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Anna Katharine Green >> Initials Only
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Orlando Brotherson has accomplished his task. He has invented a
mechanism which can send an air-car straight up from its mooring
place. As the three watchers realise this, Oswald utters a cry
of triumph, and Doris throws herself into Mr. Challoner's arms.
Then they all stand transfixed again, waiting for a descent which
may never come.
But hark! a new sound, mingling its clatter with all the others.
It is the rain. Quick, maddening, drenching, it comes; enveloping
them in wet in a moment. Can they hold their faces up against it?
And the wind! Surely it must toss that aerial messenger before
it and fling it back to earth, a broken and despised toy.
"Orlando?" went up in a shriek. "Orlando?" Oh, for a ray of light
in those far-off heavens For a lull in the tremendous sounds
shivering the heavens and shaking the earth! But the tempest rages
on, and they can only wait, five minutes, ten minutes, looking,
hoping, fearing, without thought of self and almost without thought
of each other, till suddenly as it had come, the rain ceases and
the wind, with one final wail of rage and defeat, rushes away into
the west, leaving behind it a sudden silence which, to their
terrified hearts, seems almost more dreadful to bear than the
accumulated noises of the moment just gone.
Orlando was in that shout of natural forces, but he is not in this
stillness. They look aloft, but the heavens are void. Emptiness
is where life was. Oswald begins to sway, and Doris, remembering
him now and him only, has thrown her strong young arm about him,
when--What is this sound they hear high up, high up, in the rapidly
clearing vault of the heavens! A throb--a steady pant,--drawing
near and yet nearer,--entering the circlet of great branches over
their heads--descending, slowly descending,--till they catch
another glimpse of those hazy outlines which had no sooner taken
shape than the car disappeared from their sight within the
elliptical wall open to receive it.
It had survived the gale! It has re-entered its haven, and that,
too, without colliding with aught around or any shock to those
within, just as Orlando had promised; and the world was henceforth
his! Hail to Orlando Brotherson!
Oswald could hardly restrain his mad joy and enthusiasm. Bounding
to the door separating him from this conqueror of almost invincible
forces, he pounded it with impatient fist.
"Let me in!" he cried. "You've done the trick, Orlando, you've
done the trick."
"Yes, I have satisfied myself," came back in studied self-control
from the other side of the door; and with a quick turning of the
lock, Orlando stood before them.
They never forgot him as he looked at that moment. He was drenched,
battered, palpitating with excitement; but the majesty of success
was in his eye and in the bearing of his incomparable figure.
As Oswald bounded towards him, he reached out his hand, but his
glance was for Doris.
"Yes," he went on, in tones of suppressed elation, "there's no flaw
in my triumph. I have done all that I set out to do. Now--"
Why did he stop and look hurriedly back into the hangar? He had
remembered Sweetwater. Sweetwater, who at that moment was stepping
carefully from his seat in some remote portion of the car. The
triumph was not complete. He had meant--
But there his thought stopped. Nothing of evil, nothing even of
regret should mar his great hour. He was a conqueror, and it was
for him now to reap the joy of conquest.
XXXVIII
NIGHT
Three days had passed, and Orlando Brotherson sat in his room at
the hotel before a table laden with telegrams, letters and marked
newspapers. The news of his achievement had gone abroad, and Derby
was, for the moment, the centre of interest for two continents.
His success was an established fact. The second trial which he
had made with his car, this time with the whole town gathered
together in the streets as witnesses, had proved not only the
reliability of its mechanism, but the great advantages which it
possessed for a direct flight to any given point. Already he saw
Fortune beckoning to him in the shape of an unconditional offer of
money from a first-class source; and better still,--for he was a
man of untiring energy and boundless resource--that opportunity
for new and enlarged effort which comes with the recognition of
one's exceptional powers.
All this was his and more. A sweeter hope, a more enduring joy
had followed hard upon gratified ambition. Doris had smiled on him;
--Doris! She had caught the contagion of the universal enthusiasm
and had given him her first ungrudging token of approval. It had
altered his whole outlook on life in an instant, for there was an
eagerness in this demonstration which proclaimed the relieved heart.
She no longer trusted either appearances or her dream. He had
succeeded in conquering her doubts by the very force of his
personality, and the shadow which had hitherto darkened their
intercourse had melted quite away. She was ready to take his
word now and Oswald's, after which the rest must follow. Love does
not lag far behind an ardent admiration.
Fame! Fortune! Love! What more could a man desire? What more
could this man, with his strenuous past and an unlimited capacity
for an enlarged future, ask from fate than this. Yet, as he bends
over his letters, fingering some, but reading none beyond a line
or two, he betrays but a passing elation, and hardly lifts his head
when a burst of loud acclaim comes ringing up to his window from
some ardent passer-by: "Hurrah for Brotherson! He has put our town
on the map!"
Why this despondency? Have those two demons seized him again? It
would seem so and with new and overmastering fury. After the hour
of triumph comes the hour of reckoning. Orlando Brotherson in his
hour of proud attainment stands naked before his own soul's tribunal
and the pleader is dumb and the judge inexorable. There is but one
Witness to such struggles; but one eye to note the waste and
desolation of the devastated soul, when the storm is over past.
Orlando Brotherson has succumbed; the attack was too keen, his
forces too shaken. But as the heavy minutes pass, he slowly
re-gathers his strength and rises, in the end, a conqueror.
Nevertheless, he knows, even in that moment of regained command,
that the peace he had thus bought with strain and stress is but
momentary; that the battle is on for life: that the days which to
other eyes would carry a sense of brilliancy--days teeming with
work and outward satisfaction--would hold within their hidden
depths a brooding uncertainty which would rob applause of its music
and even overshadow the angel face of Love.
He quailed at the prospect, materialist though he was. The days
--the interminable days! In his unbroken strength and the glare
of the noonday sun, he forgot to take account of the nights looming
in black and endless procession before him. It was from the day
phantom he shrank, and not from the ghoul which works in the
darkness and makes a grave of the heart while happier mortals sleep.
And the former terror seemed formidable enough to him in this his
hour of startling realisation, even if he had freed himself for
the nonce from its controlling power. To escape all further
contemplation of it he would work. These letters deserved
attention. He would carry them to Oswald, and in their
consideration find distraction for the rest of the day, at least.
Oswald was a good fellow. If pleasure were to be gotten from these
tokens of good-will, he should have his share of it. A gleam of
Oswald's old spirit in Oswald's once bright eye, would go far
towards throttling one of those demons whose talons he had just
released from his throat; and if Doris responded too, he would
deserve his fate, if he did not succeed in gaining that mastery
of himself which would make such hours as these but episodes in
a life big with interest and potent with great emotions.
Rising with a resolute air, he made a bundle of his papers and,
with them in hand, passed out of his room and down the hotel stairs.
A man stood directly in his way, as he made for the front door.
It was Mr. Challoner.
Courtesy demanded some show of recognition between them, and
Brotherson was passing with his usual cold bow, when a sudden
impulse led him to pause and meet the other's eye, with the
sarcastic remark:
"You have expressed, or so I have been told, some surprise at my
choice of mechanician. A man of varied accomplishments, Mr.
Challoner, but one for whom I have no further use. If, therefore,
you wish to call off your watch-dog, you are at liberty to do so.
I hardly think he can be serviceable to either of us much longer."
The older gentleman hesitated, seeking possibly for composure,
and when he answered it was not only without irony but with a
certain forced respect:
"Mr. Sweetwater has just left for New York, Mr. Brotherson. He
will carry with him, no doubt, the full particulars of your great
success."
Orlando bowed, this time with distinguished grace. Not a flicker
of relief had disturbed the calm serenity of his aspect, yet when
a moment later, he stepped among his shouting admirers in the
street, his air and glance betrayed a bounding joy for which
another source must be found than that of gratified pride. A
chain had slipped from his spirit, and though the people shrank a
little, even while they cheered, it was rather from awe of his
bearing and the recognition of that sense of apartness which
underlay his smile than from any perception of the man's real
nature or of the awesome purpose which at that moment exalted
it. But had they known--could they have seen into this
tumultuous heart--what a silence would have settled upon these
noisy streets; and in what terror and soul-confusion would each
man have slunk away from his fellows into the quiet and solitude
of his own home.
Brotherson himself was not without a sense of the incongruity
underlying this ovation; for, as he slowly worked himself along,
the brightness of his look became dimmed with a tinge of sarcasm
which in its turn gave way to an expression of extreme melancholy
--both quite unbefitting the hero of the hour in the first flush
of his new-born glory. Had he seen Doris' youthful figure emerge
for a moment from the vine-hung porch he was approaching, bringing
with it some doubt of the reception awaiting him? Possibly, for
he made a stand before he reached the house, and sent his followers
back; after which he advanced with an unhurrying step, so that
several minutes elapsed before he finally drew up before Mr. Scott's
door and entered through the now empty porch into his brother's
sitting-room.
He had meant to see Doris first, but his mind had changed. If all
passed off well between himself and Oswald, if he found his brother
responsive and wide-awake to the interests and necessities of the
hour, he might forego his interview with her till he felt better
prepared to meet it. For call it cowardice or simply a reasonable
precaution, any delay seemed preferable to him in his present mood
of discouragement, to that final casting of the die upon which hung
so many and such tremendous issues. It was the first moment of real
halt in his whole tumultuous life! Never, as daring experimentalist
or agitator, had he shrunk from danger seen or unseen or from threat
uttered or unuttered, as he shrank from this young girl's no; and
something of the dread he had felt lest he should encounter her
unaware in the hall and so be led on to speak when his own judgment
bade him be silent, darkened his features as he entered his brother's
presence.
But Oswald was sunk in a bitter revery of his own, and took no heed
of these signs of depression. In the re-action following these days
of great excitement, the past had re-asserted itself, and all was
gloom in his once generous soul. This, Orlando had time to perceive,
quick as the change came when his brother really realised who his
visitor was. The glad "Orlando!" and the forced smile did not
deceive him, and his voice quavered a trifle as he held out his
packet with the words:
"I have come to show you what the world says of my invention. We
will soon be great men," he emphasised, as Oswald opened the letters.
"Money has been offered me and--Read! read!" he urged, with an
unconscious dictatorialness, as Oswald paused in his task. "See
what the fates have prepared for us; for you shall share all my
honours, as you will from this day share my work and enter into all
my experiments. Cannot you enthuse a little bit over it? Doesn't
the prospect contain any allurement for you? Would you rather stay
locked up in this petty town--"
"Yes; or--die. Don't look like that, Orlando. It was a cowardly
speech and I ask your pardon. I'm hardly fit to talk to-day.
Edith--"
Orlando frowned.
"Not that name!" he harshly interrupted. "You must not hamper your
life with useless memories. That dream of yours may be sacred, but
it belongs to the past, and a great reality confronts you. When you
have fully recovered your health, your own manhood will rebel at a
weakness unworthy one of our name. Rouse yourself, Oswald. Take
account of our prospects. Give me your hand and say, 'Life holds
something for me yet. I have a brother who needs me if I do not
need him. Together, we can prove ourselves invincible and wrench
fame and fortune from the world.'"
But the hand he reached for did not rise at his command, though
Oswald started erect and faced him with manly earnestness.
"I should have to think long and deeply," he said, "before I took
upon myself responsibilities like these. I am broken in mind and
heart, Orlando, and must remain so till God mercifully delivers me.
I should be a poor assistant to you--a drag, rather than a help.
Deeply as I deplore it, hard as it may be for one of your
temperament to understand so complete an overthrow, I yet must
acknowledge my condition and pray you not to count upon me in any
plans you may form. I know how this looks--I know that as your
brother and truest admirer, I should respond, and respond strongly,
to such overtures as these, but the motive for achievement is gone.
She was my all; and while I might work, it would be mechanically.
The lift, the elevating thought is gone."
Orlando stood a moment studying his brother's face; then he turned
shortly about and walked the length of the room. When he came back,
he took up his stand again directly before Oswald, and asked, with
a new note in his voice:
"Did you love Edith Challoner so much as that?"
A glance from Oswald's eye, sadder than any tear.
"So that you cannot be reconciled?"
A gesture. Oswald's words were always few.
Orlando's frown deepened.
"Such grief I partly understand," said he. "But time will cure it.
Some day another lovely face--"
"We'll not talk of that, Orlando."
"No, we'll not talk of that," acquiesced the inventor, walking away
again, this time to the window. "For you there's but one woman;
--and she's a memory."
"Killed!" broke from his brother's lips. "Slain by her own hand
under an impulse of wildness and terror! Can I ever forget that?
Do not expect it, Orlando."
"Then you do blame me?" Orlando turned and was looking full at
Oswald.
"I blame your unreasonableness and your overweening pride."
Orlando stood a moment, then moved towards the door. The heaviness
of his step smote upon Oswald's ear and caused him to exclaim:
"Forgive me, Orlando." But the other cut him short with an
imperative:
"Thanks for your candour! If her spirit is destined to stand like
an immovable shadow between you and me, you do right to warn me.
But this interview must end all allusion to the subject. I will
seek and find another man to share my fortunes; (as he said this
he approached suddenly, and took his papers from the other's hand)
or--" Here he hastily retraced his steps to the door which he
softly opened. "Or" he repeated--But though Oswald listened for
the rest, it did not come. While he waited, the other had given
him one deeply concentrated look and passed out.
No heartfelt understanding was possible between these two men.
Crossing the hall, Orlando knocked at the door of Doris' little
sitting-room.
No answer, yet she was there. He knew it in every throbbing fibre
of his body. She was there and quite aware of his presence; of
this he felt sure; yet she did not bid him enter. Should he knock
again? Never! but he would not quit the threshold, not if she
kept him waiting there for hours. Perhaps she realised this.
Perhaps she had meant to open the door to him from the very first,
who can tell? What avails is that she did ultimately open it, and
he, meeting her soft eye, wished from his very heart that his
impulse had led him another way, even if that way had been to the
edge of the precipice--and over.
For the face he looked upon was serene, and there was no serenity
in him; rather a confusion of unloosed passions fearful of barrier
and yearning tumultuously for freedom. But, whatever his revolt,
the secret revolt which makes no show in look or movement, he kept
his ground and forced a smile of greeting. If her face was quiet,
it was also lovely;--too lovely, he felt, for a man to leave it,
whatever might come of his lingering.
Nothing in all his life had ever affected him like it. For him
there was no other woman in the past, the present or the future,
and, realising this--taking in to the full what her affection and
her trust might be to him in those fearsome days to come, he so
dreaded a rebuff--he, who had been the courted of women and the
admired of men ever since he could remember,--that he failed to
respond to her welcome and the simple congratulations she felt
forced to repeat. He could neither speak the commonplace, nor
listen to it. This was his crucial hour. He must find support
here, or yield hopelessly to the maelstrom in whose whirl he was
caught.
She saw his excitement and faltered back a step--a move which she
regretted the next minute, for he took advantage of it to enter and
close behind him the door which she would never have shut of her
own accord. Then he spoke, abruptly, passionately, but in those
golden tones which no emotion could render other than alluring:
"I am an unhappy man, Miss Scott. I see that my presence here is
not welcome, yet am sure that it would be so if it were not for a
prejudice which your generous nature should be the first to cast
aside, in face of the outspoken confidence of my brother: Oswald.
Doris, little Doris, I love you. I have loved you from the moment
of our first meeting. Not to many men is it given to find his
heart so late, and when he does, it is for his whole life; no
second passion can follow it. I know that I am premature in saying
this; that you are not prepared to hear such words from me and that
it might be wiser for me to withhold them, but I must leave Derby
soon, and I cannot go until I know whether there is the least hope
that you will yet lend a light to my career or whether that career
must burn itself to ashes at your feet. Oswald--nay, hear me out
--Oswald lives in his memories; but I must have an active hope
--a tangible expectation--if I am to be the man I was meant to be.
Will you, then, coldly dismiss me, or will you let my whole future
life prove to you the innocence of my past? I will not hasten
anything; all I ask is some indulgence. Time will do the rest."
"Impossible," she murmured.
But that was a word for which he had no ear. He saw that she was
moved, unexpectedly so; that while her eyes wandered restlessly at
times towards the door, they ever came back in girlish wonder, if
not fascination, to his face, emboldening him so that he ventured
at last, to add:
"Doris, little Doris, I will teach you a marvellous lesson, if you
will only turn your dainty ear my way. Love such as mine carries
infinite treasure with it. Will you have that treasure heaped,
piled before your feet? Your lips say no, but your eyes--the
truest eyes I ever saw--whisper a different language. The day will
come when you will find your joy in the breast of him you are now
afraid to trust." And not waiting for disclaimer or even a glance
of reproach from the eyes he had so wilfully misread, he withdrew
with a movement as abrupt as that with which he had entered.
Why, then, with the memory of this exultant hour to fend off all
shadows, did the midnight find him in his solitary hangar in the
moonlit woods, a deeply desponding figure again. Beside him, swung
the huge machine which represented a life of power and luxury; but
he no longer saw it. It called to him with many a creak and quiet
snap,--sounds to start his blood and fire his eye a week--nay, a
day ago. But he was deaf to this music now; the call went unheeded;
the future had no further meaning, for him, nor did he know or
think whether he sat in light or in darkness; whether the woods
were silent about him, or panting with life and sound. His demon
had gripped him again and the final battle was on. There would
never be another. Mighty as he felt himself to be, there were
limits even to his capacity for endurance. He could sustain no
further conflict. How then would it end? He never had a doubt
himself! Yet he sat there.
Around him in the forest, the night owls screeched and innumerable
small things without a name, skurried from lair to lair.
He heard them not.
Above, the moon rode, flecking the deepest shadows with the silver
from her half-turned urn, but none of the soft and healing drops
fell upon him. Nature was no longer a goddess, but an avenger;
light a revealer, not a solace. Darkness the only boon.
Nor had time a meaning. From early eve to early morn he sat there
and knew not if it were one hour or twelve. Earth was his no longer.
He roused, when the sun made everything light about him, but he did
not think about it. He rose, but was not conscious that he rose.
He unlocked the door and stepped out into the forest; but he could
never remember doing this. He only knew later that he had been in
the woods and now was in his room at the hotel; all the rest was
phantasmagoria, agony and defeat.
He had crossed the Rubicon of this world's hopes and fears, but he
had been unconscious of the passage.
XXXIX
THE AVENGER
"Dear Mr. Challoner:
"With every apology for the intrusion, may I request
a few minutes of private conversation with you this evening
at seven o'clock? Let it be in your own room.
"Yours truly,
"ORLANDO BROTHERSON."
Mr. Challoner had been called upon to face many difficult and
heartrending duties since the blow which had desolated his home
fell upon him.
But from none of them had he shrunk as he did from the interview
thus demanded. He had supposed himself rid of this man. He had
dismissed him from his life when he had dismissed Sweetwater. His
face, accordingly, wore anything but a propitiatory look, when
promptly at the hour of seven, Orlando Brotherson entered his
apartments.
His pleasure or his displeasure was, however, a matter of small
consequence to his self-invited visitor. He had come there with a
set purpose, and nothing in heaven or earth could deter him from it
now. Declining the offer of a seat, with the slightest of
acknowledgments in the way of a bow, he took a careful survey of
the room before saying:
"Are we alone, Mr. Challoner, or is that man Sweetwater lurking
somewhere within hearing?"
"Mr. Sweetwater is gone, as I had the honour of telling you
yesterday," was the somewhat stiff reply. "There are no witnesses
to this conference, if that is what you wish to know."
"Thank you, but you will pardon my insistence if I request the
privilege of closing that door." He pointed to the one communicating
with the bedroom. "The information I have to give you is not such
as I am willing to have shared, at least for the present."
"You may close the door," said Mr. Challoner coldly. "But is it
necessary for you to give me the information you mention, to-night?
If it is of such a nature that you cannot accord me the privilege of
sharing it, as yet, with others, why not spare me till you can? I
have gone through much, Mr. Brotherson."
"You have," came in steady assent as the man thus addressed stepped
to the door he had indicated and quietly closed it. "But," he
continued, as he crossed back to his former position, "would it be
easier for you to go through the night now in anticipation of what
I have to reveal than to hear it at once from my lips while I am in
the mood to speak?"
The answer was slow in coming. The courage which had upheld this
rapidly aging man through so many trying interviews, seemed
inadequate for the test put so cruelly upon it. He faltered and
sank heavily into a chair, while the stern man watching him, gave
no signs of responsive sympathy or even interest, only a patient
and icy-tempered resolve.
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