The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 10
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He was coming in as they came out; and his "I hoped I might find you," an exhalation of cool candour that they took full in the face, had the effect, the next moment, of a great soft carpet, all flowers and figures, suddenly unrolled for them to walk upon and before which they felt a scruple. Their ejaculation, Maud was conscious, couldn't have passed for a welcome, and it wasn't till she saw the poor gentleman checked a little, in turn, by their blankness, that she fully perceived how interesting they had just become to themselves. His face, however, while, in their arrest, they neither proposed to re-enter the shop with him nor invited him to proceed with them anywhere else—his face, gaping there, for Bight's promised instructions, like a fair receptacle, shallow but with all the capacity of its flatness, brought back so to our young woman the fond fancy her companion had last excited in him that he profited just a little—and for sympathy in spite of his folly—by her sense that with her too the latter had somehow amused himself. This placed her, for the brief instant, in a strange fellowship with their visitor's plea, under the impulse of which, without more thought, she had turned to Bight. "Your eager claimant," she, however, simply said, "for the opportunity now so beautifully created."
"I've ventured," Mr. Marshal glowed back, "to come and remind you that the hours are fleeting."
Bight had surveyed him with eyes perhaps equivocal. "You're afraid someone else will step in?"
"Well, with the place so tempting and so empty———" Maud made herself again his voice. "Mr Marshal sees it empty itself perhaps too fast."
He acknowledged, in his large, bright way, the help afforded him by her easy lightness. "I do want to get in, you know, before anything happens."
"And what," Bight inquired, "are you afraid may happen?"
"Well, to make sure," he smiled, "I want myself, don't you see, to happen first."
Our young woman, at this, fairly fell, for her friend, into his sweetness. "Do let him happen!"
"Do let me happen!" Mr. Marshal followed it up.
They stood there together, where they had paused, in their strange council of three, and their extraordinary tone, in connection with their number, might have marked them, for some passer catching it, as persons not only discussing questions supposedly reserved for the Fates, but absolutely enacting some encounter of these portentous forces. "Let you—let you?" Bight gravely echoed, while on the sound, for the moment, immensities might have hung. It was as far, however, as he was to have time to speak, for even while his voice was in the air another, at first remote and vague, joined it there on an ominous note and hushed all else to stillness. It came, through the roar of thoroughfares, from the direction of Fleet Street, and it made our interlocutors exchange an altered look. They recognized it, the next thing, as the howl, again, of the Strand, and then but an instant elapsed before it flared into the night. "Return of Beadel—Muffet! Tremenjous Sensation!"
Tremenjous indeed, so tremenjous that, each really turning as pale with it as they had turned, on the same spot, the other time and with the other news, they stood long enough stricken and still for the cry, multiplied in a flash, again to reach them. They couldn't have said afterwards who first took it up. "Return———?"
"From the Dead—I say!" poor Marshal piercingly quavered.
"Then he hasn't been———?" Maud gasped it with him at Bight.
But that genius, clearly, was not less deeply affected. "He's alive?" he breathed in a long, soft wail in which admiration appeared at first to contend with amazement and then the sense of the comic to triumph over both. Howard Bight uncontrollably—it might have struck them as almost hysterically—laughed.
The others could indeed but stare. "Then who's dead?" piped Mortimer Marshal.
"I'm afraid, Mr. Marshal, that you are," the young man returned, more gravely, after a minute. He spoke as if he saw how dead.
Poor Marshal was lost. "But someone was killed———!"
"Someone undoubtedly was, but Beadel somehow has survived it."
"Has he, then, been playing the game———?" It baffled comprehension.
Yet it wasn't even that what Maud most wondered. "Have you all the while really known?" she asked of Howard Bight.
He met it with a look that puzzled her for the instant, but that she then saw to mean, half with amusement, half with sadness, that his genius was, after all, simpler. "I wish I had. I really believed."
"All along?"
"No; but after Frankfort."
She remembered things. "You haven't had a notion this evening?"
"Only from the state of my nerves."
"Yes, your nerves must be in a state!" And somehow now she had no pity for him. It was almost as if she were, frankly, disappointed. "I," she then boldly said, "didn't believe."
"If you had mentioned that then," Marshal observed to her, "you would have saved me an awkwardness."
But Bight took him up. "She did believe—so that she might punish me."
"Punish you———?"
Maud raised her hand at her friend. "He doesn't understand."
He was indeed, Mr. Marshal, fully pathetic now. "No, I don't understand. Not a wee bit."
"Well," said Bight kindly, "we none of us do. We must give it up."
"You think I really must?"
"You, sir," Bight smiled, "most of all. The places seem so taken."
His client, however, clung. "He won't die again———?"
"If he does he'll again come to life. He'll never die. Only we shall die. He's immortal."
He looked up and down, this inquirer; he listened to the howl of the Strand, not yet, as happened, brought nearer to them by one of the hawkers. And yet it was as if, overwhelmed by his lost chance, he knew himself too weak even for their fond aid. He still therefore appealed. "Will this be a boom for him?"
"His return? Colossal. For—fancy!—it was exactly what we talked of, you remember, the other day, as the ideal. I mean," Bight smiled, "for a man to be lost, and yet at the same time———"
"To be found?" poor Marshal too hungrily mused.
"To be boomed," Bight continued, "by his smash and yet never to have been too smashed to know how he was booming."
It was wonderful for Maud too. "To have given it all up, and yet to have it all."
"Oh, better than that," said her friend: "to have more than all, and more than you gave up. Beadel," he was careful to explain to their companion, "will have more."
Mr. Marshal struggled with it. "More than if he were dead?"
"More," Bight laughed, "than if he weren't! It's what you would have liked, as I understand you, isn't it? and what you would have got, It's what I would have helped you to."
"But who then," wailed Marshal, "helps him?"
"Nobody. His star. His genius."
Mortimer Marshal glared about him as for some sign of such aids in his own sphere. It embraced, his own sphere too, the roaring Strand, yet—mystification and madness!—it was with Beadel the Strand was roaring. A hawker, from afar, at sight of the group, was already scaling the slope. "Ah, but how the devil———?"
Bight pointed to this resource. "Go and see."
"But don't you want them?" poor Marshal asked as the others retreated.
"The Papers?" They stopped to answer. "No, never again. We've done with them. We give it up."
"I mayn't again see you?"
Dismay and a last clutch were in Marshal's face, but Maud, who had taken her friend's meaning in a flash, found the word to meet them. "We retire from business."
With which they turned again to move in the other sense, presenting their backs to Fleet Street. They moved together up the rest of the hill, going on in silence, not arrested by another little shrieking boy, not diverted by another extra-special, not pausing again till, at the end of a few minutes, they found themselves in the comparative solitude of Covent Garden, encumbered with the traces of its traffic, but now given over to peace. The howl of the Strand had ceased, their client had vanished forever, and from the centre of the empty space they could look up and see stars. One of these was of course Beadel-Muffet's, and the consciousness of that, for the moment, kept down any arrogance of triumph. He still hung above them, he ruled, immortal, the night; they were far beneath, and he now transcended their world; but a sense of relief, of escape, of the light, still unquenched, of their old irony, made them stand there face to face. There was more between them now than there had ever been, but it had ceased to separate them, it sustained them in fact like a deep water on which they floated closer. Still, however, there was something Maud needed. "It had been all the while worked?"
"Ah, not, before God—since I lost sight of him—by me."
"Then by himself?"
"I dare say. But there are plenty for him. He's beyond me."
"But you thought," she said, "it would be so. You thought," she declared, "something."
Bight hesitated. "I thought it would be great if he could. And as he could—why, it is great. But all the same I too was sold. I am sold. That's why I give up."
"Then it's why I do. We must do something," she smiled at him, "that requires less cleverness."
"We must love each other," said Howard Bight.
"But can we live by that?"
He thought again; then he decided. "Yes."
"Ah," Maud amended, "we must be 'littery.' We've now got stuff."
"For the dear old ply, for the rattling good tile? Ah, they take better stuff than this—though this too is good."
"Yes," she granted on reflection, "this is good, but it has bad holes. Who was the dead man in the locked hotel room?"
"Oh, I don't mean that. That," said Bight, "he'll splendidly explain."
"But how?"
"Why, in the Papers. To-morrow."
Maud wondered. "So soon?"
"If he returned to-night, and it's not yet ten o'clock, there's plenty of time. It will be in all of them—while the universe waits. He'll hold us in the hollow of his hand. His chance is just there. And there," said the young man, "will be his greatness."
"Greater than ever then?"
"Quadrupled."
She followed; then it made her seize his arm. "Go to him!"
Bight frowned. "'Go'———?"
"This instant. You explain!"
He understood, but only to shake his head. "Never again. I bow to him."
Well, she after a little understood; but she thought again.
"You mean that the great hole is that he really had no reason, no funk———?"
"I've wondered," said Howard Bight.
"Whether he had done anything to make publicity embarrassing?"
"I've wondered," the young man repeated.
"But I thought you knew!"
"So did I. But I thought also I knew he was dead. However," Bight added, "he'll explain that too."
"To-morrow?"
"No—as a different branch. Say day after."
"Ah, then," said Maud, "if he explains———!"
"There's no hole? I don't know!"—and it forced from him at last a sigh. He was impatient of it, for he had done with it; it would soon bore him. So fast they lived. "It will take," he only dropped, "much explaining."
His detachment was logical, but she looked a moment at his sudden weariness. "There's always, remember, Mrs. Chorner."
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Chorner; we luckily invented her."
"Well, if she drove him to his death———?"
Bight, with a laugh, caught at it. "Is that it? Did she drive him?"
It pulled her up, and, though she smiled, they stood again, a little, as on their guard. "Now, at any rate," Maud simply said at last, "she'll marry him. So you see how right I was."
With a preoccupation that had grown in him, however, he had already lost the thread. "How right———?"
"Not to sell my Talk."
"Oh yes,"—he remembered. "Quite right." But it all came to something else. "Whom will you marry?"
She only, at first, for answer, kept her eyes on him. Then she turned them about the place and saw no hindrance, and then, further, bending with a tenderness in which she felt so transformed, so won to something she had never been before, that she might even, to other eyes, well have looked so, she gravely kissed him. After which, as he took her arm, they walked on together. "That, at least," she said, "we'll put in the Papers."
THE END