Time undeniably was working its changed with Major Foxmaster, as with his surroundings. He must be about sixty now; but, seeing him for the first time, you might have been pardoned for setting him down as a man of [149] seventy or thereabouts—he looked it. His shoulders, which formerly he carried squared back so splendidly, were beginning to fold in upon the casing of his ribs. His hair used to be black, shot with white hairs; it was now white, shot with a few black hairs. His back had had a hollow in it; there was a curve in it yet, but the curve was outward instead of inward. When a man’s figure develops convex lines where there used to be concavities, that man is getting on; and the Major plainly was getting on pretty fast. His eyes, which remained dignifiedly and defiantly scornful of all the world, and of all the world might think and might say, nevertheless were filmed over the least bit, so that they lost something of their icy blue keenness. His face, though, with the jaws sinking in upon the shrunken gums and the brows growing shaggier, was as much of a mask as it had ever been.
What was true of Major Foxmaster was seemingly not true of her who followed him. Within the flapping shapelessness of her disguise her figure showed as straight and supple as in the beginning, and her noiseless step was as nimble and quick as ever it had been. And that was a mighty strange thing too. It was as though her shroud of wrappings, which kept the sunshine and the wind off her, kept off age too.
This very same thought came at length into Major Foxmaster’s head. It took lodgment [150] there and sprouted, sending out roots into all the odd corners of his mind. It is not for me to tell why or how he got this notion, or exactly when. It is for me merely to narrate as briefly as may be the progress of the obsession and its consequences.
Another five years passed, and then three, making eight more on top of the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty. Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the story of Major Foxmaster’s shadow and bear it forward into yet another generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house winked with one dead eye and stared with the other.
The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the [151] trotting track wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more—he had a palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he adhered to the old habits. He took his daily constitutionals—sometimes alone—except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind him—oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down.
His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow places, the spittle would accumulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes—still the faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain—gave no betrayal of the racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The delusion was a mania now—a besetting mania, feeding [152] on silence and isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.
By years—so he reasoned it out with himself in every waking hour—by years, she who bided within that shuttered house over the way was his age, or near it. By rights, her draped form should be as shrunken and warped as his own. By rights, the face behind that thick black veil should be as old as his, and bleached, moreover, to a corpsey paleness. Yet the furtive glances he stole over his shoulder told him that the figure behind him moved as alertly erect as ever it had; that its movements had the same sure and silent swiftness.
So that, after a while, Major Foxmaster began to think things that no entirely sane man has any business thinking. He began to say to himself that now he had solved the secret which, all these years, had been kept from his ken. A curse had been put upon him—that was it; that must be it! Behind that veil was no face old and sunken and wasted as his was, but, instead, a young, plump face, with luminous grey eyes set in it, and a sweet, full mouth, and about it wavings of lustrous, rich brown hair—the face of the girl he once loved as she looked in the days before he quit loving her.
He held up his own hands before his watery eyes. They were trembly, wrinkled hands, gnarled in their knuckles, corded on their backs. They were the colour of scorched [153] leather—the texture of it too. But hers must be the plump little white hands he remembered, with rosy-pink palms and bright, pointed nails. Before a long mirror in his dressing room he studied himself—studied his bowed back and his hunching shoulders and his shaky shanks—and all. Her figure, inside its flapping black draperies, was straight as an arrow; her head poised itself firmly upright on her shoulders. That much at least he knew; so if that much were true, why was not the rest of it true too?
It was not fair! According to his lights he had fought out the fight with only such weapons as Nature and his own will gave him; but the Supreme Handicapper had stacked the cards against him. He was bound to lose the long, long race. He could not last much longer. He could feel age tugging at every flabby muscle; infirmity was forever fingering his tissues, seeking the most vulnerable spot at which to strike in at him.