Now, as it turned out, his chief surprise was that she should wait so long to make him speak them. All through the dinner she had swept him along on a rapid current of talk which showed no tendency to linger or turn back upon the past. At first he ascribed her reserve to a sense of delicacy with which he reproached himself for not having previously credited her; then he saw that she had been carried so far beyond the point at which they had last faced each other, that it was by the merest hazard of associated ideas that she was now finally borne back to it. For it appeared that the very next evening, at Mrs. Beecher Bain’s, a Hindu Mahatma was to lecture to the Uplift Club on the Limits of the Subliminal; and it was owing to no less a person than Howland Wade that this exceptional privilege had been obtained.
“Of course Howland’s known all over the world as the interpreter of Pellerinism, and the Aga Gautch, who had absolutely declined to speak anywhere in public, wrote to Isabella that he could not refuse anything that Mr. Wade asked. Did you know that Howland’s lecture, ‘What Pellerinism Means,’ has been translated into twenty-two languages, and gone into a fifth edition in Icelandic? Why, that reminds me,” Miss Fosdick broke off—“I’ve never heard what became of your queer friend—what was his name?—whom you and Bob Wade accused me of spiriting away after that very lecture. And I’ve never seen you since you rushed into the house the next morning, and dragged me out of bed to know what I’d done with him!”
With a sharp effort Bernald gathered himself together to have it out. “Well, what did you do with him?” he retorted.
She laughed her appreciation of his humour. “Just what I told you, of course. I said good-bye to him on Isabella’s doorstep.”
Bernald looked at her. “It’s really true, then, that he didn’t go home with you?”
She bantered back: “Have you suspected me, all this time, of hiding his remains in the cellar?” And with a droop of her fine lids she added: “I wish he had come home with me, for he was rather interesting, and there were things I think I could have explained to him.”
Bernald helped himself to a nectarine, and Miss Fosdick continued on a note of amused curiosity: “So you’ve really never had any news of him since that night?”
“No—I’ve never had any news of him.”
“Not the least little message?”
“Not the least little message.”
“Or a rumour or report of any kind?”
“Or a rumour or report of any kind.”
Miss Fosdick’s interest seemed to be revived by the strangeness of the case. “It’s rather creepy, isn’t it? What could have happened? You don’t suppose he could have been waylaid and murdered?” she asked with brightening eyes.
Bernald shook his head serenely. “No. I’m sure he’s safe—quite safe.”
“But if you’re sure, you must know something.”
“No. I know nothing,” he repeated.
She scanned him incredulously. “But what’s your theory—for you must have a theory? What in the world can have become of him?”
Bernald returned her look and hesitated. “Do you happen to remember the last thing he said to you—the very last, on the doorstep, when he left you?”
“The last thing?” She poised her fork above the peach on her plate. “I don’t think he said anything. Oh, yes—when I reminded him that he’d solemnly promised to come back with me and have a little talk he said he couldn’t because he was going home.”
“Well, then, I suppose,” said Bernald, “he went home.”
She glanced at him as if suspecting a trap. “Dear me, how flat! I always inclined to a mysterious murder. But of course you know more of him than you say.”
She began to cut her peach, but paused above a lifted bit to ask, with a renewal of animation in her expressive eyes: “By the way, had you heard that Howland Wade has been gradually getting farther and farther away from Pellerinism? It seems he’s begun to feel that there’s a Positivist element in it which is narrowing to any one who has gone at all deeply into the Wisdom of the East. He was intensely interesting about it the other day, and of course I do see what he feels. … Oh, it’s too long to tell you now; but if you could manage to come in to tea some afternoon soon—any day but Wednesday—I should so like to explain—”
THE EYES
I
WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s—the narrative of a strange personal visitation.
Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand being, after Murchard’s brilliant opening, the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfil the condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham—whose story was the slightest of the lot—had the habit of sending our souls into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be proud of our seven “exhibits,” and none of us would have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.
Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his armchair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his guests. By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a “turn.”
Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his character than my mother’s assertion that he had once been “a charming little man with nice eyes” corresponded to any possible reconstitution of his dry thwarted physiognomy.
“He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,” Murchard had once said of him. “Or a phosphorescent log, rather,” some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky. Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary only because some one had to do the cooking. On the importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy was the only science which he revered as dogma. It must be owned that his little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view, besides being a reason—though not the main one—for the fidelity of his friends.