The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton Part 26

"I am so sorry," he said apologetically. "You are a man of business, Mr. Bomford, and you, professor, see much further into life than I can, but I do not wish to have anything whatever to do with your scheme. It does not appeal to me in the least--in fact it offends me. It seems cra.s.sly vulgar, a vulgar way of attaining to a position which I, personally, should loathe."

He rose to his feet.

"If you will excuse me, professor," he said. Mr. Bomford, with a greater show of vigor than he had previously displayed, jumped up and laid his hand upon the young man's shoulder. His hard face seemed suddenly to have become the rioting place for evil pa.s.sions. His lips were a little parted and his teeth showed unpleasantly.

"Do you mean, young man," he exclaimed, "that you refuse to join us?"

"That is what I intended to convey," Burton replied coldly.

"You refuse either to come into our scheme or to give us one of the beans?"

Burton nodded.

"I hold them in trust for myself." There was a moment's silence. Mr.

Bomford seemed to be struggling for words. The professor was looking exceedingly disappointed.

"Mr. Burton," he protested, "I cannot help feeling a certain amount of admiration for your point of view, but, believe me, you are entirely in the wrong. I beg that you will think this matter over."

"I am sure that it would be useless," Burton replied. "Nothing would induce me to change my mind."

"Nothing?" Mr. Bomford asked, with a peculiar meaning in his tone.

"Nothing?" the professor echoed softly.

Burton withdrew his eyes from the little shadowy vista of garden and looked steadfastly at the two men. Then his heart began to beat. He was filled with a sort of terror lest they should say what he felt sure was in their minds. It was like sacrilege. It was something unholy.

His eyes had been caught by the flutter of a white gown pa.s.sing across one of the lighter places of the perfumed darkness. They had been watching him. He only prayed that they would not interrupt until he had reached the end of his speech.

"Professor," he said softly, turning to his host, "there is one thing which I desire so greatly that I would give my life itself for it. I would give even what you have asked for to-night and be content to leave the world in so much shorter time. But that one thing I may not ask of you, for in those days of which I have told you, before the wonderful adventure came, I was married. My wife lives now in Garden Green. I have also a little boy. You will forgive me."

He pa.s.sed through the open French windows and neither of them made any further attempt to detain him. Their silence was a little unnatural and from the walk outside he glanced for a moment behind him. The two men were sitting in exactly the same positions, their faces were turned towards him, and their eyes seemed to be following his movements. Yet there was a change. The professor was no longer the absorbed, mildly benevolent man of science. Mr. Bomford had lost his commonplace expression. There was a new thing in their faces, something eager, ominous. Burton felt a sudden depression as he turned away. He looked with relief at the thin circle of the moon, visible now through the waving elm trees at the bottom of the garden. He drew in with joy a long breath of the delicious perfume drawn by the night from the silent boughs of the cedar tree. Resolutely he hurried away from the sight of that ugly little framed picture upon which he had gazed through the open French windows--the two men on either side of the lamp, watching him.

"Edith!" he called softly.

She answered him with a little laugh. She was almost by his side. He took a quick step forward. She was standing among the deepest shadows, against the trunk of the cedar tree, her slim body leaning slightly against it. It seemed to him that her face was whiter, her eyes softer than ever. He took her hand in his.

She smiled.

"You must not come out to me here," she whispered. "Mr. Bomford will not like it. It is most improper."

"But it may be our good-bye," he pleaded. "They want me to do something, Mr. Bomford and your father, something hideous, utterly grotesque. I have refused and they are very angry."

"What is it that they want you to do?"

"Dear," he answered, "you, I am sure, will understand. They want me to give them one of my beans. They want to make some wretched drug or medicine from it, to advertise it all over the world, to ama.s.s a great fortune."

"Are you in earnest?" she cried.

"Absolutely," he a.s.sured her. "It is Mr. Bomford's scheme. He says that it would mean great wealth for all of us. Your father, too, praises it. He, too, seemed to come--for the moment, at any rate--under the curse. He, too, is greedy for money."

"And you?" she whispered. "What did you say?

"What did I say?" he repeated wonderingly. "But of course you know!

Imagine the horror of it--a health-food for the mind! Huge sums of money rolling in from the pockets of credulous people, money stinking with the curse of vulgarity and quackery! It is almost like a false note, dear, to speak of it out here, but I must tell you because they are angry with me. I am afraid that your father will send me away, and I am afraid that our little dream is over and that I shall not wander with you any more evenings here in the cool darkness, when the heat of the day is past and the fragrance of the cedar tree and your roses fills the air, and you, your sweet self, Edith, are here."

She was looking at him very fixedly. Her lips were a little parted, her eyes were moist, her bosom was rising and falling as though she were shaken by some wonderful emotion.

"Dear!" she murmured.

It seemed to him that she leaned a little towards him. His heart ached with longing. Very slowly, almost reverently, his hands touched her shoulders, drew her towards him.

"You and I," he whispered, "at least we live in the same world. Nothing will ever be able to take the joy of that thought from my heart."

She remained quite pa.s.sive. In her eyes there was a far-away look.

"Dear," she said softly in his ear, "you are such a dreamer, aren't you--such a dear unpractical person? Have you never used your wonderful imagination to ask yourself what money may really mean? You can buy a world of beautiful things, you can buy the souls of men and women, you can buy the law."

He felt a cold pain in his heart. Looking at her through the twilight he could almost fancy that there was a gleam in her face of something which he had seen shining out of her father's eyes. His arms fell away from her. The pa.s.sion which had thrilled him but a moment ago seemed crushed by that great resurgent impulse which he was powerless to control.

"You think that I should do this?" he cried, hoa.r.s.ely.

"Why not?" she answered. "Money is only vulgar if you spend it vulgarly. It might mean so much to you and to me."

"Tell me how?" he faltered.

"Mr. Bomford is very fond of money," she continued. "He is fonder of money, I think, than he is of me. And then," she added, her voice sinking to a whisper, "there is Garden Green. Of course, I do not know much about these things, but I suppose if you really wanted to, and spent a great deal of money, you could buy your freedom, couldn't you?"

The air seemed full of jangling discords. He closed his eyes. It was as though a shipwreck was going on around him. His dream was being broken up into pieces. The girl with the fair hair was pa.s.sing into the shadows from which she had come. She called to him across the lawn as he hurried away, softly at first and then insistently. But Burton did not return. He spent his night upon the Common.

CHAPTER XIX

A BAD HALF-HOUR

Burton slept that night under a gorse bush. He was no sooner alone on the great unlit Common with its vast sense of s.p.a.ciousness, its cool silence, its splendid dome of starlit sky, than all his anger and disappointment seemed to pa.s.s away. The white, threatening faces of the professor and Mr. Bomford no longer haunted him. Even the memory of Edith herself tugged no longer at his heartstrings. He slept almost like a child, and awoke to look out upon a million points of sunlight sparkling in the dewdrops. A delicious west wind was blowing. Little piled-up ma.s.ses of white cloud had been scattered across the blue sky.

Even the gorse bushes creaked and quivered. The fir trees in a little spinney close at hand were twisted into all manners of shapes. Burton listened to their music for a few minutes, and exchanged civilities with a dapple-breasted thrush seated on a clump of heather a few yards away.

Then he rose to his feet, took in a long breath of the fresh morning air, and started briskly across the Common towards the nearest railway station.

He was conscious, after the first few steps, of a dim premonition of some coming change. It did not affect--indeed, it seemed to increase the lightness of his spirits, yet he was conscious at the back of his brain of a fear which he could not put into words. The first indication of real trouble came in the fact that he found himself whistling "Yip-i-addy-i-ay" as he turned into the station yard. He knew then what was coming.

After the first start, the rapidity of his collapse was appalling. The seclusion of the first-cla.s.s carriage to which his ticket ent.i.tled him, and which his somewhat peculiar toilet certainly rendered advisable, was suddenly immensely distasteful. He bought t.i.t-bits and Ally Sloper at the bookstall, squeezed his way into a crowded third-cla.s.s compartment, and joined in a noisy game of nap with half a dozen roistering young clerks, who were full of jokes about his crumpled dinner clothes.

Arrived in London, he had the utmost difficulty to refrain from buying a red and yellow tie displayed in the station lavatory where he washed and shaved, and the necessity for purchasing a collar stud left him for a few moments in imminent peril of acquiring a large bra.s.s-stemmed production with a sham diamond head. He hastened to his rooms, scarcely daring to look about him, turned over the clothes in his wardrobe with a curious dissatisfaction, and dressed himself hastily in as offensive a combination of garments as he could lay his hands upon. He bought some common Virginian cigarettes and made his way to the offices of Messrs.

Waddington and Forbes.

Mr. Waddington was unfeignedly glad to see him. His office was pervaded by a sort of studious calm which, from a business point of view, seemed scarcely satisfactory. Mr. Waddington himself appeared to be immersed in a calf-bound volume of Ruskin. He glanced curiously at his late employee.

"Did you dress in a hurry, Burton?" he inquired. "That combination of gray trousers and brown coat with a blue tie seems scarcely in your usual form."