“Cullen told her that with him everything was going to the devil, that he could barely maintain a servant. But poverty had no terrors for this girl, who supped, when sup she did, on a crust, and she answered him with smiles.
“Now, however perverse a cad may be, he cannot beat down a dog simply because it loves him. There are limits even to human turpitude. Then, too, I have never known a man, good, bad, or indifferent, who would not prefer to brave mythical redskins, than face a woman’s tears. Janet had shed no tears as yet, or, if she had, they were but tears of joy. The fanfare had been so much music to her.
“Seeing which, Cullen varied his tactics. He defiled into his keep, and from that stronghold wrote Janet a dozen pages, pages in which sordidness struggled with grammar, pages that one word would have covered, pages that said only ‘Finis.’ Only that! Only the trumpet’s note that heralds an eternal silence.”
After that fine phrase, which I had heard before, my companion stopped to light another cigarette. Then at once he was off again:
“I was not with Cullen when he committed that crime, and I cannot tell you how he felt; but I may tell you that when I heard of it I felt that there was no man living whom I envied less. Yet even now I must omit to judge him. We are all of us strangers to one another; not infrequently we are strangers to ourselves. The motives of human actions are not always for human ken. Because of the fate prepared for him, it may be that, whether Cullen wished to or not, he was impelled to act as he did.”
“Yes,” I told my companion. I no longer felt like a boor with a baby or even with a bore; he had got me at last. “Yes, for among all our uncertainties, this perhaps alone is certain—never do useless events occur.”
“Never,” he repeated, “no matter how useless, in our blindness, the events may seem to us. And that fact, while it applies to Cullen, applies also to Janet. I was not with her, nor, poor child, was anyone with her when she got that infamous letter; yet had all the world been with her, she still would have been alone. In the great crises of the soul, everyone is, and Janet was so thoroughly alone that she could not bear it. When at last her brother found her, she had gone.”
“Gone?”
“With a hatpin she had run herself through that aching heart of hers, which, because of the ache, she well knew where to pierce.”
At this, I shifted in my chair, and, whether because of the night air or the story, or both, I shivered. Through the window behind me drifted the hum of talk. From beyond, over the inky syrup, the music from the warship came.
“Beside her was Cullen’s infamy, and beside that, one line: ‘I forgive him, and may God forgive me.’ ”
“And Hubert,” I asked, “was he as generous?”
“Would you have been?”
“You see,” I answered, “when ignorant people are injured, they blame others; the wise blame themselves; the evolved blame no one.”
“Quite so—when the injury is personal. But if it affected someone for whom you deeply cared, would you not then take reprisals? It is a case of conscience, no doubt. Yet, in any event, Hubert did, or at least attempted to. He secured a pistol, and went straight to Cullen, whom he found seated beneath one of his immemorial elms, and occupied, if you please, with a copy of Punch. At sight of Hubert, at sight, rather, of the menace of him, he sprang up. Point-blank, Hubert fired. Cullen dropped, and Hubert, turning the pistol, killed himself.”
“Killed himself also!” I exclaimed.
“No, not also. Cullen was not touched, or but barely touched. The bullet singed the hair above an ear, and lodged itself in the elm. In the elm, mind you, not in Cullen. But the imminence of death, combined with the unlordliness of the lord, did, at the moment, for him. He fainted and toppled over. It was then that Hubert, fancying him dead, turned the pistol on himself. What do you think of it?”
“What do I think of it?” I repeated. “I think that the dice of destiny were strangely cogged. It was Cullen who should have died, Cullen only. What had Janet done that she should have been forced to kill herself? What had Hubert done to have a similar fate?”
My companion raised a hand. “How do I know what they had done? All I know is that Cullen appeared to have wronged them.”
“Appeared to!” I exclaimed. “That seems a bit colorless.”
My companion readjusted his monocle. “Perhaps. But not from the standpoint of anterior lives. According to the theory of it, we none of us can be injured except by those who embody our past. Whatever we suffer comes from there. People who harm us are but puppets come to claim such debts as we ourselves have incurred. Apparently Cullen was but an ordinary brute; actually he may have been the hand of fate.”
“Not a very clean one, then,” I had to protest. “Fate, I think, might have deodorized him.”
“It did,” my companion replied. “And there is the remarkable part of it. By the way, are you superstitious?”
“Oh,” I answered, “when the new year begins on the thirteenth, then, like everyone else, I am apt to fear it may be unlucky. Otherwise, superstition seems to me the parody of faith. But why do you ask?”
“Because Cullen developed a curious dislike for the tree before which he had been shot at. The estate was entailed, and legally he had no right to lop so much as a branch. But he took the law in his own hands. While he was about it, he took an ax. He might as well have used a penknife. But Cullen,
