第10章 AFTERWARD January 1910(10)

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence.She watched the familiar routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression.She had come to regardherself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and tables.And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of "change." Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting.But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope.She was sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold.She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and her own agonized imagination.In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would ever know.But the house KNEW; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew.For it was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him.The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret.But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come.Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them.Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised.And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means.

V

"I don't say it WASN'T straight, yet don't say it WAS straight.It wasbusiness."

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr.Parvis" on it had been brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of Boyne's unfinished letter.In the library she had found awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person to whom her husband's last known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a man who has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of his visit.He had "run over" to England on business, and finding himself in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying his respects to Mrs.Boyne; without asking her, if the occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell's family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's bosom.Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject.Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?

"I know nothing--you must tell me," she faltered out; and her visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story.It threw, even to her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine.Her husband had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of "getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had "put him on" to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance through his impartial glasses.

"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way.It's the kind of thing that happens every day in business.I guess it's what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr.Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptnessof his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated her.

"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?" Mr.Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately."Oh, no, I don't.I don't even say it wasn't straight." He glanced up and down the long lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the definition he sought."I don't say it WASN'T straight, and yet I don't say it WAS straight.

It was business." After all, no definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror.He seemed to her like the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.