"Another symbol," I said. "Break not your brains upon the key of brass."
He scratched his head, rearranged his tinsel, and smiling, advanced to show me the stairs. I looked back once: there crowned he stood, in his symbolic coat, with the green crescent and blue door on the shoulders; and as a gust from the stairway blew open the garment, I beheld a great yellow heart on his breast. That picture remained impressed upon my vision. In the street, I recalled the room, the drawings, the inscriptions,—all so tragical and saddening! I had not proceeded far, when, moved by greater compassion, I turned and retraced my steps. At the door of the house, I saw the servant girl who had admitted me coming out with a bottle, and thought it the same I had seen lying empty under Pendlam's table. I followed her into a grocery on the corner. She called for gin, and paid for it out of my bank-bill.
I now changed my mind, and went to consult Horatio. It was concluded that Pendlam's old habits of thought and associations ought to be entirely broken up. Deserted, destitute, dependent, he condescended, after long holding out against us, to listen to what we proposed. Hearing of a vacancy in a newspaper office in a western city, we had procured for him the situation. Not without a struggle, he consented to accept it, abandoned his darling reformatory projects, and set out for his new sphere.
His position was that of subordinate writer; and for a time he maintained it with considerable ability. But he grew restless under restraint; and at length, taking advantage of the managing editor's absence, he published articles on prohibited subjects, which lost the paper half its subscribers, and him his situation. When next heard of, he was gaining a meagre subsistence by writing theatrical puffs,—employment for which he was indebted to the kindness of a certain influential actress named Kellerton.
In the mean time Susan returned from her unhappy wanderings; and her mother's family, seizing upon her like wolves, hid her from the world in their den. And I was pleased not long after to read that an individual named Clodman, a noted swindler, had recently been shot in a street-fight in St. Louis, by a husband whose domestic peace he had disturbed.
The last word of all, that ends this strange, eventful, and, alas! too true history, remains to be said.
For some months, we had heard nothing of Pendlam. But last week I received a bundle of Roman Catholic publications, one of which contained an article proclaiming a miraculous conversion of the distinguished reformer, and thereby greatly glorifying Catholicism.
The same mail brought me a letter from the convert.
"At last," he wrote, "I have found peace in the bosom of the Holy Catholic Church. All my previous experiences were necessary to lead me where I am. This is the divine association I was so long seeking elsewhere in vain; I find in its forms the true symbols of a universal religion; and I now perceive that the seeming errors, in which I was for a time permitted to stray, were wisely designed to convince me of the sublime truth, that celibacy is the single condition befitting a holy apostolic teacher."
Amid the flood of reflections that rushed upon me, arose prominent the image of poor Pendlam's unexplained symbol: "Avoid the shores of old Spain." Had it not now received its interpretation? The tossed voyager, failing to make the continent of truth, but beating hither and thither amid the reefs and breakers of dangerous coasts, mistaking many islands for the main, and drifting on unknown seas, had at last steered straight to the old Catholic shores, from which the great discoverers had sailed so many years before.