"Of course," said Nicolovius. "It is as well known as Iscariot's. By
God, how they've hounded me!"
Evidently he was recovering fast. There was bitterness, rather than
shame, in his voice. He took his hands from his eyes, adjusted his cap,
stiffened up in his chair. The sallow tints were coming back into his
face; his lips took on color; his eye and hand were steady. Not every
man could have passed through such a cataclysm and emerged so little
marked. He picked up his cigarette from the table; it was still going.
This fact was symbolic: the great shock had come and passed within the
smoking of an inch of cigarette. The pretty room was as it was before.
Pale sunshine still flickered on the swelling curtain. The leather
desk-clock gayly ticked the passing seconds. The young man's clean-cut
face looked as quiet as ever.
Upon Queed the old man fastened his fearless black eyes.
"I meant to tell you all this some day," he said, in quite a natural
voice. "Now the day has come a little sooner than I had meant--that is
all. I know that my confidence is safe with you--till I die."
"I think you have nothing to fear by trusting me," said Queed, and added
at once: "But you need tell me nothing unless you prefer."
A kind of softness shone for a moment in Surface's eyes. "Nobody could
look at your face," he said gently, "and ever be afraid to trust you."
The telephone rang, and Queed could answer it by merely putting out his
hand. It was West, from the office, asking that he report for work that
night, as he himself was compelled to be away.
Presently Surface began talking; talking in snatches, more to himself
than to his young friend, rambling backward over his broken life in
passionate reminiscence. He talked a long time thus, while the daylight
faded and dusk crept into the room, and then night; and Queed listened,
giving him all the rein he wanted and saying never a word himself.
"... Pray your gods," said Surface, "that you never have such reason to
hate your fellow-men as I have had, my boy. For that has been the
keynote of my unhappy life. God, how I hated them all, and how I do
yet!... Not least Weyland, with his ostentatious virtue, his
holier-than-thou kindness, his self-righteous magnanimity tossed even to
me ... the broken-kneed idol whom others passed with averted face, and
there was none so poor to do me reverence...."
So this, mused Queed, was the meaning of the old professor's invincible
dislike for Miss Weyland, which he had made so obvious in the
boarding-house that even Mr. Bylash commented on it. He had never been
able to forgive her father's generosity, which he had so terribly
betrayed; her name and her blood rankled and festered eternally in the
heart of the faithless friend and the striped trustee.
Henderson, the ancient African who attended the two men, knocked upon
the shut door with the deprecatory announcement that he had twice rung
the supper-bell.
"Take the things back to the kitchen, Henderson," said Queed. "I'll ring
when we are ready."
The breeze was freshening, blowing full upon Surface, who did not appear
to notice it. Queed got up and lowered the window. The old man's
neglected cigarette burned his fingers; he lit another; it, too, burned
itself down to the cork-tip without receiving the attention of a puff.
Presently he went on talking:
"I was of a high-spirited line. Thank God, I never learned to fawn on
the hand that lashed me. Insult I would not brook. I struck back, and
when I struck, I struck to kill.--Did I not? So hard that the State
reeled.... So hard that if I had had something better than mean negroes
and worse whites for my tools, fifth-rate scavengers, buzzards of
politics ... this hand would have written the history of the State in
these forty years.
"That was the way I struck, and how did they answer me?--Ostracism ...
Coventry ... The weapons of mean old women, and dogs.... The dogs! That
is what they were....
"Well, other arms were ready to receive me. Others were fairer-minded
than the cowardly bigots who could blow hot or cold as their selfish
interests and prostituted leaders whispered. I was not a man to be
kept down. Oh, my new friends were legion, and I was king again.
But it was never the same. In that way, they beat me. I give
them that.... Not they, though. It was deep calling to deep. My
blood--heritage--tradition--education--all that I was ... this was what
tortured me with what was gone, and kept calling.
"Wicked injustice and a lost birthright.... Oh, memory was there to
crucify me, by day and by night. And yet.... Why, it was a thing that is
done every day by men these people say their prayers to.... Oh, yes--I
wanted to punish--_him_ for his smug condescension, his patronizing
playing of the good Samaritan. And through him all these others ... show
them that their old idol wore claws on those feet of clay. But not in
that way. No, a much cleverer way than that. Perhaps there would be no
money when they asked for it, but I was to smile blandly and go on about
my business. They were never to reach _me_. But the Surfaces were never
skilled at juggling dirty money....
"They took me off my guard. The most technical fault--a trifle....
Another day or two and everything would have been all right. They had my
word for it--and you know how they replied.... The infamous tyranny of
the majority. The greatest judicial crime in a decade, and they laughed.
"So now I lie awake in the long nights with nine years of _that_ to look
back on.
"Let my life be a lesson to you teaching you--if nothing else--that it
is of no use to fight society. They have a hopeless advantage, the
contemptible advantage of numbers, and they are not ashamed to use
it.... But my spirit would not let me lie quiet under injury and
insult. I was ever a fighter, born to die with my spurs on. And when I
die at last, they will find that I go with a Parthian shot ... and after
all have the last word.
"So I came out into a bright world again, an old man before my time,
ruined forever, marked with a scarlet mark to wear to my grave....
"And then in time, as of course it would, the resolve came to me to come
straight back here to die. A man wants to die among his own people. They
were all that ever meant anything to me--they have that to boast of....
I loved this city once. To die anywhere else ... why, it was
meaningless, a burlesque on death. I looked at my face in the glass; my
own mother would not have known me. And so I came straight to Jennie
Paynter's, such was my whim ... whom I held on my knee fifty years ago.
"... Oh, it's been funny ... so funny ... to sit at that intolerable
table, and hear poor old Brooke on Reconstruction.
"And I've wondered what little Jennie Paynter would do, if I had risen
on one of these occasions and spoken my name to the table. How I've
hated her--hated the look and sight of her--and all the while embracing
it for dear life. She has told me much that she never knew I listened
to--many a bit about old friends ... forty years since I'd heard their
names. And Brooke has told me much, the doting old ass.
"But the life grew unbearable to a man of my temper. I could afford the
decency of privacy in my old age. For I had worked hard and saved
since....
"And then you came ... a scholar and a gentleman."
It was quite dark in the room. Surface's voice had suddenly changed. The
bitterness faded out of it; it became gentler than Queed had ever heard
it.
"I did not find you out at once. My life had made me unsocial--and out
of the Nazareth of that house I never looked for any good to come. But
when once I took note of you, each day I saw you clearer and truer. I
saw you fighting, and asking no odds--for elbow-room to do your own
work, for your way up on the newspaper, for bodily strength and
health--everywhere I saw you, you were fighting indomitably. I have
always loved a fighter. You were young and a stranger, alone like me;
you stirred no memories of a past that now, in my age, I would forget;
your face was the face of honor and truth. I thought: What a blessing if
I could make a friend of this young man for the little while that is
left me!... And you have been a blessing and a joy--more than you can
dream. And now you will not cast me off, like the others.... I do not
know the words with which to try to thank you...."
"Oh, don't," came Queed's voice hastily out of the dark. "There is no
question of thanks here."
He got up, lit the lamps, pulled down the shade. The old man lay back in
his chair, his hands gripping its arms, the lamplight full upon him.
Never had Queed seen him look less inspiring to affection. His black cap
had gotten pushed to one side, which both revealed a considerable area
of hairless head, and imparted to the whole face an odd and rakish air;
the Italian eyes did not wholly match with the softness of his voice;
the thin-lipped mouth under the long auburn mustache looked neither
sorrowful nor kind. It was Queed's lifelong habit never to look back
with vain regrets; and he needed all of his resolution now.
He stood in front of the man whose terrible secret he had surprised, and
outwardly he was as calm as ever.
"Professor Nicolovius," he said, with a faint emphasis upon the name,
"all this is as though it had never passed between us. And now let's go
and get some supper."
Surface rose to his height and took Queed's hand in a grip like iron.
His eyes glistened with sudden moisture.
"God bless you, boy! You're a _man!_"
* * * * *
It had been a memorable conversation in the life of both men, opening up
obvious after-lines of more or less momentous thought. Yet each of them,
as it happened, neglected these lines for a corollary detail of
apparently much less seriousness, and pretty nearly the same detail at
that. For Surface sat long that evening, meditating how he might most
surely break up the friendship between his young friend and Sharlee
Weyland; while Queed, all during his busy hours at the office, found his
thoughts of Nicolovius dominated by speculations as to what Miss Weyland
would say, if she knew that he had formed a lifelong compact with the
man who had betrayed her father's friendship and looted her own fortune.