The Imitator Part 15

His thoughts traversed argument upon argument while Nevins completed his work. He heard the man's voice, finally, with an actual relief, a gladness at being recalled to the daring and doing that lay before him.

When the Professor was gone, a wagon bearing away the precious mirror, Nevins poured himself out a notably stiff gla.s.s of Five-Star.

"Here's hoping," he toasted the silent room, "the silly thing gets smashed into everlasting smithereens!"

And he drowned any fears he might have had to the contrary. This particular species of time-killing was now a daily matter with Nevins; the incessant strain upon his nerves of some months past had finally brought him to the pitch where he had only one haven of refuge left.

The Professor sped over the miles to Framley Lodge. He took little thought about meals or sleep. The excitement was marking him deeply; but he paid no heed to, or was unaware of, that. Arrived at the Lodge a campaign of bribery and corruption began. Servant after servant had to be suborned. Nothing but the well-known fame and name of Augustus Vanlief enabled him, even with his desperate expenditures of tips, to avert the suspicion that he had some deadly, some covertly inimical end in view. One does not, at this age of the world, burst into another man's house and order that man's servants about, without coming under suspicion, to put it mildly. Fortunately Vanlief encountered, just as his plot seemed shattering against the rigor of the household arrangements, the doctor who was in attendance on Wantage. The man happened to be on the staff of the University where Vanlief held a chair. He held the older man in the greatest respect; he listened to his rapid talk with all the patience in the world. He looked astonished, even uncomprehending, but he shook his shoulders up and down a few times with complaisance. "There seems no possible harm," he a.s.sented.

"Don't ask me to believe in the curative possibilities, Professor; but--there can be no harm, that I see. He is not to be unduly excited. A mirror, you say? You don't think vanity can send a man from illness to health, do you? Not even an actor can be as vain as that, surely.

However, I shall tell the attendants to see that the thing is done as quietly as possible. I trust you, you see, to let nothing detrimental happen. I have to get over to the Port of Pines. I shall give the orders. Goodbye. I wish I could see the result of your little--h'm, notion--but I dare say to-morrow will be soon enough."

And he smiled the somewhat condescending smile of the successful pract.i.tioner who fancies he is addressing a campaigner whose usefulness is pa.s.sing.

The setting up of the professor's mirror, so as to face Wantage's sickbed, took no little time, no little care, no little exertion. When it was in place, the professor tiptoed to the actor's side.

"Well," queried Wantage, "what is it? Medicine? Lord, I thought I'd taken all there was in the world. Where is it?"

"No," said the professor, "not medicine. I am going to ask you to look quite hard at that curtain by the foot of the bed for a moment. I have something I think may interest you and--"

As the actor's eyes, in mere physical obedience to the other's suggestion, took the desired direction, Vanlief tugged at a cord that rolled the curtain aside, revealing the mirror, which gave Wantage back the somewhat haggard apparition of himself.

A few seconds went by in silence. Then Wantage frowned sharply.

"Gad," he exclaimed, vigorously and petulantly, "what a beastly bad bit of make-up!"

The voice was the voice of the man whom the town had a thousand times applauded as "The King of the Dandies."

An exceedingly bad quarter of an hour followed for Vanlief. Wantage, now in full possession of all his mental faculties, abused the Professor up hill and down dale. What was he doing there? What business had that mirror there? What good was a covered-up mirror? Where were the servants? The doctor had given orders? The doctor was a fool. Only the mere physical infirmity consequent upon being bedridden for so long prevented Wantage from becoming violent in his rage. Vanlief, sharp as was his sense of relief at the success of his venture, was yet more relieved when his bribes finally got his mirror and himself out of the Lodge. The incident had its humors, but he was too tired, too enervated, to enjoy them. The very moment of Wantage's recovery of his soul had its note of ironic comedy; the succeeding vituperation from the restored actor; Vanlief's own meekness; the marvel and rapacity of the servants--all these were abrim with chances for merriment. But Vanlief found himself, for, perhaps, the first time in his life, too old to enjoy the happy interpretations of life. Into all his rejoicings over the outcome of this affair there crept the constant doubts, the ceaseless questionings, as to whether he had discovered a mine of wisdom and benefit, or a mere addition to man's chances for evil.

His return journey, his delivery of the mirror into Nevins' unwilling care, were accomplished by him in a species of daze.

He had hardly counted upon the danger of his discovery. Was he still young enough to contend with them?

Nevins almost flung the mirror to its accustomed place. He unwrapped it spitefully. When he left the room, the curtain of the gla.s.s was flapping in the wind. Nevins heard the sound quite distinctly; he went to the sideboard and poured out a br.i.m.m.i.n.g potion.

"I 'opes the wind'll play the Old 'Arry with it," he smiled to himself.

He smiled often that night; he went to bed smiling. His was the cheerful mode of intoxication.

Augustus Vanlief reached the cottage in the hills a sheer wreck. He had left it a hale figure of a man who had ever kept himself keyed up to the best; now he was old, shaking, trembling in nerves and muscles.

Jeannette rushed toward him and put her arms around him. She looked her loving, silent wonder into his weary eyes.

"Sleep, dear, sleep," said this old, tired man of science, "first let me sleep."

CHAPTER XVIII.

Orson Vane, scintillating theatrically by the sea, was in a fine rage when Nevins ceased to answer his telegrams. Telegrams struck Vane as the most dramatic of epistles; there was always a certain pictorial effect in tearing open the envelope, in imagining the hushed expectation of an audience. A letter--pooh! A letter might be anything from a bill to a billet. But a telegram! Those little slips of paper struck immediate terror, or joy, or despair, or confusion; they hit hard, and swiftly.

Certainly he had been hitting Nevins hard enough of late. He had peppered him with telegrams about the furniture, about the pictures; he had forbidden one day what he had ordered the day before. It never occurred to him that Nevins might seek escape from these torments. Yet that was what Nevins had done. He had tippled himself into a condition where he signed sweetly for each telegram and put it in the hall-rack.

They made a beautiful, yellow festoon on the mahogany background.

"Those," Nevins told himself, "is for a gentleman as is far too busy to notice little things like telegrams."

Nevins watched that yellow border growing daily with fresh delight.

He could keep on accepting telegrams just as long as the sideboard held its strength. Each new arrival from the Western Union drove him to more glee and more spirits--of the kind one can buy bottled.

At last Orson Vane felt some alarm creeping through his armor of dramatic pose. Could Nevins have come to any harm? It was very annoying, but he would have to go to town for a day or so. That seemed unavoidable. Just as he had made up his mind to it, he happened to slip on a bit of lemon-peel. At once he fell into a towering rage. He cursed the entire service on the _Beaurivage_ up hill and down dale. You could hear him all over the harbor. It was the voice of a profane Voltaire.

That night, at the Casino, his rage found vent in action. He sold the _Beaurivage_ as hastily as he had bought her.

He left for town, by morning, full of bitterness at the world's conspiracy to cheat him. He felt that for a careless deck-hand to leave lemon-peel on the deck of the Beaurivage was nothing less than part of the world-wide cabal against his peace of mind.

He reached his town-house in a towering pa.s.sion, all the acc.u.mulated ill-temper of the last few days bubbling in him. He flung the housedoor wide, stamped through the halls. "Nevins!" he shouted, "Nevins!"

Nothing stirred in the house. He entered room after room. Pa.s.sing into his dressing-room he almost tore the hanging from its rod. A gust of air struck him from the wide-open window. Before he proceeded another step this gust, that his opening of the curtain had produced, lifted the veil from the mirror facing him. The veil swung up gently, revealed the gla.s.s, and dropped again.

Then he realized the figure of Nevins on a couch. He walked up to him.

The smell of spirits met him at once.

"Poor Nevins!" he muttered.

Then he fell to further realizations.

The whole history of his three experiments unfolded itself before him.

What, after them all, had he gained? What, save the knowledge of the littleness of the motives controlling those lives? This actor, this man the world thought great, whose soul he had held in usurpation, up to a little while ago, what was he? A very batch of vanities, a mountain of egoisms. Had there been, in any of the thoughts, the moods he had experienced from out the mental repertoire of that player, anything indicative of n.o.bility, of large benevolence, of sweet and light in the finest human sense? Nothing, nothing. The ambition to imitate the obvious points of human action and conduct, to the end that one be called a character-actor; the striving for an echoed fame rightly belonging to the supreme names of history; a yearning for the stimulus of immediate acclamation--these things were not worth gaining. To have experienced them was to have caught nothing beneficial.

Orson Vane began to consider himself with contempt. Upon himself must fall the odium of what the souls he had borrowed had induced in him. The littleness he had fathomed, the depths of character to which he had sunk, all left their petty brands on him. He had penetrated the barriers of other men's minds, but what had it profited him? As a ship becalmed in foul waters takes on barnacles, so had he brought forth, from the realm of alien springs and motives he had made his own, a dreadful incrustation of painful conjectures on the supremacy of evil in the world.

It needed only a glance at the man, Nevins, to force home the destructiveness born of these incursions into other lives. That trembling, cowering thing had been, before Orson Vane's departure from the limitations of his own temperament, a decent, self-respecting fellow. While now--

Vane paced about the house in bitter unrest. In the outer hall he noticed the yellow envelopes bordering the coat-rack. He took one of them down, opened it, and smiled. "Poor Nevins!" he murmured. The next moment a lad from the Telegraph office appeared in the doorway. Vane went forward himself; there was no use disturbing Nevins.

The wire had followed him on from the _Beaurivage_, or rather from the man to whom he had sold her. It was from Augustus Vanlief. Its brevity was like a blow in the face.

"Am ill," it said, "must see you."

It was still possible, that very hour, to get an express to the Professor's mountain retreat. There was nothing to prevent immediate departure. Nothing--except Nevins. The man really must exercise more care about that mirror. He was safely out of all his experiments now, but the thing was dangerous none the less; if it had been his own property, he would have known how to deal with it. But it was the Professor's secret, the discovery of a lifetime. For elaborate precautions, or even for hiding the thing in some closet, there was no time. He could only rouse Nevins as energetically as possible to a sense of his previous defection from duty; gently and quite kindly he admonished him to take every care of the new mirror in the time coming.

Nevins listened to him wide-eyed; his senses were still too much agog for him to realize whence this change of voice and manner had come to his master. It was merely another page in the chapter of bewilderment that piled upon him. He bowed his promise to be careful, he a.s.sented to a number of things he could not fathom, and when Vane was gone he cleared the momentary trouble in his mind by an ardent drink. The liquor brought him a most humorous notion, and one that he felt sure would relieve him of all further anxieties on the score of the new mirror. He approached the back of it, tore the curtain from its face, wheeled it to the centre of the room, and placed all the other cheval-gla.s.ses close by. Throughout this he had wit enough, or fear enough--for his memory brought him just enough picture of Orson's own handling of this mirror to inspire a certain awe of the front of the thing--never to pa.s.s in face of the mirror. When he had the mirrors grouped in close ranks, he spun about on his heels quickly, as if seized with the devout frenzy of a dervish. He fell, finally, in a daze of dizziness and liquor. Yet he had cunning enough left. He crept out of the room on his stomach, like a snake with fiery breath. He knew that the angle at which the mirrors were tilted would keep him, belly to the carpet, out of range. Then he reeled, shouting, into the corridors.

He had accomplished his desire. He no longer knew one mirror from the other.

Orson Vane, in the meanwhile, was being rushed to the mountains. It was with a new shock of shame that he saw the ravages illness was making on the fine face of Vanlief. This, too, was one of the items in the profit-and-loss column of his experiments. Yet this burden was, perhaps, a shared one.

"Ah," said Vanlief, with a quick breath of gladness, "thank G.o.d!" He knew, the instant Vane spoke, that it was Orson Vane himself who had come; he knew that there was no more doubt as to the success of his own recent headlong journeyings. They had prostrated him; but--they had won.