He looked down on her from his unlighted chamber; and suddenly she looked up straight at the windows of the room where she thought he was sleeping; and smiled a dim, amused, weary, tender smile. Then she sped by, erect and light of foot; and the deep shadow of the great gateway took her. All he could see was the moonlight on the bluish green lawn; and the white electric light on the gleaming rubber-trees and dusty palms.
He sat down. He clasped his hands over his knee. He whistled softly a little Spanish air. He laughed very gently. “My dear little girl,” said he, “I am going to marry you. You may be swindled into helping a dozen murderers; but I am going to marry you!”
CHAPTER XVI
THE REAL EDWIN KEATCHAM
One Sunday after Mrs. Melville Winter and Archie came to Casa Fuerte, Mr. Keatcham sent for the colonel. There was nothing unusual in such a summons. From the beginning of his illness he had shown a curious, inexpressive desire for the soldier’s company. He would have him sit in the room, although too weak to talk to him, supposing he wished to talk, which was not at all sure. “I like-to-see-him-just-sitting-there,” he faltered to his nurse, “can’t-he-read-or-play-solitaire-like-the-old-lady?”
Sometimes Winter would be conscious that the feeble creature in the bed, with the bluish-white face, was staring at him. Whether the glassy eyes beheld his figure or went beyond him to unfinished colossal schemes that might change the fate of a continent, or drifted backward to the poverty-stricken home, the ferocious toil and the unending self-denial of Keatcham’s youth on the Pacific slope, the dim gaze gave no clue. All that was apparent was that it was always on Winter, as he curled his legs under his chair, wrote or knitted his brow over rows of playing-cards.
At the very first, Keatcham’s mind had wandered; he used to shrink from imaginary people who were in the room; he would try to talk to them, distressing himself painfully, for he was so weak that his nurses turned his head on the pillow; he would feebly motion them away. In such aberrations he would sometimes appeal, in a changed, thin, childish voice, to the obscure, toil-worn pioneer woman who had died while he was a lad. “Mother, I was a good boy; I always got up when you called me, didn’t I? I helped you iron when the other boys were playing—mother, please don’t let that old woman stay and cry here!” Or he would plead: “Mother, tell her, say, you tell her I didn’t know her son would kill himself—I couldn’t tell—he was a damn coward, anyhow—excuse me, mama, I didn’t mean to swear, but they make me so awful mad!” There was a girl who came, sometimes, from whose presence he shrank; a girl he had never seen; nor, indeed, had he ever known in the flesh any of the shapes which haunted him. They had lived; but never had his eyes fallen on them. Nevertheless, their presence was as real to him as that of the people about him whom he could hear and touch and see. It did not take Winter’s imagination long to piece out the explanation of these apparitions: they were specters of the characters in those dramas of ruthless conquest which Mercer had culled out of newspaper “stories” and affidavits and court reports and forced upon Keatcham’s attention. Miss Smith helped him to the solution, although her own ignorance of Mercer’s method was puzzling. “How did he ever know old Mrs. Ferris?” she said. “He called her Ferris and he talks about her funny dress—she always did wear a queer little basque and full skirt after all the world went into blouses—but how did he ever come across her? They had a place on the James that had been in the family a hundred years and had to lose it on account of the Tidewater; and Nelson Ferris blew his brains out.”
“Don’t you know how?” asked the colonel. “Well, I’ll tell you my guess sometime. Who is the girl who seems to make him throw a fit so?”
“I’m not sure; I imagine it is poor Mabel Ray; there were two of them, sisters; they made money out of their Tidewater stock and went to New York to visit some kin; and they got scared when the stock fell and the dividends stopped; and they sold out at a great loss. They never did come back; they had persuaded all their kin to invest; and the stopping of the dividends made it difficult for some of the poor ones—Mabel said she couldn’t face her old aunts. She went on the stage in New York. She was very pretty; she wasn’t very strong. Anyway, you can imagine the end of the story. I saw her in the park last winter when Mrs. Winter was in New York; she turned her face away—poor Mabel!”
Through Janet Smith’s knowledge of her dead sister’s neighbors, Winter got a dozen pitiful records of the wreckage of the Tidewater. “Mighty interesting reading,” he thought grimly, “but hardly likely to make the man responsible for them stuck on himself!” Then he would look at the drawn face on the pillow and listen to the babblings of the boy who had had no childhood; and the frown would melt off his brow.
He did not always talk to his mother when his mind wandered; several times he addressed an invisible presence as “Helen” and “Dear” with an accent of tenderness very strange on those inflexible lips. When he talked to this phantasm he was never angry or distressed; his turgid scowl cleared; the austere lines chiseling his cheeks and brow faded; he looked years younger. But for the most part, it was to no unreal creature that he turned, but to Colonel Rupert Winter. He would address him with punctilious civility, but as one who was under some obligation to assist him, saying, for instance, “Colonel Winter, I must beg you not to let those persons in the room again. They annoy me. But you needn’t let Mercer know that. Please attend to it yourself, and get them away. Miss Smith says you will. Explain to them that when I get up I will investigate their claims. I’m too sick now!”