He was soon in bed, and I drew up a chair close beside him.
Then he began to talk of his mother, to tell me of what he would do for her. “For I fancy the turning point is past,” he said. “I signed contracts to-night for more work, and now money goes to bind the bargain. They are not the barren formality they were when I put my name to the first one two years ago. I'll go home and see how mother is before I do anything else, and take a rest of a month or so. I can afford it, for the play's a big hit. There can be no mistake about it. Now that success has come, somehow it's not quite all I anticipated. A part of the satisfaction has been lost in the struggle, and a part of my ambition as well. I've served my apprenticeship to art. I have starved, hoping against hope, for three years, and now I'll be content with the money it will mean. After all, it narrows down to this: We begin with different aims before we have exhausted ourselves in trying to overcome the ignorance and prejudice of others.”
When I left him he was sleeping with his head upon his arm. The boyish roundness seemed to have returned to his face and the anxious look was gone. He was as I remembered him in the old days at Mrs. Tauton's.
The night was at an end when I went into the street. Boys were calling the morning papers and the city was wide awake. I made a collection of the various papers and left them with the old shoemaker, who was already at work in his little basement shop, to give Gavan when he should have had out his sleep. Then I went uptown to breakfast in my own rooms.
It was late in the afternoon when I started back to see him, and as I reached the house the old shoemaker met me at the street-door. I saw his kind face was grave and serious, with lines of grief upon it.
“Is he sick?” I asked.
The old man motioned me to follow and without a word we went up the stairs. In the bare desolate hall above, with its unpalliated hideousness now garishly alight with day and sun, stood a policeman, the center of a group of curious men and women.
Still I did not comprehend.
I entered the room. Gavan was lying upon the bed just as I had left him. In his hand was clutched a crushed and torn scrap of yellow paper.
As I paused, looking stupidly down at the bed and its burden, I became dimly conscious that the old man was standing at my side speaking to me, telling me how it had happened.