“Look!” Gonfallon exclaimed; “it has either split in two or the lid has been wrenched open.”
The novelist extracted a monocle from his waistcoat and gazed into the shadows.
“Serves it right,” he answered, and leisurely descended the stair. “ ‘And of the remnants—’ ” he continued, but midway in the quotation he halted. On the floor at his feet was something that sent a thrill down his spine, an object but a trifle larger than a Dutch cheese, one that had ossified and turned from dull red to dingy white, an unpleasant thing that had no business there.
He stooped and eyed it. Near the base was the rictus which the New-England lad cuts in the face of a pumpkin, and above it near the top was a fissure that resembled the signature of an axe. By it a scrap of paper had fluttered, and just beyond, the chest lay yawning and empty.
When Jones stood up again the paper was in his hand—a square bit of parchment stamped with ensigns armorial, under which for legend ran the splendid device, Malgré tout. Beneath, three or four lines had been written.
“ ‘This,’ ” he read aloud, “ ‘This is the head of Jean-Renest-Marie, Count of Cinq-Cygne, Seigneur of Dol, at one time second lieutenant in the 19th Dragoons. May God have mercy on his soul!’ ”
He tossed the paper in the chest, and turned to Gonfallon. The latter was livid. “What do you say to that?” he asked. And then, as his friend steadied himself against the wall, “I will wager,” he continued, “that a companion-piece is in the other chest, another memento like that on the floor, and another document couched perhaps somewhat as follows: ‘This is the head of Mira Almer Wheat, daughter of Arthur Percy Wheat, of New York, esquire;’ and for epitaph, ‘Wheat is not quickened except it die.’ ”
“Hush! for heaven’s sake, hush! Someone may hear you.”
“Bah! The servants sleep in the wing; in this part of the house there is no one but Rebecca—an accomplice I presume, an imbecile I am sure. And to think,” Jones added, after a moment, “to think that for twenty years that aunt of mine should not only have jockeyed the world, but that each night of those twenty years those chests should have been on either side of her, the last things she saw before closing her eyes, the first she saw on awakening! Why, Gonfallon, they were with her sleeping or waking; they were in her dreams, in her nightmares; she had made the dead her life, revenge a sustenance. What a plot! Shade of Balzac, what a plot!”
“Jones,” expostulated Gonfallon, “you are indecent.”
“Ah! I am indecent, am I? Well, perhaps—perhaps. But if you knew what a trade fiction is! Whoso enters there leaves every blush behind.”
He picked up the skull, and, turning it in his hand, half to it half to his shuddering companion, he continued in a lower tone, “I am not a whit worse than another, and yet the desire for exact representation is such that if I hold a girl in my arms I study her abandonment; does she weep, I seek a simile in her tears; in her smile is the possibility of a metaphor; I even count my own pulse. To one in my trade nothing imaginable comes amiss. When a fellow adopts letters he must analyze his own sensations. Has he an emotion, he detains it; a grief, he enjoys it; a pleasure, he torments it into a phrase. He lives not alone in his own individual skin, but in that of everyone he encounters. The expression of a face is significant as a panic on the Exchange. A bow in the street will tell him as much as a page of Montaigne. He is in pursuit of the evanescent, a seeker after the key of the little dramas we all of us live and all of us conceal. If need be, he will hold his own linen to the cackle of the public. He is the comedian of the pen: it is his duty to amuse, to entertain—or else to hold his peace. No wonder the critics bark; though, to be sure, they have nothing better to do. No, a viler profession never was. I hate it, I love it. It sends you rummaging where you have no business to be, it burns your fingers, it destroys your eyesight, alienates your friends, bars you from the sunlight, and for reward it offers—what? A back bookshelf and a reproach. Ah, Gonfallon, preach to your congregation, but not to me. No sermon ever delivered is worth one of my aspirations. Yet see, I am indecent no longer.” And, shoving the skull back in the chest, he murmured, with the grimace of an East-Side actor, “Alas! poor Yorick!”
“And now,” he added, “let us get these odds and ends away.”
VII
At the breakfast-table on the morrow Jones was taciturn and Gonfallon white. When a little before in the dim baronial hall the flames had lapped at the climax of three lives, there had come to them unawares one of those emotions that are as potent for good as the conglomerate precepts of sayers of sooth. It was not that sin had appalled, for that it always does: it was that forgiveness had been impossible to one they deemed a saint. And before their vision, as the drama unrolled, each had pictured it according to his nature, but both had dreamed.
To Gonfallon it had displayed another of the uncircuitable labyrinths of the human heart. To Jones it had been a document. Gonfallon had imagined the countess pleading with her husband, pleading with her friend, until forbearance had been warped and the deed was done. Jones had evoked the jealousy of a woman accustomed to reign; he had seen, as in a glass, the first suspicion, the affected cecity, the studied calm, the uncertainty, the vigilance, yet still the smile, the
