The Imitator Part 18

"You--"

"You--"

"Jeannette--"

Her lips began to frame the consonant for her own name, but at sight of the pleading in his gaze she stilled the playfulness of her, and finished, shyly, but oh, so sweetly.

"Orson."

The dear, delightful absurdities of the hour when men and women tell each other they love, how silly, and how pathetic they must seem to the all-seeing force that flings our destinies back and forth at its will!

Yet how fair, how ineffably fair, those moments are to their heroes and heroines; how vastly absurd the rest of the sad, serious world seems to such lovers, and how happy are the mortals, after all, who through fastnesses of doubt and darkness, come to the free s.p.a.ces where the heart, in tenderness and grace, rules supreme over the intellect, and keeps in subjection, wisdom, ignorance and all the ills men plague their minds with!

When they left the Mayfair together their precious secret was anything but a secret. Their dream lay fair and open to the world; one must have been very blind not to see how much these two were in love with each other. They had gone over every incident of their friendship; they had stirred the embers of their earliest longings; they had touched their growing happiness at every point save where Orson's steps aside had hurt his sweetheart's memory. Those periods both avoided. All else they made subject for, oh, the tenderest, the most lovelorn conversation thinkable. It was enough, if overheard, to have sickened the whole day for any ordinary mortal.

One must, to repeat, have been very stupid not to see, when they issued upon the avenue, that they shared the secret that this world appears to have been created to keep alive. Love clothed them like a visible garment.

Luke Moncreith could never have been called blind or stupid. He saw the truth at once. The truth; it rushed over him like a salt, bitter, acrid sea. He swallowed it as a drowning man swallows what overwhelms him. One instant of terrible rage spun him as if he had been a top; he faced about and was for making, then and there, a scene with this shamelessly happy pair. But the futility of that struck him on the following second.

He kept his way down the avenue, emotions surging in him; he felt that his pa.s.sions were becoming visible and conspicuous; he took a turning into one of the streets leading eastward. A sign of a wineshop flashed across his dancing vision, and he clung to it as to an anchor or a poison. He found a table. He wanted nothing else, only rest, rest. The wine stood untasted on the bare wood before him. He peered, through it, into an unfathomable mystery. This chameleon, this fellow Vane--how was it possible that he had won this glorious, flower-like creature, Jeannette? This man had been, as the fancy took him, a court fool, a sporting nonent.i.ty, and a blatant mummer. And what was he now? By the looks of him, he was, to-day--and for how long, Moncreith wondered--a very essence of meekness and sweetness; b.u.t.ter would not think of melting in his mouth. What, in the devil's name, what was this riddle!

He might have repeated that question to himself until the end of his life if the door had not opened then and let in Nevins.

Nevins ordered the strongest liquor in the place. The sideboard on Vanthuysen Square might be empty, but Nevins had still the money. As for the gloomy old Vane house, he really could not stand it any longer. He toasted himself, did Nevins, and he talked to himself.

"'An now," he murmured, thickly, "'ere's to the mirror. May I never see it again as long as I 'as breath in my body and wits in me 'ead. Which,"

he observed, with a fatuous grin, "aint for long. No, sir; me nerves is that a-shake I aint good for nothin' any more. And I asks you, is it any wonder? 'Ere's Mr. Vane, one day, pleasant as pie. Next day, comes in, takes a look at that dratted mirror of the Perfessor's, and takes to 'igh jinks. Yes, sir, 'igh jinks, very 'igh jinks. 'As pink tea-fights in his rooms, 'angs up pictures I wouldn't let me own father see--no, sir, not if 'e begged me on his bended knee, I wouldn't--and wears what you might call a tenor voice. Then--one day, while you says 'One for his n.o.b' 'e's 'imself again. An' it's always the mirror this, an' the mirror that. I must look out for it, an' it mustn't be touched, and n.o.body must come in. And what's the result of it all? Me nerves is gone, and me self-respect is gone, and I'm a poor miserable drunkard!"

He gulped down some of his misery.

"Join me," said a voice nearby, "in another of those things!"

Nevins turned, with a swaying motion, to note Moncreith, whose hand was pointing to the empty gla.s.s before Nevins.

"You are quite right," he went on, when the other's gla.s.s had been filled again, "Mr. Vane's conduct has been most scandalous of late. You say he has a mirror?"

All circ.u.mspection had long since pa.s.sed from Nevins. He was simply an individual with a grievance. The many episodes that, in his filmy mind, seemed to center about that mirror, shifted and twisted in him to where they forced utterance. He began to talk, circuitously, wildly, rapidly, of the many things that rankled in him. He told all he knew, all he had observed. From out of the ma.s.s of inane, not pertinent ramblings, Moncreith caught a glimmer of the facts.

What a terrible power this must be that was in Orson Vane's possession!

Moncreith shuddered at the thought. Why, the man might turn himself, in all but externals--and what, after all, was the husk, the sh.e.l.l, the body?--into the finest wit, the most lovable hero of his time; he might fare about the world wrecking now this, now that, happiness; he might win--perhaps he actually had, even now, won Jeannette Vanlief? If he had, if--perhaps there was yet time! There was need for sharp, desperate action.

He plunged out of the place and toward Vanthuysen Square. Then he remembered that he could not get in. He aroused Nevins from his brutish doze. He dragged him over the intervening s.p.a.ce. Nevins gave him the key, and dropped into one of the hall chairs. Moncreith leaped upstairs, and entered the room where the mirror stood, white, silent, stately.

He contemplated everything for a time. He conjured up the picture he had been able to piece together from the rambling monologues of Nevins. He wondered whether to simply smash in the mirrors--he would destroy them all, to make sure--by taking a chair-leg to them, or whether he would carefully pour some acid over them.

The simpler plan appealed most to him. It was the quickest, the most thorough. He took a little wooden chair that stood by an ebon escritoire, swung it high in the air and brought it with a shattering crash upon the face of the Professor's mirror.

But there was more than a mere crash. A deadly, sickening, stifling fume arose from the s.p.a.ce the clinking gla.s.s unbared; a flame burst out, leaped at Moncreith and seized him. The deadly white smoke flowed through the room; flame followed flame, curtains, hangings, screens went, one after the other, to feed the ravenous beast that Moncreith's blow had liberated. The room was presently a seething furnace that rattled in the cage of the walls and windows. Moncreith lay, choked with the horrid smoke, on the floor. The flames licked at him again and again; finally one took him on the tip of its tongue, twisted him about, and shriveled him to black, charred shapelessness.

The windows fell, finally, out upon the street below. The fire sneaked downward, laughing and leaping.

When the firemen came to save Orson Vane's house, they found a grinning, sodden creature in the hall.

It was Nevins. "That settles the mirror!" was all he kept repeating.

CHAPTER XX.

The Professor shivered a little when Jeannette came to him with her budget of wonderful news. She told him of her engagement. He patted her head, and blessed her and wished her happiness. Then she told him of her visit to Vane's house. It was at that he shivered.

He wondered if Vane had taken her image from that fatal gla.s.s. If he had, how, he wondered, would this experiment end? Surely it could not have happened; Jeannette was quite herself; there was no visible diminution of charm, of vitality.

When Vane arrived, presently, the Professor questioned him. The answer brought the Professor wonder, but he did not count it altogether a calamity. There could be no doubt that Orson Vane was now wearing Jeannette's sweet and beautiful soul as a halo round his own. Well, mused Vanlief, if anything should happen to Jeannette one can always--

"Oh, father!"

Jeannette burst into the room with the morning paper from town. "Orson's house is burnt to the ground. And who do you think is suspected? Luke Moncreith! They found his body. Read it!"

The Professor took the report and scanned it. There could be no doubt; the mirror, the work of his life, was gone. He could never fashion one like it. Never--Yet--He looked at the two young people at the window, whither they had turned together, each with an arm about the other.

"What a marvel of a day!" Jeannette was saying.

"The days will all be marvels for us," said Orson.

"The days, I think, must have souls, just as we have. Some days seem to have such dark, such bitter thoughts.

"Yes, I think you are right. There are days that strike one as having souls; others that seem quite soulless. Beautiful, empty sh.e.l.ls, some of them; others, dim, yet tender, full of graciousness."

"Orson!"

"Sweetheart!"

"Do you know how wonderfully you are changed? Do you know you once talked bitterly, as one who was full of disappointments and disenchantments?"

"You have set me, dear, in a garden of enchantment from which I mean never to escape. The garden is your heart."

Something glistened in the Professor's eyes as he listened. "G.o.d, in his infinite wisdom," he said, in a reverent whisper, "gave her so much of grace; she had enough for both!"