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"Do they know of--of my interest in this?"
"Yes; they know about the two O. B.s."
"The two--" He was on his feet again, but only for a moment; his
weakness was greater than his will power.
"Orlando and Oswald Brotherson," she explained, in answer to his
broken appeal. "Your brother wrote letters to her as well as you,
and signed them just as you did, with his initials only. These
letters were found in her desk, and he was supposed, for a time, to
have been the author of all that were so signed. But they found out
the difference after awhile. Yours were easily recognised after
they learned there was another O. B. who loved her."
The words were plain enough, but the stricken listener did not take
them in. They carried no meaning to him. How should they? The
very idea she sought to impress upon him by this seemingly careless
allusion was an incredible one. She found it her dreadful task to
tell him the hard, bare truth.
"Your brother," said she, "was devoted to Miss Challoner, too. He
even wanted to marry her. I cannot keep back this fact. It is
known everywhere, and by everybody but you."
"Orlando?" His lips took an ironical curve, as he uttered the word.
This was a young girl's imaginative fancy to him. "Why Orlando
never knew her, never saw her, never--"
"He met her at Lenox."
The name produced its effect. He stared, made an effort to think,
repeated Lenox over to himself; then suddenly lost his hold upon
the idea which that word suggested, struggled again for it, seized
it in an instant of madness and shouted out:
"Yes, yes, I remember. I sent him there--" and paused, his mind
blank again.
Poor Doris, frightened to her very soul, looked blindly about for
help; but she did not quit his side; she did not dare to, for his
lips had reopened; the continuity of his thoughts had returned; he
was going to speak.
"I sent him there." The words came in a sort of shout. "I was so
hungry to hear of her and I thought he might mention her in his
letter. Insane! Insane! He saw her and--What's that you said
about his loving her? He couldn't have loved her; he's not of the
loving sort. They've deceived you with strange tales. They've
deceived the whole world with fancies and mad dreams. He may have
admired her, but loved her,--no! or if he had, he would have
respected my claims."
"He did not know them."
A laugh; a laugh which paled Doris' cheek; then his tones grew even
again, memory came back and he muttered faintly:
"That is true. I said nothing to him. He had the right to court
her--and he did, you say; wrote to her; imposed himself upon her,
drove her mad with importunities she was forced to rebuke; and--and
what else? There is something else. Tell me; I will know it all."
He was standing now, his feebleness all gone, passion in every
lineament and his eye alive and feverish, with emotion. "Tell me,"
he repeated, with unrestrained vehemence. "Tell me all. Kill me
with sorrow but save me from being unjust."
"He wrote her a letter; it frightened her. He followed it up by a
visit--"
Doris paused; the sentence hung suspended. She had heard a step
--a hand on the door.
Orlando had entered the room.
XXXIII
ALONE
Oswald had heard nothing, seen nothing. But he took note of Doris'
silence, and turning towards her in frenzy saw what had happened,
and so was in a measure prepared for the stern, short sentence which
now rang through the room:
"Wait, Miss Scott! you tell the story badly. Let him listen to me.
From my mouth only shall he hear the stern and seemingly unnatural
part I played in this family tragedy."
The face of Oswald hardened. Those pliant features--beloved for
their gracious kindliness--set themselves in lines which altered
them almost beyond recognition; but his voice was not without some
of its natural sweetness, as, after a long and hollow look at the
other's composed countenance, he abruptly exclaimed:
"Speak! I am bound to listen; you are my brother."
Orlando turned towards Doris. She was slipping away.
"Don't go," said he.
But she was gone.
Slowly he turned back.
Oswald raised his hand and checked the words with which he would
have begun his story.
"Never mind the beginnings," said he. "Doris has told all that.
You saw Miss Challoner in Lenox--admired her--offered yourself to
her and afterwards wrote her a threatening letter because she
rejected you."
"It is true. Other men have followed just such unworthy impulses
--and been ashamed and sorry afterwards. I was sorry and I was
ashamed, and as soon as my first anger was over went to tell her so.
But she mistook my purpose and--"
"And what?"
Orlando hesitated. Even his iron nature trembled before the misery
he saw--a misery he was destined to augment rather than soothe.
With pains altogether out of keeping with his character, he sought
in the recesses of his darkened mind for words less bitter and less
abrupt than those which sprang involuntarily to his lips. But he
did not find them. Though he pitied his brother and wished to show
that he did, nothing but the stern language suitable to the stern
fact he wished to impart, would leave his lips.
"And ended the pitiful struggle of the moment with one quick,
unpremeditated blow," was what he said. "There is no other
explanation possible for this act, Oswald. Bitter as it is for me
to acknowledge it, I am thus far guilty of this beloved woman's
death. But, as God hears me, from the moment I first saw her, to
the moment I saw her last, I did not know, nor did I for a moment
dream that she was anything to you or to any other man of my stamp
and station. I thought she despised my country birth, my mechanical
attempts, my lack of aristocratic pretensions and traditions."
"Edith?"
"Now that I know she had other reasons for her contempt--that the
words she wrote were in rebuke to the brother rather than to the
man, I feel my guilt and deplore my anger. I cannot say more. I
should but insult your grief by any lengthy expressions of regret
and sorrow."
A groan of intolerable anguish from the sick man's lips, and then
the quick thrust of his re-awakened intelligence rising superior to
the overthrow of all his hopes.
"For a woman of Edith's principle to seek death in a moment of
desperation, the provocation must have been very great. Tell me if
I'm to hate you through life--yea through all eternity--or if I
must seek in some unimaginable failure of my own character or
conduct the cause of her intolerable despair."
"Oswald!" The tone was controlling, and yet that of one strong man
to another. "Is it for us to read the heart of any woman, least of
all of a woman of her susceptibilities and keen inner life? The
wish to end all comes to some natures like a lightning flash from a
clear sky. It comes, it goes, often without leaving a sign. But
if a weapon chances to be near--(here it was in hand)--then death
follows the impulse which, given an instant of thought, would have
vanished in a back sweep of other emotions. Chance was the real
accessory to this death by suicide. Oswald, let us realise it as
such and accept our sorrow as a mutual burden and turn to what
remains to us of life and labour. Work is grief's only consolation.
Then let us work."
But of all this Oswald had caught but the one word.
"Chance?" he repeated. "Orlando, I believe in God."
"Then seek your comfort there. I find it in harnessing the winds;
in forcing the powers of nature to do my bidding."
The other did not speak, and the silence grew heavy. It was broken,
when it was broken, by a cry from Oswald:
"No more," said he, "no more." Then, in a yearning accent, "Send
Doris to me."
Orlando started. This name coming so close upon that word comfort
produced a strange effect upon him. But another look at Oswald and
he was ready to do his bidding. The bitter ordeal was over; let
him have his solace if it was in her power to give it to him.
Orlando, upon leaving his brother's room, did not stop to deliver
that brother's message directly to Doris; he left this for Truda to
do, and retired immediately to his hangar in the woods. Locking
himself in, he slightly raised the roof and then sat down before the
car which was rapidly taking on shape and assuming that individuality
and appearance of sentient life which hitherto he had only seen in
dreams. But his eye, which had never failed to kindle at this sight
before, shone dully in the semi-gloom. The air-car could wait; he
would first have his hour in this solitude of his own making. The
gaze he dreaded, the words from which he shrank could not penetrate
here. He might even shout her name aloud, and only these windowless
walls would respond. He was alone with his past, his present and
his future.
Alone!
He needed to be. The strongest must pause when the precipice yawns
before him. The gulf can be spanned; he feels himself forceful
enough for that; but his eyes must take their measurement of it
first; he must know its depths and possible dangers. Only a fool
would ignore these steeps of jagged rock; and he was no fool, only
a man to whom the unexpected had happened, a man who had seen his
way clear to the horizon and then had come up against this! Love,
when he thought such folly dead! Remorse, when Glory called for
the quiet mind and heart!
He recognised its mordant fang, and knew that its ravages, though
only just begun, would last his lifetime. Nothing could stop them
now, nothing, nothing. And he laughed, as the thought went home;
laughed at the irony of fate and its inexorableness; laughed at his
own defeat and his nearness to a barred Paradise. Oswald loved Edith,
loved her yet, with a flame time would take long to quench. Doris
loved Oswald and he Doris; and not one of them would ever attain the
delights each was so fitted to enjoy. Why shouldn't he laugh? What
is left to man but mockery when all props fall? Disappointment was
the universal lot; and it should go merrily with him if he must take
his turn at it. But here the strong spirit of the man re-asserted
itself; it should be but a turn. A man's joys are not bounded by
his loves or even by the satisfaction of a perfectly untrammelled
mind. Performance makes a world of its own for the capable and the
strong, and this was still left to him. He, Orlando Brotherson,
despair while his great work lay unfinished! That would be to lay
stress on the inevitable pains and fears of commonplace humanity.
He was not of that ilk. Intellect was his god; ambition his motive
power. What would this casual blight upon his supreme contentment
be to him, when with the wings of his air-car spread, he should
spurn the earth and soar into the heaven of fame simultaneously
with his flight into the open.
He could wait for that hour. He had measured the gulf before him
and found it passable. Henceforth no looking back.
Rising, he stood for a moment gazing, with an alert eye now, upon
such sections of his car as had not yet been fitted into their
places; then he bent forward to his work, and soon the lips which
had uttered that sardonic laugh a few minutes before, parted in
gentler fashion, and song took the place of curses--a ballad of
love and fondest truth. But Orlando never knew what he sang. He
had the gift and used it.
Would his tones, however, have rung out with quite so mellow a
sweetness had he seen the restless figure even then circling his
retreat with eyes darting accusation and arms lifted towards him
in wild but impotent threat?
Yes, I think they would; for he knew that the man who thus expressed
his helplessness along with his convictions, was no nearer the end
he had set himself to attain than on the day he first betrayed his
suspicions.
XXXIV
THE HUT CHANGES ITS NAME
That night Oswald was taken very ill. For three days his life hung
in the balance, then youth and healthy living triumphed over shock
and bereavement, and he came slowly back to his sad and crippled
existence.
He had been conscious for a week or more of his surroundings, and
of his bitter sorrows as well, when one morning he asked Doris
whose face it was he had seen bending over him so often during the
last week: "Have you a new doctor? A man with white hair and a
comforting smile? Or have I dreamed this face? I have had so many
fancies this might easily be one of them."
"No, it is not a fancy," was the quiet reply. "Nor is it the face
of a doctor. It is that of friend. One whose heart is bound up
in your recovery; one for whom you must live, Mr. Brotherson."
"I don't know him, Doris. It's a strange face to me. And yet, it's
not altogether strange. Who is this man and why should he care for
me so deeply?"
"Because you share one love and one grief. It is Edith's father
whom you see at your bedside. He has helped to nurse you ever since
you came down this second time."
"Edith's father! Doris, it cannot be. Edith's father!"
"Yes, Mr. Challoner has been in Derby for the last two weeks. He
has only one interest now; to see you well again."
"Why?"
Doris caught the note of pain, if not suspicion, in this query, and
smiled as she asked in turn:
"Shall he answer that question himself? He is waiting to come in.
Not to talk. You need not fear his talking. He's as quiet as any
man I ever saw."
The sick man closed his eyes, and Doris watching, saw the flush
rise to his emaciated cheek, then slowly fade away again to a pallor
that frightened her. Had she injured where she would heal? Had
she pressed too suddenly and too hard on the ever gaping wound in
her invalid's breast? She gasped in terror at the thought, then
she faintly smiled, for his eyes had opened again and showed a calm
determination as he said:
"I should like to see him. I should like him to answer the question
I have just put you. I should rest easier and get well faster--or
not get well at all."
This latter he half whispered, and Doris, tripping from the room
may not have heard it, for her face showed no further shadow as
she ushered in Mr. Challoner, and closed the door behind him. She
had looked forward to this moment for days. To Oswald, however, it
was an unexpected excitement and his voice trembled with something
more than physical weakness as he greeted his visitor and thanked
him for his attentions.
"Doris says that you have shown me this kindness from the desire
you have to see me well again Mr. Challoner. Is this true?"
"Very true. I cannot emphasise the fact too strongly."
Oswald's eyes met his again, this time with great earnestness.
"You must have serious reasons for feeling so--reasons which I do
not quite understand. May I ask why you place such value upon a
life which, if ever useful to itself or others, has lost and lost
forever, the one delight which gave it meaning?"
It was for Mr. Challoner's voice to tremble now, as reaching out
his hand, he declared, with unmistakable feeling:
"I have no son. I have no interest left in life, outside this room
and the possibilities it contains for me. Your attachment to my
daughter has created a bond between us, Mr. Brotherson, which I
sincerely hope to see recognised by you."
Startled and deeply moved, the young man stretched out a shaking
hand towards his visitor, with the feeble but exulting cry:
"Then you do not blame me for her wretched and mysterious death.
You hold me guiltless of the misery which nerved her despairing arm?"
"Quite guiltless."
Oswald's wan and pinched features took on a beautiful expression
and Mr. Challoner no longer wondered at his daughter's choice.
"Thank God!" fell from the sick man's lips, and then there was a
silence during which their two hands met.
It was some minutes before either spoke and then it was Oswald
who said:
"I must confide to you certain facts. I honoured your daughter
and realised her position fully. Our plight was never made in
words, nor should I have presumed to advance any claim to her hand
if I had not made good my expectations, Mr. Challoner. I meant to
win both her regard and yours by acts, not words. I felt that I
had a great deal to do and I was prepared to work and wait. I loved
her--" He turned away his head and the silence which filled up the
gap, united those two hearts, as the old and young are seldom united.
But when a little later, Mr. Challoner rejoined Doris, in her little
sitting-room, he nevertheless showed a perplexity she had hoped to
see removed by this understanding with the younger Brotherson.
The cause became apparent as soon as he spoke.
"These brothers hold by each other," said he. "Oswald will hear
nothing against Orlando. He says that he has redeemed his fault.
He does not even protest that his brother's word is to be believed
in this matter. He does not seem to think that necessary. He
evidently regards Orlando's personality as speaking as truly and
satisfactorily for itself, as his own does. And I dared not
undeceive him."
"He does not know all our reasons for distrust. He has heard
nothing about the poor washerwoman."
"No, and he must not,--not for weeks. He has borne all that he can."
"His confidence in his older brother is sublime. I do not share it;
but I cannot help but respect him for it."
It was warmly said, and Mr. Challoner could not forbear casting an
anxious look at her upturned face. What he saw there made him turn
away with a sigh.
"This confidence has for me a very unhappy side," he remarked. "It
shows me Oswald's thought. He who loved her best, accepts the cruel
verdict of an unreasoning public."
Doris' large eyes burned with a weird light upon his face.
"He has not had my dream," she murmured, with all the quiet of an
unmoved conviction.
Yet as the days went by, even her manner changed towards the busy
inventor. It was hardly possible for it not to. The high stand
he took; the regard accorded him on every side; his talent; his
conversation, which was an education in itself, and, above all, his
absorption in a work daily advancing towards completion, removed
him so insensibly and yet so decidedly, from the hideous past of
tragedy with which his name, if not his honour, was associated, that,
unconsciously to herself, she gradually lost her icy air of
repulsion and lent him a more or less attentive ear, when he chose
to join their small company of an evening. The result was that he
turned so bright a side upon her that toleration merged from day to
day into admiration and memory lost itself in anticipation of the
event which was to prove him a man of men, if not one of the
world's greatest mechanical geniuses.
Meantime, Oswald was steadily improving in health, if not in spirits.
He had taken his first walk without any unfavourable results, and
Orlando decided from this that the time had come for an explanation
of his device and his requirements in regard to it. Seated together
in Oswald's room, he broached the subject thus:
"Oswald, what is your idea about what I'm making up there?"
"That it will be a success."
"I know; but its character, its use? What do you think it is?"
"I've an idea; but my idea don't fit the conditions."
"How's that?"
"The shed is too closely hemmed in. You haven't room--"
"For what?"
"To start an aeroplane."
"Yet it is certainly a device for flying."
"I supposed so; but--"
"It is an air-car with a new and valuable idea--the idea for which
the whole world has been seeking ever since the first aeroplane
found its way up from the earth. My car needs no room to start in
save that which it occupies. If it did, it would be but the
modification of a hundred others."
"Orlando!"
As Oswald thus gave expression to his surprise, their two faces were
a study: the fire of genius in the one; the light of sympathetic
understanding in the other.
"If this car, now within three days of its completion," Orlando
proceeded, "does not rise from the oval of my hangar like a bird
from its nest, and after a wide and circling flight descend again
into the self same spot without any swerving from its direct course,
then have I failed in my endeavour and must take a back seat with
the rest. But it will not fail. I'm certain of success, Oswald.
All I want just now is a sympathetic helper--you, for instance;
someone who will aid me with the final fittings and hold his peace
to all eternity if the impossible occurs and the thing proves a
failure."
"Have you such pride as that?"
"Precisely."
"So much that you cannot face failure?"
"Not when attached to my name. You can see how I feel about that
by the secrecy I have worked under. No other person living knows
what I have just communicated to you. Every part shipped here came
from different manufacturing firms; sometimes a part of a part was
all I allowed to be made in any one place. My fame, like my ship,
must rise with one bound into the air, or it must never rise at all.
It was not made for petty accomplishment, or the slow plodding of
commonplace minds. I must startle, or remain obscure. That is why
I chose this place for my venture, and you for my helper and
associate."
"You want me to ascend with you?"
"Exactly."
"At the end of three days?"
"Yes."
"Orlando, I cannot."
"You cannot? Not strong enough yet? I'll wait then,--three days
more."
"The time's too short. A month is scarcely sufficient. It would
be folly, such as you never show, to trust a nerve so undermined as
mine till time has restored its power. For an enterprise like this
you need a man of ready strength and resources; not one whose
condition you might be obliged to consider at a very critical
moment."
Orlando, balked thus at the outset, showed his displeasure.
"You do not do justice to your will. It is strong enough to carry
you through anything."
"It was."
"You can force it to act for you."
"I fear not, Orlando."
"I counted on you and you thwart me at the most critical moment of
my life."
Oswald smiled; his whole candid and generous nature bursting into
view, in one quick flash.
"Perhaps," he assented; "but you will thank me when you realise my
weakness. Another man must be found--quick, deft, secret, yet
honourably alive to the importance of the occasion and your rights
as a great original thinker and mechanician."
"Do you know such a man?"
"I don't; but there must be many such among our workmen."
"There isn't one; and I haven't time to send to Brooklyn. I
reckoned on you."
"Can you wait a month?"
"No."
"A fortnight, then?"
"No, not ten days."
Oswald looked surprised. He would like to have asked why such
precipitation was necessary, but their tone in which this ultimatum
was given was of that decisive character which admits of no argument.
He, therefore, merely looked his query. But Orlando was not one to
answer looks; besides, he had no reply for the same importunate
question urged by his own good sense. He knew that he must make
the attempt upon which his future rested soon, and without risk of
the sapping influence of lengthened suspense and weeks of waiting.
He could hold on to those two demons leagued in attack against him,
for a definite seven days, but not for an indeterminate time. If he
were to be saved from folly,--from himself--events must rush.
He, therefore, repeated his no, with increased vehemence, adding,
as he marked the reproach in his brother's eye, "I cannot wait. The
test must be made on Saturday evening next, whatever the conditions;
whatever the weather. An air-car to be serviceable must be ready to
meet lightning and tempest, and what is worse, perhaps, an
insufficient crew." Then rising, he exclaimed, with a determination
which rendered him majestic, "If help is not forthcoming, I'll do it
all myself. Nothing shall hold me back; nothing shall stop me; and
when you see me and my car rise above the treetops, you'll feel that
I have done what I could to make you forget--"
He did not need to continue. Oswald understood and flashed a
grateful look his way before saying:
"You will make the attempt at night?"
"Certainly."
"And on Saturday?"
"I've said it."
"I will run over in my mind the qualifications of such men as I
know and acquaint you with the result to-morrow."
"There are adjustments to be made. A man of accuracy is necessary."
"I will remember."
"And he must be likable. I can do nothing with a man with whom I'm
not perfectly in accord."
"I understand that."
"Good-night then." A moment of hesitancy, then, "I wish not only
yourself but Miss Scott to be present at this test. Prepare her for
the spectacle; but not yet, not till within an hour or two of the
occasion."
And with a proud smile in which flashed a significance which
startled Oswald, he gave a hurried nod and turned away.
When in an hour afterwards, Doris looked in through the open door,
she found Oswald sitting with face buried in his hands, thinking so
deeply that he did not hear her. He had sat like this, immovable
and absorbed, ever since his brother had left him.
XXXV
SILENCE--AND A KNOCK
Oswald did not succeed in finding a man to please Orlando. He
suggested one person after another to the exacting inventor, but
none were satisfactory to him and each in turn was turned down.
It is not every one we want to have share a world-wide triumph or
an ignominious defeat. And the days were passing.
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