“I have made it to bearer,” he added as he finished, and handed it over.
Greasily the fat physician coughed and rubbed his fabulous nose; but the coroner, folding the paper, said:
“I will have a word with Barker, and then I will authorize Folsom to certify accordingly.”
At the door, in answer to the pressed button, a servant stood.
“Show these gentlemen out,” Rochester said.
“Well?” Jones put in when they had gone.
Rochester stood up, crossed the room, recrossed it, closed the door.
“Well, that’s over!”
With quick sympathy Jones eyed him.
“It must be a relief.”
Rochester mopped his face.
“Yes, for her family it will be. I am glad to have spared them that. They are very decent people. Besides, what I said was the absolute truth, though I did not tell all of it.”
Jones twisted.
“So I rather supposed. Do you care to tell me?”
With an intake of the breath, Rochester sketched a gesture.
“Yes, but beforehand tell me something. Do you think murder is ever justified?”
The sudden query was like the point of a rapier, and Jones backed from before it. Yet immediately, and in spite, too, of the six-shooter on the floor, he felt that whatever else may have happened, the possibility which the question evoked was absurd. Even Bluebeards no longer slaughter their wives. They perhaps find it simpler to love them.
That view—the optimism of which he later revised—steadied him. Lightly he was about to reply that he had killed any number of people in cold ink; but, judging the lightness ill-timed, instead he asked for a match.
Before Rochester could supply him, the servant entered.
“Mrs. Varian, sir.”
Rochester turned to Jones.
“That’s her mother, poor soul!”
Jones, at once on his feet, stretched a hand.
“I’ll look in again, Phil.”
He was as good as his word. On the morrow he returned to the house, and again the day after, but fruitlessly. Rochester was invisible. “He is suffering from aftershock,” Jones concluded, and, apart from attending the funeral and sending the usual flowers, he desisted from further effort.
Later a note came, thanking him, saying that Rochester was leaving town, and Jones wondered if he were en route for Massachusetts and the Puritan girl; but that amourette, he decided, had clearly been ended. Even otherwise, Rochester was too recently a widower to renew it.
Yet what was behind that widowerhood Jones could not picture. All that he could see was the pistol.
III
It was then October. June had come and was going before Jones saw Rochester again.
It was in his own workshop—a room containing no other evidence of the life known as literary except a vast table, upon which was a thin sheaf of copy. Upon the manuscript was a stiletto, long, wicked, brilliant, which, one adventurous night in Madrid, he had found—in his back. Long since he had recovered from its quick acquisition. Now he used it as a paperweight.
It was otherwise serviceable. It inspired. Engraved on the glittering blade was a promise—“Penetrabo.”
“I have been away,” Rochester very needlessly explained, after Jones had greeted him. “I have been to Caracas, to Rio, to Montevideo. I have been trying to get away from myself. The task is not humanly possible. I failed.”
Amicably Jones looked him over. He was less abominably dressed than before, and tan had covered the pallor of his face. Otherwise, too, he had changed, and not unbecomingly. His hair, formerly blue-black, had an eighteenth-century powdered effect. It was white.
“I’ll have a cigar, if you’ve got one,” resumed Rochester, seating himself. “And something else,” he added as Jones shoved a box at him.
“Anything you wish, Phil.”
Rochester, lighting a cigar, considered him.
“I want you to do what only a novelist can. I want you to double your personality, to put yourself in my place and tell me how, given the circumstances, you would have me act if I were a character in one of your stories.” Rochester paused and flicked his ashes. “God knows I have tried to find the way,” he continued; “but I cannot. Fate is against me!”
“Fate has nothing against any of us, Phil, except, indeed, such things as we may have against ourselves.”
Rochester shook himself. The idea was too massive for immediate digestion. Divining which, Jones, with ready sympathy, tacked.
“Tell me what is troubling you. It began in Massachusetts, did it not?”
At the clairvoyance of that, Rochester stared; but at once memory raised a latch.
“Yes, I wrote you from there. That was before my marriage. I had met somebody. I wrote you of it; but did I tell you her name? It was Priscilla. It does not picture her. No name could, except perhaps some one of those names that Poe gave to his heroines. She seemed a-tiptoe on the threshold of the beyond. When I first saw her, I thanked her. She asked me why. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘you have shown me an angel.’ ”
“I must use that!” Jones professionally reflected.
“Do you remember Euphorion?” Rochester immediately asked. “That Greek who, in Periclean days, painted only the mouth? He alone could have portrayed hers. It was ideal. So, too, were her eyes. In the lumber-room of verse is a line that runs: ‘Beauty, like a murmuring sound, had passed into her face.’ That line seemed made for her. It accompanied and announced her. I can hear it now, as I can hear her voice. The echo of both used to haunt me. There were days without number and nights without end when I thought the echo would drive me mad. On one occasion it did; but that was long afterward.”
Rochester puffed, but vainly. Relighting the cigar, he resumed:
“At the time she represented the goal in that eternal steeplechase after happiness in which, shirted and capped in the colors of hope, we all take part. Does it not seem to you that few of us ever get there? We either fall by the way or miss it by a nose. It was my misfortune to be thrown at the last hurdle. A furlong more, and the cup was mine—or at least I
