Short Fiction

who had two deaths to his debit, was not to be balked by an elm. He bored a hole in it, and inserted an explosive. That explosive⁠—”

My companion paused, leisurely lit a fresh cigarette, exhaled the smoke, considered me.

I prodded him. “Well?”

He nodded. “That explosive discharged the bullet that Hubert had fired, the bullet that had been intended for Cullen, but that, having missed him, had bided its time, there in the tree, until it could, and did, get at him.”

“You don’t mean⁠—”

Again my companion nodded. “I do. I do mean it. The bullet went straight through his throat, and severed the carotid artery. Lord Cullen was dead. What do you say to that? Don’t you think it was fate?”

What I did think was that it seemed rather odd that I, who read the papers, had missed an account of a matter so unusual, and I was about to say as much when my companion stood up.

“I should much like to stop and talk it over with you,” he obligingly resumed. “But,” he added, indicating, as he spoke, the warship, “I am due on the Thunderer. They are having a dance there. Good night.”

Feeling that I had been having something of a dance myself, I turned and watched him go.

He passed through the open window into the room from which we had come, and, as he passed, I saw him stop and say a word to Spencer Poole.

A moment later I, too, got up, and entered the room, which, as before, resounded with the call of numbers, the announcement of points.

“Who was that chap?” I asked my friend.

But Poole, his eyes on the cards, did not immediately answer. Then absently he looked at me. “What chap?”

“The man that just spoke to you, the man who was with me in the reading room when you joined us.”

“Oh, that fellow? Why, I thought you knew him. That’s Eric Hereward, the novelist. Has he been rehearsing one of his plots to you? If so, I can sympathize. He did it to me.”

The Falsehood Shop

The servant, opening the door, announced: “Miss Egon.”

I had not quite expected that. A moment previous I had been a thousand years away, among the young empresses of Byzance, whose brilliant lives I was trying and, what is worse for them, was succeeding in etching in dull prose. But, as the girl entered, the dead vanished, exorcised by the living, and I sprang forward to greet her.

“Where is Herbert, do you know?” she agitatedly asked.

To lie to a lady is never nice, yet tell the truth and sometimes it is not only the devil that you shame.

“No,” I answered with affected candor. With an equally assumed appearance of surprise, I added: “Don’t you?”

She stared at me and I at her. In her face was anxiety, uncertainty, constraint, a little panorama of emotions, but most noticeably charm. Ordinarily, not one of all the beauties of Byzance could have been as fair as she. But there were days when she was merely exquisite. This was one of them. She swallowed a sob, sank into a chair and, still looking at me, said, and simply enough: “He is dead.”

Well, yes, in a sense⁠—that is to say, so far as she was concerned⁠—Herbert Brook was dead. But I could not tell her so. I lacked the courage. Even otherwise I lacked the imagination to bury him decently⁠—to bury him, for that matter, at all. In search of cover, I dropped into the vague.

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed. “Why do you say that?”

But, for the moment, I must have overdone it. For the moment, she must have caught, or thought she caught, a note that did not ring quite true, for at once, much as though she suspected that the brute might be somewhere concealed, she looked about, at the bookcases that lined the room, at the windows that gave on the Champs Élysées, at a portrait that hung on the wall⁠—a portrait which displayed me in the resplendent costume of my Heidelberg corps, a great Dane crouching at my boots.

It was ten years ago that the thing was painted. Since then, my historical genuflections have bent me a bit. On the other hand, kneipes and their plenteous beer failing, I am less stout. Otherwise, barring of course the medieval accoutrements, the picture shows me much as I still am, with, moreover, what I shall always retain, the cicatrix of a student duel slashed across my face.

The girl’s eyes turned from the daub to me. Their promenade about the room had occupied but a moment, yet during it, whatever suspicion she may have had must have died. She looked as she had before, exquisite, anxious, constrained.

“Yes,” I reiterated, “why do you say that?”

Then the meager story of it limped forth to me, who knew it all and better, and in particular the key to it, which I was determined she should never get.

Herbert Brook was, confound him, my cousin. Relationship began and ended there. He was alarmingly good-looking and disgustingly rich, while I am but the scarred-faced historian of improbable queens. The role, passably obscure, had prevented me from ever more than tentatively approaching this girl, to whom Herbert had strummed another guitar. It was a way of his, a way which often had aroused in me the sin of envy, to carry everything by storm. But when he met Kate Egon, which he did entirely through my own stupidity, I had no fear of him, and that for the ridiculous reason that he was vehemently in love with a friend of hers, Jenny Price, who, however, as fate would have it, threw him over, whereat, in the rebound, and out of pique perhaps, he made up to Kate.

At the time we were all in New York. As soon as I learned how things were going, I saw that there was nothing for me to do except to be going also. A week later I was in