That was the skeleton in the cupboard. Stephen Gale had been a fine chap, but as someone—whose modest anonymity shall be respected—has so finely phrased it, pigs is pigs.”
II
After her mother’s death, Olivia rented the dear old place, the home of her ancestors for nearly twenty-five years, filled with the priceless possessions purchased from the proceeds of the preposterously profitable porcine proclivities of her papa, but haunted by the family ghosts of Berkshire and Chester White. She fled to London to escape her heritage of shame.
There she met Alexis Triona, the famous author of Rushing Through Russia. With his clean-shaven face, broad forehead, gray eyes, humorous mouth, he looked the hero that he wasn’t. He had faked his book from a stolen diary which he always carried about with him so that, at the proper moment, he might be found out.
He was a chauffeur, the son of a laborer, therefore his diction was faultless. “Diction” is the word. He employed it in ordinary conversation unsparingly—diction and contradiction—for he was a wonderful liar. Lacking all the advantages of birth and education, he had, nevertheless, achieved a mendacity of majestic grandeur and ravishing art.
III
It was not until after their marriage that Olivia discovered Triona’s essential greatness—and his essential and fatal defect.
He had taken two drinks of whisky and lay in a drunken slumber. Olivia found on the floor beside him the original notes of the stolen story, preserved for this dénouement. For the first time, she knew him for what he was—no mere recorder of his own experiences and observations, no mere note-book-and-camera author, but an imaginative artist of the first rank.
She was almost stunned by the greatness of her discovery, the realization that he, her husband, was worthy to be placed on a pedestal beside the greatest writers of fictitious travels—Homer, Dante, Milton, Munchausen, Dr. Cook.
Then she made the second, the fatal discovery—that his real name was—John Briggs.