CHAPTER XV

THE OTHER WOMAN

Where grown men are concerned--men of the Anglo-Saxon breed, that is--emotion cannot be other than spasmodic. I have seen a gentlemanly convict conduct himself with great dignity during the march to the scaffold. It was not, poor devil, that he did not fear death, nor that it was a grateful thing to be dropped ignominiously out of life on a June morning, but rather that he, after breaking many of his country’s laws, obeyed the one inflexible social edict which regulates good and bad “form.” Therefore, with a wry grimace when he emerged from the whitewashed corridor, and saw that his earthly pilgrimage would end near the further wall of a small courtyard, he carried himself with a composure far beyond that manifested by any other member of the melancholy procession. A criminal in one instinct, he was a man in all the rest. I suppose the real wrench had come and gone weeks before.

Now, I had no knowledge of the torture Karl had undergone until he turned towards me again, and I found a gravity in his face which had not been there before. Since that morning two little lines had developed between his eyebrows at the junction of nose and forehead. That is nature’s way of minting her crude gold--just a touch of the finger of experience, no matter if the agony be of soul or body, and there is no machine can stamp its token more indelibly.

“Maggie’s message is her last word to me,” he said. “She means that she will endeavor never to see or hear from me again.”

Even his father was troubled by the marked restraint in his voice, but I felt that the mere effort of discussion would be helpful.

“That is a blank impossibility,” I cried. “You two will find each other whether you like it or not. You did so before and you will do it again. The settlement is not in your hands, unless I err greatly.”

“You do not understand,” said Karl. “Perhaps you may meet her sometime. Please tell her what I have said. Let it rest at that.”

“If you mean that all this tomfoolery is going to stop here and now I am heartily glad of it,” broke in his father. “Had I been aware of what was going on it would have been ended long since. Good gracious! what was this unfortunate fellow, Constantine, to us that we should bother our heads about him? I assure you, Karl, that the only thing which troubles me is the fear lest this latter-day witchcraft of yours may not be interfering with your work if not actually undermining your health.”

I regret to say that my respected friend reminded me just then of Balaam smiting the ass when she refused to follow the path he had chosen. But I did not urge the parable aloud. How could a modern man of business agree to the contention that his son had set in motion an irresistible natural force? Most certainly he “stood in a narrow place, and there was no way to turn either to the right hand or to the left.”

But Karl’s obvious wishes should be respected. I pretended to agree with his father. I used the customary platitudes anent his career and the necessity there was to endeavor in future to repress any manifestation of his sixth sense. And while I was talking, I saw the ghost of a sad smile flickering on Karl’s lips, because he knew that I knew better. I laughed myself (ostensibly at some trivial remark by the elder Grier that there would be some sense in telegnomy if Karl could summon a waiter quickly by its exercise) when I thought of Hooper’s scorn of the notion that a fellow shouldn’t see through a brick wall if he had the power. I was sure that he would pounce on the suggestion as another instance of British disinclination to adopt new ideas!

We parted soon, and I regard it as not the least amazing feature of my really close association with Karl that I did not see him again for five years.

That is the sort of queer prank the tides of existence will play occasionally with the flotsam and jetsam of humanity. The great highways of rail and ocean may be bringing the whole family of the globe into closer communion, but they have, too, the strange result of separating units in a way not dreamed of by our forefathers. Thus, when my wife and I were in the Western States of America, Karl was in Germany, making the acquaintance of his mother’s relatives, and learning again the iron-clamped syllables which bind German thought in words which are whole phrases.

We came back to Europe, to watch the upspringing of our own youngster, and we transferred bag and baggage to Heidelberg at the time chosen by Mr. and Mrs. Grier to establish themselves in a house in Curzon Street, Mayfair.

Of course we kept in touch by correspondence. Mrs. Grier and my wife sent each other family news, Grier gave me occasional “tips” which, by operation of that wonderful machine, the Stock Exchange, took money from some stranger’s pocket and put it into mine, merely because one of us bought and the other sold stock, which neither of us possessed, in a railway, or a mine, or an industrial company, in which we had not the slightest commercial interest.

Karl, beyond semi-humorous hints, said little about telegnomy. He kept me duly advised of his progress in the University. During the month of May of the year following Constantine’s death he obtained that much-sought document of little future value which set forth the degree of: “GRIER, KARL, é Coll. Æn. Fac., die 30° Mensis Maii, Anni--Examinatus, prout Statuta requirunt,” and the rest of it. Then, with other youthful sages, he wrote his name in a leather-covered book, subscribed himself “Filius Generosis,” and was finally admitted “ad gradum Baccalaurei in Artibus.”

He did not secure honors, and in this respect justified his father’s fear that the adjectival sixth sense was anything but a help to him. The truth was that Karl, to whom scholastic work was too easy, was prone to dream away many an hour which might have been applied more profitably from the “Ita testamur” point of view of the examiners.

He never alluded to Maggie in his letters, and his omission in this respect reminds me that I also have been slow in recording the one really interesting bit of news I learnt from Hooper when I met him in New York.

After Constantine’s death, who do you think hunted up the whereabouts of the girl and her mother and brought back into their lives, with redoubled poignancy, the unhappy memory of a tragedy? None other than Constantine’s solicitors! The unfortunate Armenian made a holograph will in New York (which, though self-written, was quite to the point and properly witnessed), leaving to Margaret Vane Hutchinson, daughter of the late William Hutchinson, tea-planter, Darjeeling, Bengal (an archaic description of Darjeeling), and at that present date residing with her mother, Mrs. Alice Holroyd Hutchinson, in the Pall Mall Hotel, London, England, “all the real and personal estate” of which he died possessed. To account for this astounding bequest he stated that the said “Margaret Vane Hutchinson is the woman I intend to marry,” a written testimony of his views which is all the more to his credit seeing that Steindal’s Mephistophelian method of securing the girl’s submission contemplated no such honorable course. Indeed, I have thought better of the Armenian ever since I heard of that clause in the will.

Naturally, Constantine’s Armenian and Levantine relatives were very wroth. They would have liked to torture with hot irons the straightforward American secretary who found the will among his employer’s papers, and took good care that it reached the hands of the trustees and solicitors to the estate. They wanted to contest it on various grounds, none creditable, it may be safely inferred, and had the matter been left to the girl herself she would have executed any legal transfer of the property to the disappointed crew without consideration.

Her mother, however, thought they had done quite enough already for Constantine’s sake. Maggie, after a terrible scene in London on the day we were in Liverpool, obtained Mrs. Hutchinson’s consent to the abrupt closing of a professional career and a departure forthwith to the Italian Lakes, where they could live in economical retirement, and Maggie might devote herself to painting.

The mother yielded because she feared for her daughter’s reason. In sober earnest, the girl was nearly distraught, and was not in her right mind until they quitted England. But although adamant in her resolve to withdraw from the world (had Maggie been a Roman Catholic nothing could have kept her from entering some religious community), she rapidly recovered her normal good health and abounding good spirits. Hence, Mrs. Hutchinson exercised her native shrewdness when the solicitors ran her to earth, and it was proposed that her daughter should forego the fortune thrust upon her.

She referred the lawyers to the firm who looked after her own moderate investments; there was much legal squabbling, and, you may be sure, some nice grapes off the bunch fell into the legal maw. Ultimately, the other Constantines purchased the business interests of their kinsman at about half their value--it would never do for Christian accountants to be taking annual stock of their dealings--and Maggie received, from this source and from the dead man’s personal investments, nearly three quarters of a million sterling!

“Yes, sir,” said Hooper, in whom the keen air of New York had brought out the latent financial instinct, “over three and a half million dollars”--how he rapped out those wonderful syllables in clear staccato accents--“that was what Maggie scooped out of the pot when Karl called Paul and she saw both hands.”

“Where are Maggie and the millions now?” I asked admiringly.

“I’ve bin thinkin’. There ain’t much in this codification-of-laws notion anyhow. Guess I’ll take a vacation, an’ work up some sort of telegnomy that will materialize,” said he.

But he was not serious. He was already earning a reputation as a smart young lawyer, having passed with distinction all the qualifying examinations in the States, and, indeed, he told me later that he was “chewing on,” the offer of a post as legal adviser to the Paris Embassy. So far as he knew, the Hutchinson ladies never left Italy. In the winter, Maggie might be seen copying pictures in the galleries of Florence or studying architectural effects in Rome or Venice--her pictures having attained some fame for their vivid handling of sunlight on the brilliant Italian exteriors. In the summer, she and her mother dwelt in a small castle, the Castello Rondo, to be precise, on a wooded hill overlooking Lake Como. These details Hooper had gathered from people who had friends among the American colony at Florence. Maggie was very pretty, very reserved, devoted to her art and to old silver. That was all he knew about her.

I was in Heidelberg when the curtain rose again on the Grier drama. “Adventures come to the adventurous,” says the old saw, and the homeless literary free-lance of to-day has his surfeit of excitement, full measure, just as spicy a draught as ever tickled the palate of any wanderer through the Dark Ages. I have already commented on the peculiar way in which the tragedy of life obtains its stage effects, for all the world like any writer of those thrilling “spectacular” plays which in England used to be labelled “transpontine.” Here is a typical first act. Scene, a peaceful village; the good young man and the rustic beauty are discovered living in Sunday-school innocence with their bucolic parents. Enter two well-dressed villains, of both sexes, and, after quarter of an hour’s excitement, the stalwart hero is lugged off, R., to penal servitude for a crime he never committed, and the heroine falls fainting, L., while the cloth descends to slow music, _tremolo con molto espressione_. Something of the kind happened to me. We, that is Mr., Mrs., Master and friends, had been enjoying a boating excursion on the Neckar, with a grand drive through the Schonau woods, a fine meal in an ancient inn, and a moonlight-cum-mandolin journey homewards.

And there, at our comfortable lodgings, I found a telegram awaiting me:

“Karl is causing us some trouble. Can you come and help?--GRIER.”

My wife had heard from Mrs. Grier only a month ago. There was no mention of any shortcoming on Karl’s part in that missive. Indeed, it was chiefly intended to warn us of an impending visit by a tremendous person, the Baroness von Liebenzell-Zavelstein, one of Karl’s maternal great-aunts, the stoutest and most aristocratic lady in the Grand Duchy.

Yet Grier was not a man to telegraph for me without good cause. Never did I regret more keenly the inspissated brains which refused to exhibit the least sign of a sixth sense. How useful it would have been now if I could “send out” Hertzian waves and “call up” Karl on our private installation of wireless telephony! But my dense membranes forbade any such short cut towards knowledge, even if the remainder of the machinery were not rusty with disuse, so, while I was packing, I could only indulge in theorizing.

“The sure thing is that Maggie has vacated the Castello Rondo,” said I to my better half. “A beautiful and rich young Englishwoman could never immure herself for life in the Italian hinterland.”

“It is the height of the season in town. Karl and she have met in society,” was the practical response.

“Um! A coincidence.”

“What is the coincidence?”

“It is just five years ago to-day since I went to London with Karl. It was then the ‘height of the season’ as you call it.”

“That is what everybody else calls it.”

“My dear, the phrase is hackneyed. The wife of a writer should seek a polished synonym. Let me help you to a selection: the fashionable zenith, the apotheosis of Park Lane, even the saturnalia of society--”

“Are you going without your boots?”

Well, I reached Charing Cross next evening, and there, on the platform, stood Grier _père_ to meet me. He was alone.

“I have taken rooms at an hotel,” he said after our first hearty greeting. “I don’t want you at the house, because I fancy you will do more good by getting Karl to yourself of an evening, so I must ask you to be my guest at the Pall Mall Hotel.”

“That is odd,” I said.

“You will understand better when we have had a talk.”

I did not explain that my ejaculation referred to the choice of the hotel and not to his action in sending me there. We entered his carriage and quitted the station.

“I hope there is nothing seriously wrong with Karl?” I began.

“No, no. Not at all. But you are the only man who really knows, or pretends to know, anything about this inf---- this wretched sixth sense of his, and it has come on again, worse than ever, since his engagement.”

“Hertzblut! Is he going to marry Maggie after all?”

“Maggie! Maggie! Why do you mention her? He is engaged to the Honorable Nora Cazenove, daughter of Lord Sandilands.”

I leaned back in the carriage. I could almost have chuckled.

“Ah,” I murmured softly to myself. “The other woman has arrived! Now there will be ructions!”