stopped to ask, almost under his breath: ‘Then you really think my stuff’s no good?’
“I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don’t defend my laugh—it was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was a fool, and that I’d done my best for him—I really had.
“He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That afternoon I left for Frascati, where I’d promised to spend the Sunday with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by the same token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the eyes. I dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me before when their visitations ceased; and when I woke the next morning, in my peaceful painted room above the ilexes, I felt the utter weariness and deep relief that always followed on that repairing slumber. I put in two blessed nights at Frascati, and when I got back to my rooms in Rome I found that Gilbert had gone … Oh, nothing tragic had happened—the episode never rose to
IV
CULWIN paused again, and again Frenham sat motionless, the dusky contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.
“And what became of Noyes afterward?” I finally asked, still disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread between the parallel lines of the tale.
Culwin twitched his shoulders. “Oh, nothing became of him—because he became nothing. There could be no question of ‘becoming’ about it. He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn’t shaved. I was told he drank. He didn’t recognize me.”
“And the eyes?” I asked, after another pause which Frenham’s continued silence made oppressive.
Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the shadows. “I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two and two together if you can. For my part, I haven’t found the link.”
He rose stiffly, his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the table on which reviving drinks had been set out.
“You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my dear fellow. Here, Phil—” He turned back to the hearth.
Frenham still sat in his low chair, making no response to his host’s hospitable summons. But as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes met in a long look; after which, to my intense surprise, the young man, turning suddenly in his seat, flung his arms across the table, and dropped his face upon them.
Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his face.
“Phil—what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared
He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the hearth-rug, his hands still in his pockets, gazing down in honest perplexity at the youth’s bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no answer, he moved a step or two nearer.
“Cheer up, my dear Phil! It’s years since I’ve seen them—apparently I’ve done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos. Unless my present evocation of them has made
His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on the lad’s shoulders.
“Phil, my dear boy, really—what’s the matter? Why don’t you answer?
Frenham’s face was still pressed against his arms, and from where I stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his perplexed congested face, and I caught its sudden reflection in the mirror behind Frenham’s head.
Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the mirror, as if scarcely recognizing the countenance in it as his own. But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable space of time he and the image in the glass confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go of Frenham’s shoulders, and drew back a step, covering his eyes with his hands …
Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.
THE BLOND BEAST
I
IT had been almost too easy—that was young Millner’s first feeling, as he stood again on the Spence doorstep, the great moment of his interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at his feet.
Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared to remember Rastignac’s apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard recklessly under his small fair moustache: “Who knows?”
He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already: a good deal more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour’s talk with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city spread out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who knew the rest.
A gust of wind, whirling down from the dizzy height of the building on the next corner, drove sharply through his overcoat and compelled him to clutch at his hat. It was a bitter January day, a day of fierce light and air, when the sunshine cut like icicles and the wind sucked one into black gulfs at the street corners. But Millner’s complacency was like a warm lining to his shabby coat, and heaving steadied his hat he continued to stand on the Spence threshold, lost in the vision revealed to him from the Pisgah of its marble steps. Yes, it was wonderful what the vision showed him. … In his absorption he might have frozen fast to the doorstep if the Rhadamanthine portals behind him had not suddenly opened to let out a slim fur-coated figure, the figure, as he perceived, of the youth whom he had caught in the act of withdrawal as he entered Mr. Spence’s study, and whom the latter, with a wave of his affable hand, had detained to introduce as “my son Draper.”
