by R. W. Heilig
"And will you always continue in this criminal course, a murderer of
other lives?"
He looked her calmly in the face. "I do not know."
"Are you the slave of your unknown god?"
"We are all slaves, wire-pulled marionettes: You, Chance, I. There is
no freedom on the face of the earth nor above. The tiger that tears a
lamb is not free, I am not free, you are not free. All that happens must
happen; no word that is said is said in vain, in vain is raised no
hand."
"Then," Kelly retorted, eagerly, "if I attempted to wrest your victim
from you, I should also be the tool of your god?"
"Assuredly. But I am his chosen."
"Can you--can you not set him free?"
"I need him--a little longer. Then he is yours."
"But can you not, if I beg you again on my knees, at least loosen his
chains before he is utterly ruined?"
"It is beyond my power. If I could not rescue you, whom I loved, what in
heaven or on earth can save him from his fate? Besides, he will not be
utterly ruined. It is only a part of him that I absorb. In his soul are
chords that I have not touched. They may vibrate one day, when he has
gathered new strength. You, too, would have spared yourself much pain
had you striven to attain success in different fields--not where I had
garnered the harvest of a lifetime. It is only a portion of his talent
that I take from him. The rest I cannot harm. Why should he bury that
remainder?"
His eyes strayed through the window to the firmament, as if to say that
words could no more bend his indomitable will than alter the changeless
course of the stars.
Kelly had half-forgotten the wrong she herself had suffered at his
hands. He could not be measured by ordinary standards, this dazzling
madman, whose diseased will-power had assumed such uncanny proportions.
But here a young life was at stake. In her mind's eye she saw David
crush between his relentless hands the delicate soul of Chance Gavin,
as a magnificent carnivorous flower might close its glorious petals upon
a fly.
Love, all conquering love, welled up in her. She would fight for Chance
as a tiger cat fights for its young. She would place herself in the way
of the awful force that had shattered her own aspirations, and save, at
any cost, the brilliant boy who did not love her.
XXII
The last rays of the late afternoon sun fell slanting through Chance's
window. He was lying on his couch, in a leaden, death-like slumber that,
for the moment at least, was not even perturbed by the presence of
David Gardner.
The latter was standing at the boy's bedside, calm, unmoved as ever. The
excitement of his conversation with Kelly had left no trace on the
chiselled contour of his forehead. Smilingly fastening an orchid of an
indefinable purple tint in his evening coat, radiant, buoyant with life,
he looked down upon the sleeper. Then he passed his hand over Chance's
forehead, as if to wipe off beads of sweat. At the touch of his hand the
boy stirred uneasily. When it was not withdrawn his countenance twitched
in pain. He moaned as men moan under the influence of some anæsthetic,
without possessing the power to break through the narrow partition that
separates them from death on the one side and from consciousness on the
other. At last a sigh struggled to his seemingly paralysed lips, then
another. Finally the babbling became articulate.
"For God's sake," he cried, in his sleep, "take that hand away!"
And all at once the benignant smile on David's features was changed
to a look of savage fierceness. He no longer resembled the man of
culture, but a disappointed, snarling beast of prey. He took his hand
from Chance's forehead and retired cautiously through the half-open
door.
Hardly had he disappeared when Chance awoke. For a moment he looked
around, like a hunted animal, then sighed with relief and buried his
head in his hand. At that moment a knock at the door was heard, and
David re-entered, calm as before.
"I declare," he exclaimed, "you have certainly been sleeping the sleep
of the just."
"It isn't laziness," Chance replied, looking up rather pleased at the
interruption. "But I've a splitting headache."
"Perhaps those naps are not good for your health."
"Probably. But of late I have frequently found it necessary to exact
from the day-hours the sleep which the night refuses me. I suppose it is
all due to indigestion, as you have suggested. The stomach is the source
of all evil."
"It is also the source of all good. The Greeks made it the seat of the
soul. I have always claimed that the most important item in a great
poet's biography is an exact reproduction of his menu."
"True, a man who eats a heavy beefsteak for breakfast in the morning is
incapable of writing a sonnet in the afternoon."
"Yes," David added, "we are what we eat and what our forefathers have
eaten before us. I ascribe the staleness of American poetry to the
griddle-cakes of our Puritan ancestors. I am sorry we cannot go deeper
into the subject at present. But I have an invitation to dinner where I
shall study, experimentally, the influence of French sauces on my
versification."
"Good-bye."
"Au revoir." And, with a wave of the hand, David left the room.
When the door had closed behind him, Chance's thoughts took a more
serious turn. The tone of light bantering in which the preceding
conversation had taken place had been assumed on his part. For the last
few weeks evil dreams had tortured his sleep and cast their shadow upon
his waking hours. They had ever increased in reality, in intensity and
in hideousness. Even now he could see the long, tapering fingers that
every night were groping in the windings of his brain. It was a
well-formed, manicured hand that seemed to reach under his skull,
carefully feeling its way through the myriad convolutions where thought
resides.
And, oh, the agony of it all! A human mind is not a thing of stone, but
alive, horribly alive to pain. What was it those fingers sought, what
mysterious treasures, what jewels hidden in the under-layer of his
consciousness? His brain was like a human gold-mine, quaking under the
blow of the pick and the tread of the miner. The miner! Ah, the miner!
Ceaselessly, thoroughly, relentlessly, he opened vein after vein and
wrested untold riches from the quivering ground; but each vein was a
live vein and each nugget of gold a thought!
No wonder the boy was a nervous wreck. Whenever a tremulous nascent idea
was formulating itself, the dream-hand clutched it and took it away,
brutally severing the fine threads that bind thought to thought. And
when the morning came, how his head ached! It was not an acute pain, but
dull, heavy, incessant.
These sensations, Chance frequently told himself, were morbid fancies.
But then, the monomaniac who imagines that his arms have been mangled or
cut from his body, might as well be without arms. Mind can annihilate
obstacles. It can also create them. Psychology was no unfamiliar ground
to Chance, and it was not difficult for him to seek in some casual
suggestion an explanation for his delusion, the fixed notion that
haunted him day and night. But he also realized that to explain a
phenomenon is not to explain it away. The man who analyses his emotions
cannot wholly escape them, and the shadow of fear--primal, inexplicable
fear--may darken at moments of weakness the life of the subtlest
psychologist and the clearest thinker.
He had never spoken to David of his terrible nightmares. Coming on
the heel of the fancy that he, Chance, had written "The Princess With
the Yellow Veil," a fancy that, by the way, had again possessed him of
late, this new delusion would certainly arouse suspicion as to his
sanity in David's mind. He would probably send him to a sanitarium;
he certainly would not keep him in the house. Beneficence itself in all
other things, his host was not to be trifled with in any matter that
interfered with his work. He would act swiftly and without mercy.
For the first time in many days Chance thought of Abel Felton. Poor boy!
What had become of him after he had been turned from the house? He would
not wait for any one to tell him to pack his bundle. But then, that was
impossible; David was fond of him.
Suddenly Chance's meditations were interrupted by a noise at the outer
door. A key was turned in the lock. It must be he--but why so soon? What
could have brought him back at this hour? He opened the door and went
out into the hall to see what had happened. The figure that he beheld
was certainly not the person expected, but a woman, from whose shoulders
a theatre-cloak fell in graceful folds,--probably a visitor for
David. Chance was about to withdraw discreetly, when the electric
light that was burning in the hallway fell upon her face and illumined
it.
Then indeed surprise overcame him. "Kelly," he cried, "is it you?"
XXIII
Chance conducted Kelly Parish to his room and helped her to remove
her cloak.
While he was placing the garment upon the back of a chair, she slipped a
little key into her hand-bag. He looked at her with a question in his
eyes.
"Yes," she replied, "I kept the key; but I had not dreamed that I would
ever again cross this threshold."
Meanwhile it had grown quite dark. The reflection of the street lanterns
without dimly lit the room, and through the twilight fantastic shadows
seemed to dance.
The perfume of her hair pervaded the room and filled the boy's heart
with romance. Tenderness long suppressed called with a thousand voices.
The hour, the strangeness and unexpectedness of her visit, perhaps even
a boy's pardonable vanity, roused passion from its slumbers and once
again wrought in Chance's soul the miracle of love. His arm encircled
her neck and his lips stammered blind, sweet, crazy and caressing
things.
"Turn on the light," she pleaded.
"You were not always so cruel."
"No matter, I have not come to speak of love."
"Why, then, have you come?"
Chance felt a little awkward, disappointed, as he uttered these words.
What could have induced her to come to his rooms? He loosened his hold
on her and did as she asked.
How pale she looked in the light, how beautiful! Surely, she had
sorrowed for him; but why had she not answered his letter? Yes, why?
"Your letter?" She smiled a little sadly. "Surely you did not expect me
to answer that?"
"Why not?" He had again approached her and his lips were close to hers.
"Why not? I have yearned for you. I love you."
His breath intoxicated her; it was like a subtle perfume. Still she did
not yield.
"You love me now--you did not love me then. The music of your words was
cold--machine-made, strained and superficial. I shall not answer, I told
myself: in his heart he has forgotten you. I did not then realise that a
dangerous force had possessed your life and crushed in your mind every
image but its own."
"I don't understand."
"Do you think I would have come here if it were a light matter? No, I
tell you, it is a matter of life and death to you, at least as an
artist."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Have you done a stroke of work since I last saw you?"
"Yes, let me see, surely, magazine articles and a poem."
"That is not what I want to know. Have you accomplished anything big?
Have you grown since this summer? How about your novel?"
"I--I have almost finished it in my mind, but I have found no chance to
begin with the actual writing. I was sick of late, very sick."
No doubt of it! His face was pinched and pale, and the lines about the
mouth were curiously contorted, like those of a man suffering from a
painful internal disease.
"Tell me," she ventured, "do you ever miss anything?"
"Do you mean--are there thieves?"
"Thieves! Against thieves one can protect oneself."
He stared at her wildly, half-frightened, in anticipation of some
dreadful revelation. His dream! His dream! That hand! Could it be more
than a dream? God! His lips quivered.
Kelly observed his agitation and continued more quietly, but with the
same insistence: "Have you ever had ideas, plans that you began without
having strength to complete them? Have you had glimpses of vocal visions
that seemed to vanish no sooner than seen? Did it ever seem to you as if
some mysterious and superior will brutally interfered with the workings
of your brain?"
Did it seem so to him! He himself could not have stated more plainly
the experience of the last few months. Each word fell from her lips like
the blow of a hammer. Shivering, he put his arm around her, seeking
solace, not love. This time she did not repulse him and, trustingly, as
a child confides to his mother, he depicted to her the suffering that
harrowed his life and made it a hell.
As she listened, indignation clouded her forehead, while rising tears of
anger and of love weighed down her lashes. She could bear the pitiful
sight no longer.
"Child," she cried, "do you know who your tormentor is?"
And like a flash the truth passed from her to him. A sudden intimation
told him what her words had still concealed.
"Don't! For Christ's sake, do not pronounce his name!" he sobbed. "Do
not breathe it. I could not endure it. I should go mad."
XXIV
Very quietly, with difficulty restraining her own emotion so as not to
excite him further, Kelly had related to Chance the story of her
remarkable interview with David Gardner. In the long silence that
ensued, the wings of his soul brushed against hers for the first time,
and Love by a thousand tender chains of common suffering welded their
beings into one.
Caressingly the ivory of her fingers passed through the gold of his hair
and over his brow, as if to banish the demon-eyes that stared at him
across the hideous spaces of the past. In a rush a thousand incidents<
br />
came back to him, mute witnesses of a damning truth. His play, the
dreams that tormented him, his own inability to concentrate his mind
upon his novel which hitherto he had ascribed to nervous disease--all,
piling fact on fact, became one monstrous monument of David Gardner's
crime. At last Chance understood the parting words of Abel Felton and
the look in Kelly's eye on the night when he had first linked his fate
with the other man's. Walkham's experience, too, and David's remarks
