“Gone,” Hugh murmured, dejectedly, “it can’t be possible.”
“Here is the key,” cried the janitress, triumphantly. “And if you were to unlock that door the Lord deliver us from the horrors you would find.”
With that statement for prelude, Mrs. O’Hassadam launched forth into voluble digressions and extravagant conjectures; but Hugh was not to be detained, he had no heart to listen further, and dumbly perplexed, he turned and sought his room.
For a fortnight thereafter Hugh ransacked the city, wandering like a lost dog through mazes of streets, interrogating windows, questioning lodging-house keepers, always on the alert and always disappointed. At the end of that period he learned that a secondhand furniture dealer had come, exhibited a bill of sale and carted off the Sisseton belongings. Where to? Ah! that Mrs. O’Hassadam did not know, but she took evident pleasure in losing herself in the wildest surmises.
Thereupon the Odyssey recommenced. The appalling ugliness of the suburbs, the terrors of Long Island, New Jersey wastes, one and all were visited and visited in vain. He had not a clue to work on and not a trace of the missing was to be had. Presently fatigue and disappointment had their way; a low fever overtook him and for a month he lay in bed. Mrs. O’Hassadam had a physician in for him, but Hugh was strong and young, and in spite of the physician the fever departed and the convalescent, very feeble but with clearer mind, rose to his feet. If Jenny had cared for him, he decided, at least she would have sent him a line.
Thereat he got at his easel again and painted with a grim energy which he had never displayed before. Work has the ability to dull the most ardent sorrow, and in that which Hugh undertook, though happiness had fallen by the wayside, art stood revealed. Moreover, chanced favored him. Being indifferent to both fame and fortune, he was necessarily the person whom fame and fortune elected to pursue. A dealer who heretofore had purchased his wares at prices that would have made a mad-dog blush, suddenly increased them. Not only that, he admitted that Hugh’s signature was beginning to acquire an appreciable commercial value, and as a commission for someone whose name he was not at liberty to mention, he took “Heliogabalus” in exchange for two thousand dollars in cash.
Hugh paid the debts he had contracted during his illness and set to work harder than before. He could have taken a studio now in a pleasanter part of the city, or he could have set off on that tour through the ghosts and treasures of Italy of which every artist dreams. But invisible threads detained him, and he remained where he was, consuming his heart with regrets and his strength with fatigue.
Summer passed, the Autumn came, and with it an unstillable longing to get away—to be somewhere where there was youth and companionship, where there were smiles and flowers, the welcome of eyes and fields. His solitude was distressing to him. Week in, week out there was not a soul with whom he could exchange a word. He had not a friend, not a relative even, and his sweetheart he had lost. Wherever he looked was the desert, and in his heart was a blank despair. Had his mother been living, how quickly he would have gone to her. But she was dead, and he could no longer run to her side, as had been his wont, with the troubles of childhood’s years. He was alone, without a tie, a hope or an aim.
At the thought of his mother he recalled the hour when his dearest wish had been to erect a monument on her grave. He had money in plenty to do so now. Though he were forsaken by the living, why should he forsake the dead? The next day he arrived at Richmond, and by evening he was before the cottage which he loved.
Apparently nothing had happened to it. It had contented itself with continuing to be, and in the increasing darkness rose white and solitary as before. Hugh unlocked the door and entered. The shutters, he noticed, had disappeared, the broken windows were curtained with cobwebs, there was an odor and silence of the tomb, but practically it had weathered the years unchanged. Noiselessly, as though in fear of disturbing phantoms, he passed through the little hall to the kitchen beyond. It was chill and damp, but through the window the spire of the village church was just discernible, and nearby was a grave that he knew. For a minute, an hour perhaps, he loitered there, the guest of memories that came one by one and claimed him as their own—the sport he had had with Dinah and his mother’s tender care; episodes long forgotten returned to him, but in that curious fashion that episodes will at times assume, as though they had occurred not to him, but to some Hugh Hyrtl who had existed in an anterior life, one in which he personally had had no part and of which only a hearsay recollection endured. There, for instance, was his mother’s sudden illness and unexpected death. Try as he might, he could not reconstruct that scene. In the dimmest manner only he recalled that one day a cry was said to have
