He laughed incredulously. The next moment she was back, enveloped in coat and muffler.
“You’re going,” he said frowning, “now?”
“Whenever you wish,” she said, her dark eyes steadily on him, without reproach or criticism.
“We’ll see,” he said, resentfully, and he started down the hall. Without a word she followed at his side.
XXI
The name of Daniel Garford had figured on many occasions in the scare-heads of the Metropolitan press, not only on account of the eccentricities of genius and the wildness of his youth, but from the fact that the name of Garford had been a social beacon for generations. Even before the Mexican War there had been a Garford who had sat in the Cabinet as Secretary of State, and from that time on, the family had progressed in power and wealth, a proud, intensely ambitious, self-willed, and dominating line of men, who, whatever their faults, were never accused of idleness. There was a restless, mental energy about these men which had driven them to the front, while the strength of the old Garford strain continued to show in their impatience of forms and traditions, their ability to originate and discover, and especially in their distinguishing trait of never being satisfied with success.
The Honorable Benjamin Garford, Daniel’s uncle, whom he resembled, according to the incomprehensible vagaries of heredity in form and temperament, had been a clear example of this boundless craze for real achievement. Though possessed of an ample fortune, he had, from his youth, devoted himself to scientific research and discussion. One of the most distinguished scholars of his day, honored by numerous European scientific bodies for discoveries in the field of electrical energy, his text-books accepted as standards, twice minister to St. Petersburg, and once to Paris, he summed up his life in one little phrase: “I die a disappointed man.” This remark, incomprehensible to the multitude, should be retained as the key to Daniel’s character—the passionate pursuit of an ideal linked to an inevitable moment of self-appraisement and disillusion.
His life had been enveloped in storm, a whirling, breathless existence, with strange reversals of fortune, never quiet, nor long continuing along obvious lines. The quality of genius had always been in him from the lonely, tragic days of his boyhood, but a disordered, tormented genius which had made him the sport of accidental influences. Dudley Garford, his father, in a moment of intense infatuation in his early twenties, had eloped with and married a beautiful Italian girl of distinguished parentage whom he had met in his travels, and this mixture of the virility of the Garfords with the warmth and color of the South had made a genius of the boy. To this fortuitous mingling of rich strains was added the awakening touch of early sorrow and a precocious comprehension of tragedy. What father and mother had consummated in a burst of wildness, they lived to destroy in bitterness. From the earliest years of their marriage, violent quarrels had broken out, due at first to the unreasoning espionage of passionate jealousy to which the wife subjected the husband, and, later, inevitably to a succession of rapid, volatile attachments into which the husband had been driven, first, by her intolerance, and second, by the brilliant pleasure-loving qualities of his own forceful personality.