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FOR the next few days I hardly knew Brunt. He was depressed and out of sorts, not to say out of temper. John is always rather breezy, but I never before nor since knew him to be irritable. When his friends are aggravating he laughs at them, and if other people are bothersome he turns his back, which is a good broad one.
"What's the matter, Jack," said I, one day. "You seem out of sorts. Is it because you haven't been up Pike's Peak according to your original programme?"
"Yes," said he, "I always hate to have heights continually before my eyes that I can't climb."
"But you might go up if you liked," said I, ready to humor him.
"Yes, and get frozen to death at the top. Thanks, it doesn't tempt me."
"Did you ever hear of any one getting frozen to death up there?"
"No, but I have an idea that the summit is strewn with corpses."
It always refreshes Jack to talk in riddles, and when they are transparent enough for my comprehension, I sometimes join in. A vision of Ned and Benny frozen stiff in characteristic attitudes in the "lucidity" of a certain high altitude visited my imagination, and a sympathetic shiver accompanied it.
We were to start for New York soon after Christmas and I began to think John was likely to be poor company on the journey. He had got absurdly morbid on the subject of that letter. I believe he tried two or three times to confess to Miss Lamb, though it went sadly against the grain. I think, myself, that a twentieth edition would have loosened his tongue; yet I must say, in justice to him, that Miss Lamb was partly responsible for his ill success. She had the most singular way of warding off confidences. I remember one occasion in particular when she turned the conversation so effectually that it would have been impossible to go on.
It was two or three days after our solemn auto-da-fé, and we were picnicking with a party of people at Monument Park. By rare good luck John and I had got Miss Lamb to ourselves, a little apart from the rest of the crowd, in a warm, sunny hollow, at the foot of one of those huge yellow monsters in stone with hats on their heads. Miss Lamb and I were making an amicable exchange of a very plump quail in return for a glass of claret, when she suddenly asked me why, I supposed, Miss Lamb did not answer her letter.
"Have you had no answer yet?" I asked in feigned surprise, trying to gain time for invention.
"Not a word," she said, "and I begin to think that you were mistaken in supposing that she wanted to hear from me."
"I suppose," said I, "there must have been some error in the address, either on her part or mine."
"Miss Lamb," John began, visibly bracing himself for the effort. "I have something to tell you about the author of Spoils."
"Oh, please not," she cried, in mock dismay. "I really don't want to hear anything more about her. I know just enough to make her interesting."
"But it is something I must tell you," John began again.
"Stop a minute, please. I will listen to you only on one condition. Are you sure that what you wish to tell me will not diminish my interest in her?"
"I think it will increase it," said I, anxious to help John.
"But shall I admire her as much as ever? Are you perfectly sure you would not destroy an ideal? It is so seldom that one has a full-fledged ideal to satisfy one's imagination with. Are you perfectly sure that what Mr. Brunt is going to tell me will not disturb that?"
"I am afraid it may," said the undiplomatic John, "but—"
"Then I positively refuse to listen. And would you be so kind as to get me a glass of water, Mr. Brunt? Your wine is delicious, but it does not take the place of water."
Before John returned with the water some of the other picnickers had joined our little party and the time for disclosures was past.
Very much the same thing happened on several occasions which John reported, It seemed to be a caprice of Miss Lamb's to hear nothing more about her name sake. Once, indeed, when we were calling upon them and Mrs. Ellerton opened the subject, her niece interfered so resolutely, that I began to wonder whether pique had not something to do with it. Was she offended at having received no answer to her letter? Or—a sudden light burst in upon me—was she jealous of her gifted namesake. The latter suspicion I ventured to impart to John, who promptly demolished me.
"Why on earth should Miss Lamb be jealous of anybody under heaven?" he demanded. "I think you must have been reading dime novels, Dick."
"Then why won't she hear the name mentioned?"
"She is tired to death of it, as I am! Hang it all!"
As I said before, John was very unlike himself.
To make matters worse, a little thing happened about that time to stir him all up again about the authorship of the poems. Having borrowed some current magazines from Miss Lamb, we were sitting one evening in my room, turning them over, when I came across a sheet of paper on which there were three verses written in pencil in Miss Lamb's hand. Considering poetry to be public property, I glanced over the verses, which rejoiced in the hilarious title of "A Plaint." They were not so harrowing as some of their predecessors, to be sure, yet they were hardly calculated to have an exhilarating effect upon John. He had about succeeded in convincing himself that the "friend" was genuine, that appearances were not deceitful, that the girl of his choice was not a blighted being. This, although there was so much evidence of the poems having been written in Colorado Springs and by some one sharing all Miss Lamb's personal interests, that he was almost driven to accept the "unenterprising" Mrs. Ellerton's authorship as the sole alternative. And here was Miss Lamb herself—no mistaking the author this time—still fondly and mournfully contemplating the fragments of a broken heart. It would perhaps have been kinder to suppress my discovery, but such magnanimity was beyond me, and I cried:
"Look here, John. Here's a clincher! No question about this anyhow. See, she has corrected two of the lines. Dated on the 10th of December too," I went on, as he began reading the verses. "A week after our arrival. By Jove! Women are deep!"
While I was endeavoring to reconcile my memory of Miss Lamb's cheerful countenance with the graveyard phantasy I had just read, John was spending more time than seemed strictly necessary, in perusing the verses. By the time he had got through, his face looked pretty black, and he said, in a peculiar, jarring voice:
"I don't know, Dick, whether to be more proud of the way in which we have deceived Miss Lamb about ourselves, or of the manner in which we have succeeded in prying into her private affairs. Anyhow I am going to bed. Good-night!"
He departed, carrying the paper off with him.
The next morning he asked me if I did not think we had been in Colorado about long enough, and we agreed to start for home on the 26th.