“I’ll swear by what you like, then,” the little man, in no wise disconcerted, replied. “I’ll swear that my dearest wish is to see you famous and happy.”
“And you have gone about it the right way, haven’t you?”
“No, you are right there, I haven’t. But just consider the circumstances. Before I knew of your existence the banknotes were in my pocket. Besides, if it hadn’t been for me your father never would have had them; as it was they kept crying to me—‘Carry us off, double us, triple us, quintuple us, repay later, but carry us off now.’ That’s what they kept crying to me, and, thundering guns! I was weak enough to obey. But as I said before, send for the police. State’s prison is too good for me; I ought to be hanged and have my ghost kicked.”
Hugh gave him a look that enveloped him from head to heel.
“I have but one request to make,” he said, measuredly; “and that is that you will go.”
At this, the little man got up and hobbled to the door. There, for a moment, he halted and tormented his beard; then, looking over his shoulder at Hugh, who had turned to the window where he had caught the first glimpse of Jenny’s face, he coughed. Hugh affected not to hear him.
“Mr. Hyrtl!”
Hugh still kept his back turned. The little man made a step toward him.
“Mr. Hyrtl, before I go let me tell you this; it may be a consolation to you. I am in more desperate straits than the day I met you. I had hope then; I have none left now. I am starving, and, as I cannot beg, I am going to throw myself into the river. Goodbye.”
Hugh fumbled in his pocket, and, turning from the window, crossed the room. “Here, take that,” he said. “I give it to you because of the one good action of your life—in memory of my mother, whom you tried to aid.”
With that, he went back to the window, and the little man, his eyes very red and wet, opened the door and disappeared.
VIII
The day passed somehow, the morrow as well; a week took flight, during which Hugh sat in his room, inert and listless, issuing, like a wolf from his den, only when hunger compelled.
On such occasions hunger seemed to vanish when food appeared; he had appetite for nothing; he had lost even zest in life. Another might have betaken himself to the caresses of that yellow fay who lurks in certain bottles; but to Hugh even that palliative was denied; he could not drink; it may be that he was too refined.
He could not work, either; he could not read. With that immobility noticeable in certain forms of dementia, he gazed at the untenanted window opposite hour after hour, until night loosed her draperies and the window was hid. At such times his mind was empty—inhabited, if at all, by spectral shadows, the phantoms of regret. Among our friends and acquaintances are always those who, to our knowledge, have sorrows of their own. But there are others that evolve a world, one that glows, subsides and dies away, unknown to any save themselves. The solitudes of space appall, the solitudes of the heart can be as endless as they. In those which Hugh concealed a universe had had its being and its subsistence—a universe with gem-like hopes for stars, one in which the sun had been so eager it had cast its rainbows in his eyes. But now it was all dispersed; there was nothing left—a desire merely, which, dumb at first, little by little had become articulate—a longing for the grave. Like many another young man who has suddenly found himself balked, Hugh had determined to take his life.
It was preoccupations of this description that a visitor one day interrupted. Hugh had not heard anyone enter, and was made aware of another’s presence only by the sound of his own name. He started with that spring a cat gives when suddenly aroused. Before him stood the picture-dealer who had taken Heliogabalus away. He was a man of noticeable gentility, a man with an acquired smile, a brilliant hat, fabulous trousers and a pea-green stick. At the moment he was diligently smoking a huge cigar.
“Nothing new, eh?” he inquired, with a glance at the empty easel.
Hugh shook his head.
“I have a commission for you,” he continued. “What’s the matter? You look out of sorts.”
To this Hugh made no reply.
“There’s a gentleman who has purchased an elegant house in Irving place; and he wants a high-toned artist to decorate it—he wants it done in first-rate style, and damn the expense. I told him of you, and he says you are to begin at once. His name is—h’m, what is his name? Thurlire, or something like that. However, I’ve got it written down. What do you say?”
“I say he can go to the devil.”
In amazement at this rebuff the dealer dropped the ashes from his cigar all over himself and flushed mightily.
“If that’s the message you expect one gentleman to take to another gentleman I guess you may—”
What in circumstances of that nature he thought Hugh might do will never be known to history. In a rich rustle of vocables and skirt, Mrs. O’Hassadam appeared at the open door, a letter in her hand, which, she announced, with much emphasis and a look of unmollifiable suspicion at the dealer, was for Mr. Hyrtl and for no one else whatever.
Hugh grasped the letter as the man in the legend grasped the straw. It was from Jenny, he was sure. But the handwriting was not of a maidenly description. It was in the bold, free hand of a clerk, and it intimated very tersely that the writer would be obliged for a check in payment of the monument which he had erected on
