IN THE PAINTED GARDEN
East India Place is not a well-known thoroughfare. In fact, it is a court, hidden between truck stables and concealed also by the boxes and bales of commission merchants. Even on a sunshiny day the dank bottom of this court is dark and smells as if it were under rather than on the earth. A warehouse occupies one side, the other presents several doorways, which might once have been the entrances to sailors’ lodgings, but which now are plastered with the rude signs of junk dealers. The numbers on these houses were all even—2-4-8-10—which left me the conclusion that Number 5 must be the warehouse and that the scene-painting loft must be on the top floor of the grimy building. Indeed, I could see that a skylight had been superimposed on the roof and my eye caught the sign at the entrance, “The Mohave Scenic Studios.” I began the ascent of boxed wooden stairways, musty with the odors of ships’ cargoes. At the top a sign confronted me, “No Admittance Except on Business. This means You”; but beneath it in red, white, and blue paint, was the message, “Used for Storage. New Studio at 43 Barkiston Avenue.”
I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the stump of a knob; the door yielded. I found myself in a large room with rolls and rolls of canvas in piles and huge scenic back drops pendant from the high ceiling. A skylight above, with rotting curtains drawn across the square panes, threw a strange green glare over everything. A peculiar aromatic odor, such as is sometimes wafted over the footlights into the audience, gave the deserted place a theatrical flavor which was heightened by the presence of gilded papier-maché statuettes and a huge representation of the god Buddha leaning against the bare brick wall. A spider had spun a web above one of this god’s bare shoulders; it glinted in a chance ray of direct sunlight which had entered through a tear in the curtain overhead. Above me a staging held a kitchen chair, some fire pails, and several pots whose sides were smirched with the colors they contained. The only sign of human life was the faint warm odor of pipe smoke. Knowing, then, that some one beside myself was in the loft, I proceeded gingerly between two vast canvases which hung side by side, preparing myself on my soft-footed way down this aisle to see the man I sought as I emerged from the other end. I imagined I heard a nervous, suppressed cough, indicating that the other already knew of my invasion of his strange abode.
This was not the fact. For a moment, looking from the opening, I had ample opportunity, without being seen, to observe all that spread itself before me. A painted drop hung against the wall, upon which, in delicate colors of Italian blue and rich green, was stretched a vast, imposing, and beautiful view of the Gardens of Versailles, with a wealth of flowers in full bloom extending along the velvet greensward into the depth of the landscape, where, white and regal, walls and pillars rose toward the clear sky of spring. A modern grotesque had invaded this regal scene and forbidden ground, and had placed his cot, disordered with newspapers and ragged red blankets, so boldly in the foreground that at first sight the impropriety of his presence was shocking. I could see that the man sat upon his cot cross-legged; his back, pitifully thin under a spare white shirt, was turned toward me. With one sinewy, aged hand he fondled the wisps of faded hair upon his head; with the other he moved small objects over a flat board. He was a lonely monarch upon a throne of squalor; he was playing a solitary game of chess!
“The Sheik of Baalbec!” I whispered to myself.
The creature stopped, looked up at the skylight and its green curtains and drew a miserable sigh from the depths of his lungs. It was such a sigh that I could not restrain a shudder.
“Julianna,” said I.
He drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened turtle and held himself stiffly as one who has been doused with a pail of ice water. For several moments he did not move; when at last he turned around, his expression was patient rather than vicious, sad rather than terror-stricken.
“What do you want?” he said, and held his mouth open so that he, too, seemed like an automaton, the springs of which had failed.
The pause gave me the opportunity to observe that he was not the man with the gold fillings. Indeed, the only part of him which seemed well preserved—which, as it were, he had saved from the wreck—was a row of white, even teeth!
“What do you want?” he repeated. “I have never seen you before. I know no reason for your speaking a word to me.”
“Your daughter—” I began.
“I have no daughter,” he cried, his eyes blazing with sudden passion. “Who are you? I tell you that you are talking nonsense. I have no daughter!”
“Fine words,” I said threateningly; “fine words. But this is no time for them. She is in vital danger—”
“Danger!” he screamed, clawing at the red blankets. “My God! Has it come? What form? Quick, I say! What form?”
“It is because you can shed light upon it that I have come,” said I. “We know little. She has sent her husband away—”
“Damn him!” he choked.
“She has locked herself in her room. She has been so for three weeks. The maid—”
“Margaret Murchie,” he whispered. “She believes that I am dead?”
I nodded.
“I know nothing,” he said. “The girl is not of me or mine.”
“Come, come,” said I. “It is time for disclosure.”
He arose, searched under the corner of the mattress a moment, and then, with a quick, panther-like movement, sprang upon the bed again, holding a revolver in his two claws.
“I have no idea of what you mean,” he cried. “I will not be questioned. If I shoot, it is self-defense. You understand that. Nor will any one be the wiser. She is not my daughter. I know nothing of her.”
“You know everything,” I cried, as anger made me reckless. “ It will not pay you to flourish that weapon. Listen!”
“Some one else coming!” he whispered.
“Yes,” I shouted. “You have seen him before. It is young Estabrook.”
The wizened creature immediately hid the revolver under the folds of the blanket and began to play nervously with the chessmen. Both of us waited, listening to the approach of the footsteps which came so cautiously behind the pendant canvas.
To see at last that I was right, that the newcomer was Estabrook, was a relief.
“Well,” said the young man, appearing suddenly around the corner. “I came. I thought I heard your voice, Doctor. You were talking?”
I pointed.
The worn, colorless face of the other man gazed up at us pathetically; his body had relaxed into the hollows of his disordered cot. Against the scene of regal gardens which was luminous as if the painted sky itself bathed all in the soft light of a spring evening, the man and his face were ridiculous and incongruous. His presence in that half-real setting seemed a satire upon the beauties achieved by man and God.
“Who?” asked Estabrook involuntarily.
“The Sheik of Baalbec,” I said.
The man looked up at me again.
“Mortimer Cranch,” said I.
He fell forward on his face. It was several moments before any of us moved. Cranch spoke first. He had arisen, and now stood with his sad eyes fixed upon Estabrook, and I noticed for the first time that his mouth and lips showed suffering and, perhaps, strength.
“It is this, above all things, I hoped would never come,” said he. “You have resurrected me from the dead. I was buried. You have dug me up. Whatever good you may get from this strange meeting, make the most of it. If it will help to guard against the danger spoken of by this man you address as Doctor, I will be satisfied.”
“You dog!” cried Estabrook, hot with emotions of violence. “It is you who were responsible for the death of Judge Colfax.”
The other held out his knotted hands toward me.
“The whole story!” he cried. “Not a part. You must know the whole story.”
“Briefly,” I commanded.
He nodded, and began to pace the foreground of the Gardens of Versailles, back and forth like a tethered beast in a park. His voice was dispassionate. The narrative proceeded in a monotone. But if fiends could conceive a tale more dark, they would whisper it among themselves.
For this, told in the somewhat quaint narrative of a former generation, was his story.
| BOOK VI A PUPPET OF THE PASSIONS |