"Oh, that!" said Sharlee. "Well, that question is not so easy to answer as you might think. It opens up a peculiar situation: to begin with, he is a sort of an orphan, and--"
"How do you mean, a sort of an orphan?"
"You see, that is just where the peculiar part comes in. There is the heart of the whole mystery, and yet right there is the place where I must be reticent with you, mother, for though I know all about it, it was told to me confidentially--professionally, as my aunt"s agent--and therefore--"
"Do you mean that you know nothing about his people?"
"I suppose it might be stated, crudely, in that way, but--"
"And knowing nothing about who or what he was, you simply picked him up at the boarding-house, and admitted him to your friendship?"
"Picking-up is not the word that the most careful mothers employ, in reference to their daughters" att.i.tude toward young men. Mother, don"t you understand? I"m a democrat."
"It is not a thing," said Mrs. Weyland, with some asperity, "for a lady to be."
Sharlee, fixing her hair in the back before the mirror, laughed long and merrily. "Do you dare--do you _dare_ look your own daughter in the eye and say she is no lady?"
"Do you like this young man?" Mrs. Weyland continued.
"He interests me, heaps and heaps."
Mrs. Weyland sighed. "I can only say," she observed, sinking into a chair and picking up her book, "that such goings on were never heard of in my day."
XXII
_In which Professor Nicolovius drops a Letter on the Floor, and Queed conjectures that Happiness sometimes comes to Men wearing a Strange Face._
Queed sat alone in the sitting-room of the Duke of Gloucester Street house. His afternoon"s experiences had interested him largely. By subtle and occult processes which defied his a.n.a.lysis, what he had seen and heard had proved mysteriously disturbing--all this outpouring of irrational sentiment in which he had no share. So had his conversation with the girl disturbed him. He was in a condition of mental unrest, undefined but acute; odds and ends of curious thought kicked about within him, challenging him to follow them down to unexplored depths.
But he was paying no attention to them now.
He sat in the sitting-room, wondering how Nicolovius had ever happened to think of that story about the Fenian refugee.
For Queed had been gradually driven to that unpleasant point. While living in the old man"s house, he was, despite his conscientious efforts, virtually spying upon him.
The Fenian story had always had its questionable points; but so long as the two men were merely chance fellow-boarders, it did as well as any other. Now that they lived together, however, the multiplying suggestions that the old professor was something far other than he pretended became rather important. The young man could not help being aware that Nicolovius neither looked nor talked in the slightest degree like an Irishman. He could not help being certain that an Irishman who had fled to escape punishment for a political crime, in 1882, could have safely returned to his country long ago; and would undoubtedly have kept up relations with his friends overseas in the meantime. Nor could he help being struck with such facts as that Nicolovius, while apparently little interested in the occasional cables about Irish affairs, had become seemingly absorbed in the three days" doings of the United Confederate Veterans.
Now it was entirely all right for the old man to have a secret, and keep it. There was not the smallest quarrel on that score. But it was not in the least all right for one man to live with another, pretending to believe in him, when in reality he was doubting and questioning him at every move. The want of candor involved in his present relations with Nicolovius continually fretted Queed"s conscience. Ought he not in common honesty to tell the old man that he could not believe the Irish biography, leaving it to him to decide what he wanted to do about it?
Nicolovius, tramping in only a few minutes behind Queed, greeted his young friend as blandly as ever. Physically, he seemed tired; much dust of city streets clung to his commonly spotless boots; but his eyes were so extraordinarily brilliant that Queed at first wondered if he could have been drinking. However, this thought died almost as soon as it was born.
The professor walked over to the window and stood looking out, hat on head. Presently he said: "You saw the grand parade, I suppose? For indeed there was no escaping it."
Queed said that he had seen it.
"You had a good place to see it from, I hope?"
Excellent; Miss Weyland"s porch.
"Ah!" said Nicolovius, with rather an emphasis, and permitted a pause to fall. "A most charming young lady--charming," he went on, with his note of velvet irony which the young man peculiarly disliked. "I hear she is to marry your Mr. West. An eminently suitable match in every way. Yet I shall not soon forget how that delightful young man defrauded you of the editorship."
Silence from Mr. Queed, the question of the editorship having already been thoroughly threshed out between them.
"I, too, saw the gallant proceedings," resumed Nicolovius, retracing his thought. "What an outfit! What an outfit!"
He dropped down into his easy chair by the table, removed his straw hat with traces of a rare irritation in his manner, put on his black skull cap, and presently purred his thoughts aloud:--
"No writer has yet done anything like justice to the old soldier cult in the post-bellum South. Doubtless it may lie out of the province of you historians, but what a theme for a new Thackeray! With such a fetish your priestcraft of the Middle Ages is not to be compared for a moment.
There is no parallel among civilized nations; to find one you must go to the Voodooism of the savage black. For more than a generation all the intelligence of the South has been asked, nay compelled, to come and bow down before these alms-begging loblollies. To refuse to make obeisance was treason. The entire public thought of a vast section of the country has revolved around the figure of a worthless old grafter in a tattered gray shirt. Every question is settled when some moth-eaten ne"er-do-well lets out what is known as a "rebel yell." The most polished and profound speech conceivable is answered when a jacka.s.s mounts the platform and brays out something about the gallant boys in gray. The cry for progress, for material advancement, for moral and social betterment, is stifled, that everybody may have breath to shout for a flapping trouser"s leg worn by a degraded old sot. All that your Southern statesmen have had to give a people who were stripped to the bone is fulsome rhetoric about the Wounded Warrior of Wahoo, or some other inflated nonent.i.ty, whereupon the mesmerized population have loyally fallen on their faces and shouted, "Praise the Lord." And all the while they were going through this wretched mummery, they were hungry and thirsty and naked--dest.i.tute in a smiling land of plenty. Do you wonder that I think old-soldierism is the meanest profession the Lord ever suffered to thrive? I tell you Baal and Moloch never took such toll of their idolaters as these shabby old G.o.ds of the gray shirt."
"Professor Nicolovius," said Queed, with a slow smile, "where on earth do you exhume your ideas of Southern history?"
"Observation, my dear boy! G.o.d bless us, haven"t I had three years of this city to use my eyes and ears in? And I had a peculiar training in my youth," he added, retrospectively, "to fit me to see straight and generalize accurately."
... Couldn"t the man see that no persecuted Irishman ever talked in such a way since the world began? If he had a part to play, why in the name of common sense couldn"t he play it respectably?
Queed got up, and began strolling about the floor. In his mind was what Sharlee Weyland had said to him two hours before: "All the bitterness nowadays comes from the non-combatants, the camp-followers, the sutlers, and the cowards." Under which of these heads did his friend, the old professor, fall?... Why had he ever thought of Nicolovius as, perhaps, a broken Union officer? A broken Union officer would feel bitter, if at all, against the Union. A man who felt so bitter against the South--
A resolution was rapidly hardening in the young man"s mind. He felt this att.i.tude of doubt and suspicion, these thoughts that he was now thinking about the man whose roof he shared, as an unclean spot upon his chaste pa.s.sion for truth. He could not feel honest again until he had wiped it off.... And, after all, what did he owe to Nicolovius?
"But I must not leave you under the impression," said Nicolovius, almost testily for him, "that my ideas are unique and extraordinary. They are shared, in fact, by Southern historians of repute and--"
Queed turned on him. "But you never read Southern historians."
Nicolovius had a smile for that, though his expression seemed subtly to shift. "I must make confession to you. Three days ago, I broke the habits of quarter of a century. At the second-hand shop on Centre Street I bought, actually, a little volume of history. It is surprising how these Southern manifestations have interested me."
Queed was an undesirable person for any man to live with who had a secret to keep. His mind was relentlessly constructive; it would build you up the whole dinosaur from the single left great digitus. For apparently no reason at all, there had popped into his head a chance remark of Major Brooke"s a year ago, which he had never thought of from that day to this: "I can"t get over thinking that I"ve seen that man before a long time ago, when he looked entirely different, and yet somehow the same too."
"I will show you my purchase," added Nicolovius, after a moment of seeming irresolution.
He disappeared down the hail to his bedroom, a retreat in which Queed had never set foot, and returned promptly carrying a dingy duodecimo in worn brown leather. As he entered the room, he absently raised the volume to his lips and blew along the edges.
Queed"s mental processes were beyond his own control. "Three days old,"
flashed into his mind, "and he blows dust from it."
"What is the book?" he asked.
"A very able little history of the Reconstruction era in this State. I have a mind to read you a pa.s.sage and convert you."
Nicolovius sat down, and began turning the pages. Queed stood a step away, watching him intently. The old man fluttered the leaves vaguely for a moment; then his expression shifted and, straightening up, he suddenly closed the book.
"I don"t appear to find," he said easily, "the little pa.s.sage that so impressed me the day before yesterday. And after all, what would be the use of reading it to you? You impetuous young men will never listen to the wisdom of your elders."
Smiling blandly, the subject closed, it might have been forever, Nicolovius reached out toward the table to flick the ash from his cigarette. In so doing, as luck had it, he struck the book and knocked it from his knees. Something shook from its pages as it dropped, and fell almost at Queed"s feet. Mechanically he stooped to pick it up.
It was a letter, at any rate an envelope, and it had fallen face up, full in the light of the open window. The envelope bore an address, in faded ink, but written in a bold legible hand. Not to save his soul could Queed have avoided seeing it: