CHAPTER XX
A shambling step along the floor of my hall one evening, long past nine o'clock, aroused me from thoughts of Hosley, the man whose image filled my home hours with a creeping shame and dread. A knock on my door, the first since I had been living there, startled me.
Before I could advance, Jim Hosley stumbled in and braced his worn body against the wall. He reached for my hand and I took it, and forgave him everything I had suspected he had done, and every crime he might have committed. The look on Jim Hosley's face that night would have won the pardon of a cannibal chief; it would have halted a Spanish inquisition, stayed the commune of Paris and wrung unadulterated, anonymous pity from the heart of an Irish landlord or a monopolist. A minute before I was for hanging Jim Hosley (provided my connection with the case was not revealed). Now, when I saw him and felt his hand once more in the grasp of comradeship, I was with him heart and soul, and scoundrel though he might be, a lineal descendant of old Bluebeard, perhaps, I stood ready to sharpen and pass his knives to him and assist in any humble way a willing and obliging servant could to make the business a success.
"Ben, I have searched for you for three hours. Thank Heaven, I am near you at last! I lay in the next room at the hospital, but Gabrielle would not let me see you," were his first words.
"In the hospital? With me in the next room? And Gabrielle—"
"Yes, Ben; we can talk all night, and then we shan't understand. How did those letters written to the girl—"
He flung himself into a chair. He was exhausted and ten years older. Pain in his leg prompted him to ask me to remove his shoe. I helped him into my dressing-gown, gave him a pipe, plenty of pillows in an easy chair and fondled him like a prodigal son. I was never so glad to see a mortal since I peeped into the world. The fatted calf's substitute, a dish of pork and beans, was put to heat in a pan of water on the gas stove. The coffee-pot was "rastled" under the tap to remove the early morning aroma which clung to the grounds always left to await my attention the following morning. The egg poacher, the toaster, the slab of bacon, and a mince pie, bought an hour before to produce sleep, were brought out and displayed to make a scene like the old days when joy was unconfined, when women were mere theories and courtship a pastime.
Jim in his despair warmed up and actually smiled. That heart-ache which had overwhelmed him and made life so unbearable when he entered, gave way, and hope, with the smell of bacon and fried eggs, mounted higher. Grief, powerful dynamo though it be, may be tickled by a smaller one—a square meal often brings its victim into line.
"Jim, we'll take the night to talk this thing over. It will take all that time for me to tell you that I am so mighty glad to see you again, and besides, it will take time to eat as well, for you look to me as if food was the one supply you had failed to connect with since that fire. Tell me, Jim, how Gabrielle could keep you away? How could you allow a woman to separate you from your old pal? Does it seem reasonable? And yet you always were so innocently plausible I could never doubt you. How did that happen? Tell me now, before I give you anything to eat. I would like to feel a little more sure on that point."