The Guest of Quesnay Part 23

Keredec was alone in his salon, extended at ease upon a long chair, an ottoman and a stool, when I burst in upon him; a portentous volume was in his lap, and a prolific pipe, smoking up from his great cloud of beard, gave the final reality to the likeness he thus presented of a range of hills ending in a volcano. But he rolled the book cavalierly to the floor, limbered up by sections to receive me, and offered me a hearty welcome.

"Ha, my dear sir," he cried, "you take pity on the lonely Keredec; you make him a visit. I could not wish better for myself. We shall have a good smoke and a good talk."

"You are improved to-day?" I asked, it may be a little slyly.

"Improve?" he repeated inquiringly.

"Your rheumatism, I mean."

"Ha, yes; that rheumatism!" he shouted, and throwing back his head, rocked the room with sudden laughter. "Hew! But it is gone--almost! Oh, I am much better, and soon I shall be able to go in the woods again with my boy." He pushed a chair toward me. "Come, light your cigar; he will not return for an hour perhaps, and there is plenty of time for the smoke to blow away. So! It is better. Now we shall talk."

"Yes," I said, "I wanted to talk with you."

"That is a--what you call?--ha, yes, a coincidence," he returned, stretching himself again in the long chair, "a happy coincidence; for I have wished a talk with you; but you are away so early for all day, and in the evening Oliver, he is always here."

"I think what I wanted to talk about concerns him particularly."

"Yes?" The professor leaned forward, looking at me gravely. "That is another coincidence. But you shall speak first. Commence then."

"I feel that you know me at least well enough," I began rather hesitatingly, "to be sure that I would not, for the world, make any effort to intrude in your affairs, or Mr. Saffren's, and that I would not force your confidence in the remotest--"

"No, no, no!" he interrupted. "Please do not fear I shall misinterpretate whatever you will say. You are our friend. We know it."

"Very well," I pursued; "then I speak with no fear of offending. When you first came to the inn I couldn't help seeing that you took a great many precautions for secrecy; and when you afterward explained these precautions to me on the ground that you feared somebody might think Mr. Saffren not quite sane, and that such an impression might injure him later--well, I could not help seeing that your explanation did not cover all the ground."

"It is true--it did not." He ran his huge hand through the heavy white waves of his hair, and shook his head vigorously. "No; I knew it, my dear sir, I knew it well. But, what could I do? I would not have telled my own mother! This much I can say to you: we came here at a risk, but I thought that with great care it might be made little. And I thought a great good thing might be accomplish if we should come here, something so fine, so wonderful, that even if the danger had been great I would have risked it. I will tell you a little more: I think that great thing is BEING accomplis.h.!.+" Here he rose to his feet excitedly and began to pace the room as he talked, the ancient floor shaking with his tread.

"I think it is DONE! And ha! my dear sir, if it SHOULD be, this big Keredec will not have lived in vain! It was a great task I undertake with my young man, and the glory to see it finish is almost here. Even if the danger should come, the THING is done, for all that is real and has true meaning is inside the soul!"

"It was in connection with the risk you have mentioned that I came to talk," I returned with some emphasis, for I was convinced of the reality of Mr. Earl Percy and also very certain that he had no existence inside or outside a soul. "I think it necessary that you should know--"

But the professor was launched. I might as well have swept the rising tide with a broom. He talked with magnificent vehemence for twenty minutes, his theme being some theory of his own that the individuality of a soul is immortal, and that even in perfection, the soul cannot possibly merge into any Nirvana. Meantime, I wondered how Mr. Percy was employing his time, but after one or two ineffectual attempts to interrupt, I gave myself to silence until the oration should be concluded.

"And so it is with my boy," he proclaimed, coming at last to the case in hand. "The spirit of him, the real Oliver Saffren, THAT has NEVER change! The outside of him, those thing that BELONG to him, like his memory, THEY have change, but not himself, for himself is eternal and unchangeable. I have taught him, yes; I have helped him get the small things we can add to our possession--a little knowledge, maybe, a little power of judgment. But, my dear sir, I tell you that such things are ONLY possessions of a man. They are not the MAN! All that a man IS or ever shall be, he is when he is a baby. So with Oliver; he had lived a little while, twenty-six years, perhaps, when pft--like that!--he became almost as a baby again. He could remember how to talk, but not much more. He had lost his belongings--they were gone from the lobe of the brain where he had stored them; but HE was not gone, no part of the real HIMSELF was lacking. Then presently they send him to me to make new his belongings, to restore his possessions. Ha, what a task! To take him with nothing in the world of his own and see that he get only GOOD possessions, GOOD knowledge, GOOD experience! I took him to the mountains of the Tyrol--two years--and there his body became strong and splendid while his brain was taking in the stores. It was quick, for his brain had retained some habits; it was not a baby's brain, and some small part of its old stores had not been lost. But if anything useless or bad remain, we empty it out--I and those mountain' with their pure air. Now, I say he is all good and the work was good; I am proud! But I wish to restore ALL that was good in his life; your Keredec is something of a poet.--You may put it: much the old fool! And for that greates' restoration of all I have brought my boy back to France; since it was necessary. It was a madness, and I thank the good G.o.d I was mad enough to do it. I cannot tell you yet, my dear sir: but you shall see, you shall see what the folly of that old Keredec has done! You shall see, you shall--and I promise it--what a Paradise, when the good G.o.d helps, an old fool's dream can make!"

A half-light had broken upon me as he talked, pacing the floor, thundering his paean of triumph, his t.i.tanic gestures bruising the harmless air. Only one explanation, incredible, but possible, sufficed.

Anything was possible, I thought--anything was probable--with this dreamer whom the trump of Fame, executing a whimsical fantasia, proclaimed a man of science!

"By the wildest chance," I gasped, "you don't mean that you wanted him to fall in love--"

He had reached the other end of the room, but at this he whirled about on me, his laughter rolling out again, till it might have been heard at Pere Baudry's.

"Ha, my dear sir, you have said it! But you knew it; you told him to come to me and tell me."

"But I mean that you--unless I utterly misunderstand--you seem to imply that you had selected some one now in France whom you planned that he should care for--that you had selected the lady whom you know as Madame d'Armand."

"Again," he shouted, "you have said it!"

"Professor Keredec," I returned, with asperity, "I have no idea how you came to conceive such a preposterous scheme, but I agree heartily that the word for it is madness. In the first place, I must tell you that her name is not even d'Armand--"

"My dear sir, I know. It was the mistake of that absurd Amedee. She is Mrs. Harman."

"You knew it?" I cried, hopelessly confused. "But Oliver still speaks of her as Madame d'Armand."

"He does not know. She has not told him."

"But why haven't you told him?"

"Ha, that is a story, a poem," he cried, beginning to pace the floor again--"a ballad as old as the oldest of Provence! There is a reason, my dear sir, which I cannot tell you, but it lies within the romance of what you agree is my madness. Some day, I hope, you shall understand and applaud! In the meantime--"

"In the meantime," I said sharply, as he paused for breath, "there is a keen-faced young man who took a room in the inn this morning and who has come to spy upon you, I believe."

"What is it you say?"

He came to a sudden stop.

I had not meant to deliver my information quite so abruptly, but there was no help for it now, and I repeated the statement, giving him a terse account of my two encounters with the rattish youth, and adding:

"He seemed to be certain that 'Oliver Saffren' is an a.s.sumed name, and he made a threatening reference to the laws of France."

The effect upon Keredec was a very distinct pallor. He faced me silently until I had finished, then in a voice grown suddenly husky, asked:

"Do you think he came back to the inn? Is he here now?"

"I do not know."

"We must learn; I must know that, at once." And he went to the door.

"Let me go instead," I suggested.

"It can't make little difference if he see me," said the professor, swallowing with difficulty and displaying, as he turned to me, a look of such profound anxiety that I was as sorry for him now as I had been irritated a few minutes earlier by his galliard air-castles. "I do not know this man, nor does he know me, but I have fear"--his beard moved as though his chin were trembling--"I have fear that I know his employers. Still, it may be better if you go. Bring somebody here that we can ask."

"Shall I find Amedee?"

"No, no, no! That babbler? Find Madame Brossard."

I stepped out to the gallery, to discover Madame Brossard emerging from a door on the opposite side of the courtyard; Amedee, Glouglou, and a couple of carters deploying before her with some light trunks and bags, which they were carrying into the pa.s.sage she had just quitted. I summoned her quietly; she came briskly up the steps and into the room, and I closed the door.

"Madame Brossard," said the professor, "you have a new client to-day."

"That monsieur who arrived this morning," I suggested.

"He was an American," said the hostess, knitting her dark brows--"but I do not think that he was exactly a monsieur."

"Bravo!" I murmured. "That sketches a likeness. It is this 'Percy'

without a doubt."

"That is it," she returned. "Monsieur Poissy is the name he gave."