After this night Graydon saw the old man often. They dined together occasionally in the small cafes on the West Side. Droom could not, for some reason known only to himself, be induced to go to Sherry's again.
"When Jane comes back, I'll give you both a quiet little supper there after the play maybe. It'll be my treat, my boy."
The old man worked patiently and fruitlessly over his "inventions." They came to naught, but they lightened his otherwise barren existence. There was not a day or night in which his mind was wholly free from thoughts of James Bansemer.
He counted the weeks and days until the man would be free, and his eyes narrowed with these furtive glances into the future. He felt in his heart that James Bansemer would come to him at once, and that the reckoning for his single hour of triumph would be a heavy one to pay. Sometimes he would sit for hours with his eyes staring at the Napoleon above the bookcase, something like dread in their depths. Then again he would laugh with glee, pound the table with his bony hand—much to the consternation of Chang—and exclaim as if addressing a multitude:
"I hope I'll be dead when he gets out of there! I hope I won't live to see him, free again. That would spoil everything. Let me see, I'm seventy-one now; I surely can't live much longer. I want to die seeing him as I saw him that day. The last thing I think of on earth must be James Bansemer's face behind the bars. Ha, ha, ha! It was worth all the years, that one hour! It was even worth while being his slave. I'm not afraid of him! No! That's ridiculous. Of course, I'm not afraid of him. I only want to know he's lying in a cell when I die out here in the great, free world! By my soul, he'll know that a handsome face isn't always the best. He laughed at my face, curse him. His face won her—his good looks! Well, well, well, I only hope she's where she can see his face now!"
He would work himself into a frenzy of torment and glee combined, usually collapsing at the end of his harangue. It disgusted him to think that his health was so good that he might be expected to live beyond the limit of James Bansemer's imprisonment.
At the end of eighteen months, Jane was coming home. She had written to Graydon from London, and the newspapers announced the sailing of the Cables on one of the White Star steamers.
"I am coming home to end all of this idleness," she wrote to him. "I mean to find pleasure in toil, in doing good, in lifting the burdens of those who are helpless. You will see how I can work, Graydon. You will love me more than ever when you see how I can do so much good for my fellow creatures. I want you to love me more and more, because I shall love you to the end of my life."
The night before the ship was to arrive Graydon was dining with the Jack Percivals. There were a dozen in the party—a blase, bored collection of human beings who had dined out so incessantly that eating was a punishment. They had come to look upon food as a foe to comfort and a grievous obstacle in the path of pleasure. Bridge was just beginning to take hold of them; its grip was tightening with new coils as each night went by. Nobody thought of dinner; the thought was of the delay in getting at the game; an instinct that was not even a thought urged them to abhor the food that had come into their lives so abundantly.
Night after night they dined out; night after night they toyed with their forks, ate nothing, drank to hide their yawns, took black coffee and said they enjoyed the food tremendously.