"'Alone with his enemy,'" he kept saying, "How right she was, how just! Ah, but I must take care lest my enemy be her enemy too."
Then on a sudden came a frightening spasm of pain, the first in his life. Always Herrick had been well and robust, seldom ill for two days together; but now he gasped and choked, held his hand to his chest, thinking with ungovernable terror that he was going to die with all the loose strings of his life untied. After minutes that were years, the spell passed. He lay back white-faced in a chair, his forehead pouring sweat. He recognized the warning. His heart was affected. What use would there be in disguising the truth?
Herrick had no intention to consult a physician. Physicians had not saved his wife; they had never been of use to him. He knew the advice they would give: diet, self-control, no excitement. They had no cure for this complaint. Some people lived on for years, others were snuffed out in a night; what was bound to fall fell despite the advice of all the doctors in the world. After the gripping pain had relaxed—there was no room for any state except fear while it lasted—the man even treated the subject jauntily and swore he was as likely as any to round off his threescore and ten. But he could not do it peacefully if he left any room for grief to befall Nancy and Edward.
It was after this attack that Ronald Nasmith received a letter to which with surprise he saw Herrick's signature attached. The note was short, impersonal in its wording; the writer had business of importance he could not discuss on paper; he asked Mr. Nasmith to indulge the infirmities of an older man by paying him a visit; he also must request that his letter and the subject of the visit be treated as confidential.
Nasmith dispatched Beresford as acting-uncle on a picnic to some hot springs while he slipped away to see Herrick. His mind during the past few days had been much occupied with Herrick and the puzzle of the scrolls. He had been studying a riddle which instinct told him was full of personal import, a message that Herrick intended and wished him to decipher. Yet the answer evaded his closest research. It might seem easy to Herrick, schooled in these antithetical couplets by which the Chinese conveyed the many thoughts they did not care to lay bare on the surface; it was not clear to Nasmith, who burrowed through all his dictionaries and went to the length of asking help from his teacher. The dictionaries explained little and the teacher, although he exclaimed at once that the characters were the work of a master, offered explanations so involved that Nasmith, even though he understood less than half of what his teacher said, knew that this excess of commentary was merely the happy Chinese way of concealing ignorance: the teacher was groping for a clue, as Nasmith once before had caught him doing when the drowsy pedagogue had elaborated the most profound moral sentiments from what proved to be simply the Chinese transliteration of the name Australia. In the end, exhaustive study had not told as much as Herrick himself chose to reveal:—
The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon
for the moon;
The moon following from the east tenderly displays the
reflection of the sun.
"I wonder if he will have expected me to master his riddle," thought Nasmith, as he set out upon his long walk.
Herrick received his guest in the same room as before. He was regaining the dominance of his nerves but there was, nevertheless, a stiffness of bearing which caused Nasmith to eye his host keenly, anxious for any hint of the business in hand, and to note marks of the upheaval through which the man had been passing. Something was wrong—business cares, worries about property, some trouble in which the man could not turn to Chinese friends for assistance. Perhaps Herrick wanted an executor or a witness to his will. No, that could not be the difficulty; he would have called for Beresford as well.
"I suppose you are mystified as to the reasons for my letter," Herrick began. "Did you read the scroll I wrote for you?"
"I tried to read it," Nasmith admitted.