Jimmy Quixote Part 34

The porter told him, with a strange sort of shrug, that Mr. Larrance was at home; it seemed, as the man somewhat disdainfully put it, that Mr.

Larrance was generally at home. Not understanding, Anthony Ditchburn climbed the stairs, and knocked at the door; after an extraordinary delay the door was opened, and Jimmy stood there, blinking out at him.

A new Jimmy. A Jimmy with no smartness about him, as it seemed in that first casual glance--a reckless-looking Jimmy, with unkempt hair and unbrushed clothes; moreover, a Jimmy who swayed a little as he stood.

"Good-afternoon, my dear friend," said Anthony, hesitating on the landing. "It is long since I have seen you. I trust you are well."

"No--I'm not; but that doesn't concern you," retorted Jimmy. "You can come in if you like."

It seemed a new sort of room to which Anthony was introduced--not the old hard-working place he had known before. The desk was an untidy wilderness of papers--and yet not the untidy wilderness of the man who works. This was the room of a drone; of a man who slept the days away, and had no future to look to. Anthony Ditchburn saw more than ever, as he thought, that this was an unhappy story which he was to set right; on the one side of the picture--the woman who wept, and who wrote letters that were never sent; on the other side--the man who sat here, gloomy and miserable, and probably longing for the woman he loved and was too proud to approach. This was going to be quite an easy matter, Anthony thought--and the easy reward to follow.

Jimmy had gone back into his rooms, and had dropped in a listless att.i.tude into a chair. Anthony Ditchburn, glancing about, saw a bottle and gla.s.s on the table, and smacked his lips audibly. The younger man turned towards him, and after looking at him sourly for a moment, nodded at the bottle.

"You'll find a gla.s.s over there; help yourself," he said.

Anthony lost no time in doing so; he mixed a generous measure, and raised his gla.s.s to his host. "To your good fortune!" he exclaimed.

Jimmy laughed bitterly; then went to the table and mixed for himself.

"Good fortune?" he said, as he drank; "my good fortune has gone long ago. You don't know what you're talking about, Ditchburn, when you talk so glibly of good fortune. I was lucky once," he went on more excitedly, and seeming scarcely to realise to whom he talked, so that he might have a listener. "I had the world at my feet; I was envied by everyone; the game was in my hands. Look at me now!"

He spread out his hands and looked about him; his eyes were bloodshot and savage. Tears of bitterness sprang into them now, and he turned away his head. Mr. Anthony Ditchburn, feeling that the right moment had arrived, began warily to unfold his delicate plot.

"I have had the pleasure, during the past few days, of seeing Mrs.

Larrance--your wife," he said. "Sweet girl--I wish I could have seen her happier!"

He stopped on glancing at Jimmy; the young man's eyes were deadly. "So you come from her--do you?" he asked; then, without giving Anthony time to reply, he went on more quickly: "You bring something of a message from her, I suppose? I don't want to hear it; I won't hear it."

Anthony Ditchburn, somewhat taken aback, hesitatingly drew the packet from his pocket, and held it out. "I bring no actual message from her,"

he began; "but I have some letters here----"

"I won't read them."

"Letters which were never intended to be sent, I believe; quite a number of them--all addressed to you. I saw her weeping once when she mentioned your name to the child; I was quite moved, I a.s.sure you."

"Why did you bring them to me?" asked Jimmy. "They are nothing to me."

Anthony Ditchburn cleared his throat for an oration "I bring them," he said, "in the faint hope that it may be my privilege to bring together two young people who are most unhappily estranged. I am an old man, and the world has not used me well; but I would like to think"--Anthony got out a doubtful handkerchief, and dabbed at his eyes--"I would really like to think, as I go down the desolate hill of life, that I have done such a thing as this. You live apart--why? You refuse to see her--again, why?"

"Give me the letters." Jimmy held out his hand for them; s.n.a.t.c.hed them from the hand of the old man, and flung them into a corner. "Sit down,"

he said roughly, "and listen to what I have to say."

Again it seemed as though he must talk to someone; again it seemed that this old man, derelict though he was, would serve as well as any other.

Ditchburn was not particularly interested, because he saw, in the att.i.tude of the younger man, his own chances slipping away; this was not the man who would be likely to reward the amba.s.sador in such a business as this. But he sat down, and listened with something of an air of attention; also, he seized the opportunity to replenish his gla.s.s.

"I was a happy man before I married--before I was tricked into marriage," he said. "I might have married in such a fas.h.i.+on as would have gained for me a real helpmate; someone who understood me--someone who would have lifted me up--inspired me. But circ.u.mstances I can't explain prevented that; she went (I mean the woman I really loved) into the arms of another man. They were married last week, and that finished me--did for me completely."

"There seems to have been a blunder somewhere certainly," broke in Anthony, a little helplessly.

"Blunder? I should think there has been a blunder," cried Jimmy, with a laugh. "I set out so well; I meant to do such big things; and here, for ever hung round my neck like a millstone, are a wife and child who are nothing to me, and can be nothing. She drags me down, and keeps me down; my work is not what it was; it will never be anything again. I can't write; I can't think; I fly to that"--he flung out a hand towards the bottle on the table--"and so get some relief. That's poor Jimmy Larrance--who married a woman out of pity!"

Anthony Ditchburn coughed again, and shook his head; it seemed the only thing he could do. "Sad--inexpressibly sad," he murmured.

"Sad, indeed," said Jimmy. "But what does it matter? Already people are beginning to say that the work I've done lately--such as it is--isn't what it was; the grip has gone out of it. They begin to hint at failure; and you know how I started a year or two ago--eh?"

"I know--I remember well," murmured Anthony, with another melancholy shake of the head.

"Exactly; even you can be sorry for me. Take another drink; it's the best stuff in the world for a heartache--the best medicine for a failure. You're a failure--aren't you, old Ditchburn; and I'm another; we can shake hands on that!"

Anthony Ditchburn went away that evening--a little unsteadily as to the stairs--but the richer by five pounds. Here was a gold mine indeed; here was a man who, kept in a proper condition of insobriety, might spell luxury for Anthony Ditchburn for some time to come. Only one regret the old man had; that he had given up the letters; he might have done something better with those in the future.

Let it not be supposed for a moment that this att.i.tude on the part of Jimmy had been a mere thing of a moment; it had been steadily growing.

He was of that temperament that must brood, and he had had loneliness enough wherein to brood. It had begun on a particular day when Alice had come to him, to demand weakly and tearfully the meaning of a certain letter he had sent her.

He had had to tell her something; he had told her but half. To his credit let it be put that he breathed no word against Moira; it had merely been a mistaken marriage, and they had separated immediately. To his credit, also, be it written that on reflection he decided not to pose in any heroic att.i.tude before Alice; simply as the pathetic victim of a blunder. He had not loved Moira, he had said; he had felt pity for her loneliness, and had married her; that was all. And he remembered now the tears in the blue eyes, and the pathetic quiver in the voice, what time Alice had told him that her heart was breaking.

Nevertheless, she had seen Ashby Feak for a few moments that night, and Ashby Feak had had the good sense not to press his claims at that time.

A day or two later he had met her, apparently by chance, and from that time all was smooth sailing. She had written a letter to Jimmy--the letter of an old friend, who dwelt upon the past, but must make the best of the present; and she had spoken with tenderness of the great kindness of Mr. Ashby Feak. And after that--with a decent interval--the wedding.

Once or twice, in that time of his great loneliness, Jimmy had tried to work; had set himself resolutely to it, determining that he would show everyone the stuff that was in him. But always before him rose two pictures--the one of the woman he believed he loved, and whom he had last seen with tears in her blue eyes; the other of the woman to whom he was tied, living her life quietly and happily, as he believed, in the country. And at the thought of those two pictures the pen fell from his hand, and he sought the old consolation.

There cannot be set down here all the incidents of that time--all the slow processes of neglect and carelessness--all the constant telling himself, day after day, that there was nothing for which he need strive.

Only in the course of many months certain pictures stand out, and may be recorded.

A day that arrived when, out of some curious hazy dream, he woke to find that he had no money--or, at best, not sufficient for the demands upon him. Which, in process of time, led to his abandonment of those comfortable rooms of his, and a return to something like those he had once occupied in a small court in the neighbourhood of Holborn. That was necessary, for economic reasons; but it did but add to his bitterness against what he regarded as the cause of it all.

Another day--set much further on in the record--when a play that had been commissioned, and of which he had had great hopes, was curtly returned to him, with the intimation that he had failed to work out his own idea at all adequately; in a savage temper he ripped the pages across and across, and flung them on the fire.

A day when he woke out of black night, as it were, and saw in his own diseased and tortured mind a swift and sudden ending to his troubles.

Somewhere down in the quiet and peaceful country there was a smiling, happy, contented woman, with a child that was not his, and that woman was the very root of all his troubles; but for her he would have been a great man. There might be an end; some dream that had belonged to the black night suggested what that end should be. He would go down and see her.

In some blind, stumbling, halting fas.h.i.+on he got to the place; was turned back, again and again, on his way by one circ.u.mstance and another; finally, only reaching her late at night. And then a savage Jimmy--hungry and forlorn--but with a purpose staring out of his bloodshot eyes. That picture had been a horrible one, but he remembered it often and often.

After endless journeyings, he seemed to have found himself alone in a room with her. It seemed a pretty room, with dainty things about it such as might properly indicate the presence of a dainty woman. He remembered that she had come down from some upper room, singing; remembered that she had stopped at sight of him as she came in; and yet had spoken calmly and gently to him, while her dark eyes were fixed on his.

There had been no word of reproach from her, in spite of all he had said. His words had stung and lashed her; he had not spared her; he had set the thing fully and brutally before her. She was dragging him down; she and the child were a burden upon him. He had stretched out pa.s.sionate hands to call attention to himself; had begged bitterly that she would note the change in him; and then had cursed her for the cause of it all. And she had looked at him, white faced but dry eyed, and had told him that he did not mean what he said.

"I mean to find some way of escape--or you shall find one," he had said, speaking as it seemed words that he remembered had come out of the black night through which he had pa.s.sed to this hour. "There must be a way; there shall be a way. What are you to me? In all your life has there been no man you have loved?"

Her unfaltering gaze did not change even at that; only her face flushed a little. "Yes, Jimmy," she had said in a whisper; and still he had not understood.

The end of that picture seemed to be, so far as he could remember, that she stood straight and firm and fine before him, and that he had her horribly by the throat. And still her eyes burnt into his; and still, while he muttered that there was a way, and that this might be the way, and that he could kill her, she looked steadily at him, and smiled.

"Yes--kill me," she had breathed; "I shall not flinch from you. That might be the best thing, after all--at your hands."

And he had got away, and had gone out into the darkness; with a notion in his head that she was calling after him as he ran and stumbled to get away from the house.

Then black darkness again--a darkness through which figures flitted here and there; and men came, and talked to him, and left him; men who laughed, or men who drank, or men who clapped him on the shoulder, and strove to advise him. And then all the figures merging impossibly, as it seemed, into the one figure of Moira. Moira flitting about his rooms, softly putting things straight; Moira, with grave eyes, looking into his, and with lips that smiled. And for a time that dream did not fade.

Curiously, too, it seemed good and restful to have her there; broken thing though he was, he yet was able to realise that. Not that he could tell exactly from whence she came, or where she went when each day was ended; sufficient for him then that she was there; that he heard her voice speaking to him; that he could watch her moving about the room.