more than a generation all the
intelligence of the South has been asked, nay compelled, to come and bow
down before these alms-begging loblollies. To refuse to make obeisance
was treason. The entire public thought of a vast section of the country
has revolved around the figure of a worthless old grafter in a tattered
gray shirt. Every question is settled when some moth-eaten ne'er-do-well
lets out what is known as a 'rebel yell.' The most polished and profound
speech conceivable is answered when a jackass mounts the platform and
brays out something about the gallant boys in gray. The cry for
progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is
stifled, that everybody may have breath to shout for a flapping
trouser's leg worn by a degraded old sot. All that your Southern
statesmen have had to give a people who were stripped to the bone is
fulsome rhetoric about the Wounded Warrior of Wahoo, or some other
inflated nonentity, whereupon the mesmerized population have loyally
fallen on their faces and shouted, 'Praise the Lord.' And all the while
they were going through this wretched mummery, they were hungry and
thirsty and naked--destitute in a smiling land of plenty. Do you wonder
that I think old-soldierism is the meanest profession the Lord ever
suffered to thrive? I tell you Baal and Moloch never took such toll of
their idolaters as these shabby old gods of the gray shirt."
"Professor Nicolovius," said Queed, with a slow smile, "where on earth
do you exhume your ideas of Southern history?"
"Observation, my dear boy! God bless us, haven't I had three years of
this city to use my eyes and ears in? And I had a peculiar training in
my youth," he added, retrospectively, "to fit me to see straight and
generalize accurately."
... Couldn't the man see that no persecuted Irishman ever talked in such
a way since the world began? If he had a part to play, why in the name
of common sense couldn't he play it respectably?
Queed got up, and began strolling about the floor. In his mind was what
Sharlee Weyland had said to him two hours before: "All the bitterness
nowadays comes from the non-combatants, the camp-followers, the sutlers,
and the cowards." Under which of these heads did his friend, the old
professor, fall?... Why had he ever thought of Nicolovius as, perhaps, a
broken Union officer? A broken Union officer would feel bitter, if at
all, against the Union. A man who felt so bitter against the South--
A resolution was rapidly hardening in the young man's mind. He felt this
attitude of doubt and suspicion, these thoughts that he was now thinking
about the man whose roof he shared, as an unclean spot upon his chaste
passion for truth. He could not feel honest again until he had wiped it
off.... And, after all, what did he owe to Nicolovius?
"But I must not leave you under the impression," said Nicolovius, almost
testily for him, "that my ideas are unique and extraordinary. They are
shared, in fact, by Southern historians of repute and--"