The Professor's Mystery Part 7

I could see that I had hit him, for he grew jerkier than ever.

"Counterfeiting, nonsense. Absolutely absurd. Insult to suggest such a thing. Now, let's drop this and come right down to the facts. May as well be practical. Nothing more to say. You're not to call. Told you so already. Very disagreeable business. But, of course, you won't make any further trouble. Absolutely impossible. Hard on you, of course, but nothing to be done."

"Very well," said I, "you tell me this matter is between Miss Tabor and myself. We'll keep it so, and the rest of you may toast in Tophet. I tell you plainly I don't doubt your literal word, but I do doubt your motives and your authority. If Miss Tabor herself tells me to go, I'll go. Otherwise, I'll await my chance to see her; and if that's intruding, why, I'll intrude. Now, be as practical as you please."

He gave way with a suddenness that astonished me. "Just as you say, Mr.

Crosby, just as you say. No difference whatever to me. Glad to be relieved of the business. Better call this afternoon, and have it over with. Always best to settle things at once. She'll be in all day.

Quickest way of ending the whole trouble."

"I'll call this afternoon."

"Right. Say about three-thirty. I go in here. Sorry to have brought you so far. Sorry to have had this to do at all. Very unpleasant for both of us, but life's full of unpleasantness. Sorry I shan't see you again.

Can't be helped. Good-by."

I made the best of my way back, with an indistinct sense of having fought with a small tornado, and wondering whether I had won a minor victory or sealed an irrevocable defeat. True, I had gained the point of receiving my dismissal in person, but Reid's very readiness of acquiescence indicated the completeness of his confidence in my discomfiture. I spent the interim planning things to say which I knew I should miserably forget when the time came to say them; and I went to keep my appointment with Miss Tabor feeling illogically like a malefactor going up for trial, and remembering with sickly lucidity every word of the skeptical common sense that I had been flouting from the first.

She was sitting near the great Dutch fireplace, and as I crossed the room she slid her book upon the table and stood up. She did not offer me her hand, nor did she notice mine.

"How do you do, Mr. Crosby?" she said.

There was an acid formality about the meaningless little sentence that took the color out of all I had intended to say. There was no answer except that I was very well; and the hollow inanity of that under the circ.u.mstances left me standing speechless, defeated before the beginning. She was standing very straight, and her eyes looked beyond me blankly, as they had on the Ainslies' veranda. Now she brought them to mine for an instant, and motioned me to a chair that faced hers at a little distance as if it had been placed there beforehand.

"We had better sit down," she said. "I want to talk quietly to you, Mr.

Crosby."

"Your brother told me that this would be a good time for me to come,"

said I unmeaningly.

For a long time she was silent, turning over and over with reflective fingers a little ivory paper cutter. The handle of it was carved to represent a fish with its mouth open grasping the blade. Somewhere in the room a clock ticked twice to every three of my heart-beats. Finally she looked up decisively.

"You wanted to see me, Mr. Crosby. I suppose it is about something in particular. Please tell me what it is."

"You must know as well as I do," I answered, trying to steady my tone.

"I have been told that my attempt to call is an intrusion, and that you do not wish to see me again. I preferred to be told that by you, yourself."

Her eyes rested steadily upon mine. "Well," she said, "I tell you now that it is perfectly true."

There was the same formality about it all, the same sense of mechanical arrangement; not as if she were playing a part, but as if she were going through with an unpleasant purpose according to a preconceived plan. I tried to s.h.i.+ft the burden of the situation.

"Why?" I asked. "It seems to me that this part of intruder has been made up and put upon me. Except for crossing lines that need never have been drawn, I don't understand what I have done."

"Perhaps not. If you think a little, you will remember that when I asked you to go that night when--when you brought me here, I told you to forget us--that you were not to ask questions, nor try to see me again.

I thought I made it very clear at that time. Are you the judge of my right to close my own door?"

For a moment I was too much bewildered to answer. "When we met at the Ainslies'," I blurted, "you met me as a friend, as though nothing had broken what we began in the holidays. I can't believe that you were only playing a courteous part. You were your own open self. Everything was all right, I am very sure, until--until this man, this--your brother came for you."

She gave a scornful little laugh, leaning back indolently in her chair.

"Really, Mr. Crosby, aren't you rather overstating the case? Have we been such very great friends? I have known you ten days--twelve days."

I nodded dumbly.

"I have no wish to hurt you," she went on more gently, "but we have really nothing like a friends.h.i.+p to appeal to. I am not breaking anything, because there is nothing to break. When you left here--I thought that you understood me. I don't know what my family disliked in you, and I don't think I care to know. It has nothing to do with me. But this is what I dislike. You called up my father the next morning, and demanded reasons. You went to the beach, where you knew I was invited.

Was I to cut you there? Was I to explain to mutual friends that I didn't want to meet you? I don't think you have treated our acquaintances.h.i.+p particularly well, or that you have shown much regard for my plain request."

I sat stunned, the bulk of my offense looming stark before me. Then, with a great surge, the memory came back of the girl who had stood with me by the water's edge, who had run childishly hand in hand with me upon the beach, who had walked with me and talked with me, who had shown me unembarra.s.sed her gay and sweet imaginings. These things had been the truth; this was the unreality.

Perhaps she saw something of what was pa.s.sing in my mind, for she shook her head. "Don't think that because I had no heart to mar your outing, I did not mean what I had said. It was easier to be friends for a little--easier for us both. But surely you should have played your part.

At the Ainslies' I wanted to treat you as I should have treated anybody.

Do you think that you have been fair? Do you think you should have risked following me? For it was a risk. You have come back here where we are the only people you know, and as soon as you come you ask for me. I don't like to say it, Mr. Crosby, but you have acted inconsiderately. I am very anxious that this time you should clearly understand."

I got to my feet in silence. Something had happened that I could not help; and as I stood there, I knew that my world had come to an end, and as in the first shock of a physical injury, felt numbly conscious of the deliberate suffering that was to follow. She had risen too, looking somehow curiously small and frail. Then, of a sudden, my manhood caught at me. The wall was without seam or crevice, darkening the sky; and I knew that I could break it with a breath.

"I will go," I said, "when I am sure. Look at me, Lady, for you know that I know."

There was a sharp snap. She glanced at her hands, then dropped the broken paper knife at her feet and faced me haughtily. "Know?" she said, with a dry tension in her voice, "I only know that this is to be good-by." She held out a rigid hand.

I took it and stood looking soberly down at her.

"Is that all?" I asked.

"Yes," she answered. "Don't make it hard for me." Then her eyes grew suddenly afraid. She caught away her hand and shrank back a step, catching at the chain about her throat.

"Oh, don't, don't," she begged. "Please, please go--you don't understand."

I held myself with all my strength. "No, I don't understand," I whispered.

She caught her breath with half a sob, forlornly and as a child might.

"You must not understand. You are never to see me again."

"You know I can't do that," I said.

"You must do it," she answered very gravely. "Be kind to me--" she paused, "because it's hard for me to send you away."

"You must tell me one thing more than that," said I; "is there--is there any one else?"

Her eyes fell. "That is it," she said at last, "there is somebody else."

"That is all, then," I said quietly. "I shall stay away until you send for me;" and I left her.

I have no remembrance of the walk back to the inn; but I closed my door behind me softly, as if I were shutting a door upon my dreams. Now I knew that the dull round of daily life, of little happenings and usual days, stretched before me, weary and indefinite. It made little difference to think that I might some day be sent for. Evidently it was to be Europe this summer after all. My only desire was to make my going a thing immediate and complete; to rupture so absolutely the threads of the woof that we had woven that I could feel myself separated from all, enough aloof from love to think of life. I did not stop to ask myself questions or to wonder precisely what was the nature of the impossibility that was driving me away. There would be time enough for that.

I began to pack feverishly, gathering my belongings from their disposition about the room. I felt tired, as a man feels tired who has lost a battle; so that after I had packed a little I sank wearily into the chair before my bureau. Then after what may have been a minute or an hour of dull unconscious thought, I fell again to my task; pulling open the drawers from where I sat, and searching their depths for little odds and ends which I piled upon the bureau top. The bottom of the second drawer was covered with an old newspaper; and I smiled as I noticed that its fabric was already turning brittle and yellowish, and read the obsolete violence of the head-lines. Then a name half-way down the page caught me with a shock, and I slowly read and re-read the lines of tiny print, forming the empty phrases in my mind with no clear sense of their meaning. They were like the streams of silly words that run through one's head in a fever, or half-way along the road to sleep; and it was an eternity before they meant anything.

"REID-TABOR. On May 24, at the home of the bride's parents, Miriam, daughter of George and Charlotte Bennett Tabor, to Doctor Walter Reid."