O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 43

From _Harper's Magazine_

"Any woman who can accept money from a gentleman who is in no way related to her--" Miss Fowler delivered judgment.

"My dear Aunt Maria, you mean a gentleman's disembodied spirit," Hugh's light, pleasant tones intervened.

"A legacy, Maria, is not quite the same thing. Mr. Winthrop Fowler's perfect intonation carried its usual implication that the subject was closed.

"---- is what I call an adventuress," Miss Fowler summed up. She had a way of ignoring objections, of reappearing beyond them like a submarine with the ultimate and detonating answer. "And now she wants to reopen the matter when the whole thing's over and done with. After three years.

Extraordinary taste." She hitched her black-velvet Voltaire arm-chair a little away from the fire and spread a vast knitting-bag of Chinese brocade over her knees. "I suppose she isn't satisfied; she wants more."

"Naturally. I cannot imagine what other reason she could have for insisting on a personal interview," her brother agreed, dryly. He retired into the _Transcript_ as a Trappist withdraws into his vows. A chastened client of Mr. Fowler's once observed that a half-hour's encounter with him resulted in a rueful of asphyxiated topics.

Miss Maria, however, preferred disemboweling hers, "I shouldn't have consented," she snapped. "Hugh, if you would be so good as to sit down.

You are obstructing the light. And the curtain-cord. If you could refrain from twisting it for a few moments."

Hugh let his long, high-shouldered figure lapse into the window-seat.

"And besides, we're all dying to know what she looks like," he suggested.

"Speak for yourself, please," said Miss Fowler, with the vivacity of the lady who protests too much.

"I do, I do! Good Lord! I'm just as bad as the rest of you. All my life I've been consumed to know what Uncle Hugh could have seen in a perfectly obscure little person to make him do what he did. There must have been something." His eyes travelled to a sketch in pencil of a man's head which hung in the shadow of the chimneypiece, a sketch whose uncanny suggestion might have come from the quality of the sitter or merely from a smudging of the medium. "Everything he did always seemed to me perfectly natural," he went on, as though conscious of new discovery. "Even those years when he was knocking about the world, hiding his address. Even when he had that fancy that people were persecuting him. Most people did worry him horribly."

A glance flashed between the two middle-aged listeners. It was a peculiar glance, full of a half-denied portent. Then Miss Fowler's fingers, true to their traditions, loosened their grip on her needles and casually smoothed out her work.

"I have asked you not to speak of that," she mentioned, quietly.

"I know. But of course there was no doubt at all that he was sa--was entirely recovered before his death. Don't you think so, sir?"

His uncle laid down the paper and fixed the young man with the gray, unsheathed keenness that had sent so many witnesses grovelling to the naked truth. "No doubt whatever. I always held, and so did both the physicians, that his lack of balance was a temporary and sporadic thing, brought on by overwork--and certain unhappy conditions of his life.

There has never been any such taint in our branch of the family."

"No-o, so they say," Hugh agreed. "One of our forebears did see ghosts, but that was rather the fashion. And his father, that old Johnnie over the fireplace--you take after him, Aunt Maria--he was the prize witch-smeller of his generation, and he condemned all the young and pretty ones. That hardly seems well-balanced."

"Collaterals on the distaff side," Mr. Fowler put in hastily. "If you would read Mendel--"

"Mendel? I have read about him." He raised the forefinger of his right hand. "Very suggestive. If your father was a black rabbit"--he raised the forefinger of his left--"and your mother was a white rabbit, then your male children would be"--he raised all the other fingers and paused as though taken aback by the size of the family--"would be blue guinea-pigs, with a tendency to club-foot and astigmatism, but your female children might only be rather clumsy tangoists with a weakness for cutting their poor relations. That's all I remember, but I _do_ know that because I studied the charts."

"Very amusing," said Mr. Fowler, indulgently.

Hugh flushed.

"I am sure it can't be that way." Miss Maria flapped her knitting over.

"But everything has changed since my day, and _not_ for the better. The curtain-cord."

"Beg pardon," muttered Hugh. His mind went on churning nonsense. "There are two days it is useless to flee from--the day of your death and the day when your family doesn't care for your jokes.

"For a joke is an intellectual thing, And a _mot_ is the sword of an angel king.

"Good old Blake. Why do the best people always see jokes? Why does a really good one make a whole frozen crowd feel jolly and united all of a sudden?" He pondered on the beneficence of the comic spirit. Hugh was a born Deist. It gave him no trouble at all to believe that since the paintings of Velasquez and the great outdoors which he had seen, were beautiful, so much the more beautiful must be that G.o.d whom he had not seen. It seemed reasonable. As for the horrors like Uncle Hugh's affair--well, they must be put in for chiaroscuro. A thing couldn't be all white without being blank. The thought of the shadows, however, always made him profoundly uncomfortable, and his instinct right-about-faced to the lighter surface of life. "Anyhow," he broke silence, "the daughter of Heth must be game. Three to one, and on our native heath."

He looked appraisingly about the room, pausing at the stiff, distinguished, grey-haired couple, one on either side of the fire. The effect was of a highly finished genre picture: the rich wainscot between low book-shelves, the brooding portraits, the black-blue rug bordered by a veiled Oriental motive, the black-velvet cushions that brought out the watery reflections of old Sheraton as even the ancient horsehair had not done; the silver candlesticks, the miniatures, and on the mantel those two royal flower-pots whose precarious existence was to his aunt a very fearful joy. Even the tortoise-sh.e.l.l cat, sprawled between the two figures like a tiny tiger-skin, was in the picture. It was a room that gently put you into your place. Hugh recalled with a faint grin certain meetings here of philanthropic ladies whose paths had seldom turned into the interiors of older Beacon Street. The state of life to which it had pleased their Maker to call them, he reflected, would express itself preferably in gilding and vast pale-tinted upholstery and pink bibelots--oh, quite a lot of pink. This place had worried them into a condition of disconcerted awe.

He tried to fancy what it was going to do to the unbidden, resented guest. A queer protest against its enmity, an impulse to give her a square deal, surged up in him from nowhere. After all, whatever else she might be, she was Uncle Hugh's girl. Like all the world, Hugh loved the dispossessed lover. He knew what it felt like. One does not reach the mature age of twenty-four without having at least begun the pa.s.sionate pilgrimage. His few tindery and tinselly affairs suspected of following the obvious formula: three parts curiosity, three parts the literary sense, three parts crude young impulse, one part distilled moonshine.

The real love of his life had been Uncle Hugh.

He sprang up with an abruptness to which his elders seemed to be used.

He stopped before a bra.s.s-trimmed desk and jerked at the second drawer.

"Where are those letters, sir?"

"You mean--"

"Yes, the one you wrote her about the money, and her answer. You put them with his papers, didn't you? Where's the key?"

The older man drew from his waistcoat pocket a carved bit of bra.s.s.

"What do you want with them?" he asked, cautiously.

"I want to refresh my memory--and Aunt Maria's." He took out a neat little pile of papers and began to sort them intently. "Here they are on top." He laid out a docketed envelope on the desk. "And here are the essays and poems that you wouldn't publish. I considered them the best things he ever did."

"You were not his literary executor," said his uncle, coldly. Another stifled glance pa.s.sed between the seniors, but this time Miss Maria made no effort to restore the gloss of the surface. She sat idle, staring at the papers with a sort of horror.

"Put them back," she said. "Winthrop, I do think you might burn them. If you keep things like that too long the wrong people are sure to get them."

"Wait a bit. I haven't seen them for years, not since you published the collected works--with Hamlet left out." The young man lifted a worn brown-morocco portfolio tied with a frazzled red ribbon. "And here"--his voice dropped--"here is It--the letters he wrote to her and never sent.

It was a sort of diary, wasn't it, going on for years? What a howling pity we couldn't print that!"

"Hugh!"

"Don't faint, Aunt Maria. You wouldn't catch me doing anything so indecent. But suppose Dante's dear family had suppressed the _Vita Nuova_. And it ought to be one of the most extraordinary human doc.u.ments in the world, perfectly intimate, all the bars down, full of those flashes of his. Just the man, _ipsissimus_, that never happened but that once. Uncle Winthrop, don't you think that I might read it?"

"Do you think so? I never did."

"Oh, if you put it up to me like that! Of course I can't. But what luck that he didn't ask you to send it to her--supposing she's the wrong kind--wasn't it ..." His voice trailed off, leaving his lips foolishly open. "You don't mean--he did?"

"Yes, at the end, after you had left the room," said Mr. Fowler, firmly.

"And you--didn't? Why not?"

"As you said, for fear she was the wrong kind"

"It was too much to hope that she would be anything else," his aunt broke in, harshly. "Shut your mouth, Hugh; you look like a fool. Think what she might have done with them--she and some of those unspeakable papers."

"Oh, I see! I see!" groaned the young man. "But how awful not to do the very last thing he wanted! Did you ever try to find out what kind of a person she was?"

"She took the money. That was enough," cried Miss Fowler. "She got her share, just as though she had been his legal wife."

Hugh gave her a dazed look. "You don't mean that she was his illegal one? I never--"

"Oh no, no!" Mr. Fowler interposed. "We have no reason to think that she was otherwise than respectable. Maria, you allow most unfortunate implications to result from your choice of words. We know very little, really."