XXIII
THE MOVING FINGER WRITES
To the Queen came the guard full of zeal:
Haled in bonds the Pretender:
"Shall it be noose or knout, rack or wheel?"
But her proud face grew tender.
Down she stepped from her throne—made him free;
"Love," she said, with a sigh,
"What is rank? You are you, we are we, I am I!"
—The Cheating of Zenobia.
I should like to write, just here, a little disquisition on Crises. I should show how all nature moves ever on and on toward certain cataclysmic events, each of which marks a point of departure for new ascents in progression. I should begin, of course, with the Nebular Hypothesis, its crash of suns, followed by the evolution of the star and its system of planets, its life, cooling, death, and a fresh crisis forming a new nebula. I should end with either Revolutions or Malaria, depending on whether I should last consider the subject in its relation to sociology or to pathology; but in any case, somewhere along in the latter third of the work, I should treat of Love and Marriage, and therein of the Crisis and Catastrophe in Romance.
I have a good mind to do it!
But, no; crises in general must wait, seeing that our particular one stands clamoring for solution. The concrete bids away with the abstraction. None of our friends of this history could be brought just now, for a single moment, to seek solace in philosophy, unless it might be Professor Blatherwick—and he is entirely oblivious of the fact of the crisis having made its appearance.
Not so, for instance, with the professor's extraordinary daughter, whose feelings were so lacerated by the culminating proof of the fickleness of Brassfield at the Pumphreys' reception that she wondered how she could ever have thought of keeping him in that perfidious plane of consciousness in the hope that therein he would cleave to her only. Better a good friend in Amidon, said she, than a false lover in Brassfield. Howbeit, she isolated herself and mourned, thinking much of the wrong her deed of the reception had done to Amidon, and wondering how it might be remedied.
Nor with Mr. Amidon, who, while ignorant of the full extent of his misfortune in the eyes of Elizabeth, yet knew that he was deep, deep in disgrace with her, and found so many plausible reasons for it that the episode at the reception seemed the least of them. He knew enough of Brassfield to believe him guilty on any charge which might be brought against him. The only doubt he allowed himself was as to how far he, Florian Amidon, was morally responsible for Brassfield's wrong-doings. He had no doubt that Miss Scarlett had a real grievance against Brassfield, and, in an extremity of woe, made up his mind that Amidon must hold himself to the sorry trade of answering a debt he never contracted. He knew from a brief interview with Alvord that the political situation was bad, but for this he had scarcely a thought since the tragic breaking-up of their little Belshazzar's Feast. It was his relations with Miss Waldron and Miss Scarlett which placed him beyond the reach of philosophy.
So also is Judge Blodgett, who has been busy since the banquet, some of the time with a towel about his brow, searching through Edgington's library, to which his connection with the Bunn's Ferry well case gave him the entrée, for the law of breach of promise of marriage as defined by the Pennsylvania decisions. Edgington himself was apparently always from his office. Blodgett's call on Fuller and Cox was most unsatisfactory, Mr. Fuller with some acerbity disclaiming all knowledge of any such case as Scarlett versus Brassfield, and Mr. Cox being invisible.