Pacing his quiet study, sitting before his desk, eating his absent-minded meals, lying sleepless in his bed, Dr. Scott waited impatiently. In another month school would begin, but school work had become routine which would take only his time and would not interrupt his mental processes. He had read the last of Basil Everman's compositions and had made complete and elaborate plans for their presentation to the world, even though Dr. Lister had warned him that Mrs. Lister's consent must first be gained. Dr. Scott did not believe for an instant that she would refuse. She would rejoice as any sensible person would in this late fame for her brother.
Already he saw before him "Miscellaneous Studies, Basil Everman," "The Poems of Basil Everman," "Bitter Bread and other Stories, Basil Everman," "Translations from the Greek, Basil Everman." The books would need no wide advertising to float them; they would come gradually and certainly into favor. They should be smoothly bound in dark blue, excellently printed on thick, light, creamy paper in large type, and on the title-page of each should stand "The Works of Basil Everman, vol.—, Henry Harrington Scott, Editor." He gave a half-day to deciding whether "Professor of English Literature in Walton College" should be added.
He saw before him his own sentences, few in number, rich in meaning. He wrote them down, some on slips of paper which he carried with him on long walks into the country or held in his hand in the twilight as he sat in his study. "Everman's style," he wrote, "combines the freshness and lightness of youth with the more solid qualities which belong to maturity. He ornamented dexterously the subjects whose impressiveness was enhanced by an embroidery of words and with equal taste pruned rigorously those passages whose truth was best set forth undecked." Here and there he underlined a word as an indication that it was to be further considered and its suitability scrutinized.
He placed Basil in the Everman house, saw him walking the streets and wrote a sentence which pleased him mightily. The sentence was to please poor Mary Alcestis: "The history of Basil Everman offers a positive answer to that problem about which there is and will always be frequent contention—whether the human soul finds within itself the material for such presentations." Basil Everman had found tragedy, gloom, passion in his own heart and in the literature which he read and not in his own experience.
He determined to quote passages which he had loved and cherished—cherished, it might well seem for this end: Basil Everman "sensed that old Greek question, yet unanswered. The unconquerable specter still flitting among the forest trees at twilight; rising ribbed out of the sea sand; white, a strange Aphrodite—out of the sea foam; stretching its gray, cloven wings among the clouds; turning the light of their sunsets into blood."
Another sentence he meant to use which was still new and whose applicability he saw as yet vaguely:
"She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands."
He considered the sources for the brief biography. There was Mary Alcestis, first and most important. There were, he hoped, letters. And there was Thomasina.
His delight in his work set the machinery of his mind into swift revolution. He recalled with satisfaction his short contributions to contemporary literature and got down the scrapbooks in which he had preserved them. Here was an admirable paragraph—there was one which should be recast. He read again the carefully preserved letters which he had received in agreement and commendation. When the works of Basil Everman appeared, Vreeland and Lewis and Wilson would in all probability write to him again. He was still not middle-aged; there might be before him deeper literary satisfactions than the editing of another man's work, extraordinary as that work was. He might see some happy day his own productions beautifully printed, beautifully bound, his own name in gold on dark-blue cloth—Henry Harrington Scott.
In the glow which pervaded his spirit, old feelings revived, feelings which had no connection with literary matters. He began to remember once more not only why he had married, but why he had married Mrs. Scott. He saw her blue eyes, unsharpened and unfaded; he saw her eager face; he heard—alas for him!—her siren tones of appreciation and admiration. He had not, he knew, justified himself in her eyes, but that should all be changed; he promised himself that she should think well of him, that he would still achieve that success which every woman has a right to expect in the man whom she marries. Even Walter—supercilious, prosperous Walter, jingling coin in his pocket—should think well of him. To Cora's opinion he attributed no value. But he anticipated more and more pleasantly the moment when he should tell Mrs. Scott his happy secret.