He could not tell how it fell out, but at last the time came when he admitted the source of its charm. He recalled the time sharply long after, and how he had risen hastily, and paced the floor with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. That it should come to this—he, Jonathan Flint, a man whose gray hairs—here he stepped before the mirror and studied the tuft of prematurely white locks upon his forehead—whose gray hairs ought to have brought with them wisdom, or at least common sense,—that he should fall to sitting for hours in front of a picture like any schoolboy of eighteen! Really, it was too absurd!
He would send off the portrait to the cleaner to-morrow, and then when it was properly framed, it should be sent to Miss Anstice with his compliments, and so an end of the whole matter. He would never see it again.
Nor the original?
This query was so insistent that it seemed to come from outside his consciousness, and to demand an answer. He stopped short in his walk as it struck him. Then, alone as he was, he colored to the temples, and gave a little gasp. Like an overwhelming tidal wave there swept over him the realization that his will was mastered by a power above it, mightier than itself; that his seeing Winifred Anstice again was hardly a question of volition any longer, any more than breathing was a matter of will—that he must see her—that the chief question of his future was whether she cared to see him.
This train of thought did not tend to anything very cheerful. One after another he recalled their interviews, on the road, in the boat, on the beach, and again at Flying Point. Her manner on each of these occasions had been sufficiently pronounced to leave him in no doubt of her opinion; and at the last two meetings her words had been even more explicit. She had called him a man of ice. She had taxed him with the narrow limits of his sympathies. "Well," said Reason, "did you not give her cause for all she said and more? Weren't you an odious, crabbed, supercilious cad?"
Flint took a savage satisfaction in admitting every accusation which he could bring against himself, in recalling the light irony with which [Pg 228] Winifred Anstice had witnessed his blunders, and the direct, downright anger with which she had dealt out her judgments there at the Point. Only one drop of comfort could Flint extract from the memory of that interview, and he smiled cynically as he remembered the warmth which marked her description of her friend, the editor of the "Trans-Continental." When the surprises of the sudden enlightenment and the emotion of the moment had passed away, which feeling, he asked himself, would remain in her mind,—the liking for the ideal or the disliking of the experienced? For both there was not room, yet each was intense. It was a curious psychological problem. At a further remove it would have afforded him a keen intellectual pleasure to speculate upon the probable working of a woman's heart under such conditions. As it was, he found himself incapable either of solving the problem or of letting it alone. His mind dwelt upon it continuously. He was almost inclined, like Eugene Aram, to tell his story disguised to strangers, and listen to their idle speculations. Brady was a comfort at this time. He was so responsive in his sympathies and so obtuse in his perceptions. It was possible to talk all round a subject to him with no fear that his imagination would travel a step farther than it was led. It needed no urging, either, for he [Pg 229] appeared to have a sentiment of his own for Nepaug and all its associations, and drew towards it as naturally as a moth to a flame or a woman to a mirror.
Indeed, Brady often dwelt spontaneously upon the various episodes of the days at the beach,—the fireworks, the shipwreck, the evening at Flying Point. He was a capital mimic, and loved to imitate Dr. Cricket striding up and down the room, with his hands clasping his elbows behind his back and his chin-whiskers thrust out before as a herald of his approach. Then casting aside all the scruples which should have been raised within him by ties of blood, he would give a burlesque of Miss Standish peering out from beneath her little gray curls at the world, and rapping out her opinion of those around her in good set terms.
After her came Mr. Anstice, looking busily in every corner for the book he had in his hand. This the mimic followed by a representation of Ben Bradford, with hand propped on knee and chin on hand, glooming from his corner upon Winifred Anstice, when she ventured to address some one else.
"I cannot do Miss Anstice," Brady confessed one evening. It was October then, and the two friends were sitting together in Flint's room. "She has too much humor. The more humor [Pg 230] there is in an original poem, for instance, the harder it is to parody, and so with people. The grand, gloomy, and peculiar are easy enough, let them be ever so august; but the light, delicately ironical manner is a difficult thing to exaggerate."