Arnbush turned on him, swinging heavily on his big feet, as on some ponderous hinges.
“What for do you say, ‘Good God’?”
“Because,” replied the lawyer, “if Neinsoul was there, he got out of hell to come.... He died three years ago in Essen, poisoned by a blinding gas that he had invented for the German army.”
CHAPTER XIII
The Symbol
To Marion Dillard there was mockery in the symbolism of the night.
She was alone. On the table before her was an open telegram—the grating fitted into the last opening of the trap. She was a dark-haired, slender girl with that aspect of capacity and independence with which the great war endowed our women: the high courage that no assault of evil fortune could bludgeon into servility. She sat in her chair before the table, to the eye, unconquered.
But it was to the eye only. In the magnificence about her the wreckage impending was incredible; the great house fitted with every luxury, the library in which she sat, its rug the treasure of a temple, its walls paneled!
To Marion Dillard, in her chair before the table, with the telegram open before her, the whole setting was grotesque. All over the city, white with newly fallen snow, were the symbols of this majestic celebration of the birth of the Saviour. They were not absent in this room. Holly wreaths hung in the windows, and the strange ivory image, representing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, which her father had always so greatly prized, had been brought out, after the usual custom on this night, and placed on the table. It sat on a black silk cloth embroidered with a white cross. As a work of art it was not conspicuously excellent; but her father prized it for the memory of a great adventure.
Marion Dillard leaned back in the chair, reviewing the events that had moved against her as though with some sinister design. Her father was dead. A cross of white marble stood on a hilltop in France to his memory. It had been erected by every people in the great war, for her father, moved by a high, adventurous idealism, too old for longer service in the American army, had taken his own fortune—and, alas, the fortune which he held in trust for another—and with it maintained a hospital base on the western front for the benefit of every injured man, friend or enemy.
Marion Dillard reflected: Of what avail was it that her father had not realized that this trust money was going into his big conception? He had drawn on his resources in America until every item of his great fortune was pledged, and by some error, this estate, in trust, had gone into the common fund. Appalled, when she came to examine the accounts, Marion had endeavored to cover the matter, hoping that the decision of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals in a suit to recover a tract of coal lands in the south would be decided in favor of her father’s estate, and thus furnish the money to replace this trust. And so she had somehow managed to go on.