第60章 BOOK III:THE HEART OF MAN(13)

"Oswald Brotherson!"he repeated;adding in unintelligible tones to himself -"O.B.The same initials!They are following up these initials.Poor Oswald."Then aloud:"It hardly becomes me,perhaps,to question your motives in this attempt at making my brother's acquaintance.I think I can guess them;but your labour will be wasted.Oswald's interests do not extend beyond this town;they hardly extend to me.We are strangers,almost.You will learn nothing from him on the subject which naturally engrosses you."Mr.Challoner simply bowed."I do not feel called upon,"said he,"to explain my reasons for wishing to know your brother.I will simply satisfy you upon a point which may well rouse your curiosity.

You remember that -that my daughter's last act was the writing of a letter to a little protegee of hers.Miss Scott was that protegee.

In seeking her,I came upon him.Do you require me to say more on this subject?Wait till I have seen Mr.Oswald Brotherson and then perhaps I can do so."Receiving no answer to this,Mr.Challoner turned again to the man who was the object of his deepest suspicions,to find him still in the daze of that unimaginable thought,battling with it,scoffing at it,succumbing to it and all without a word.Mr.Challoner was without clew to this struggle,but the might of it and the mystery of it,drove him in extreme agitation from the room.Though proof was lacking,though proof might never come,nothing could ever alter his belief from this moment on that Doris was right in her estimate of this man's guilt,however unsubstantial her reasoning might appear.

How far he might have been carried by this new conviction;whether he would have left the house without seeing Doris again or exchanging another word with the man whose very presence stifled him,he had no opportunity to show,for before he had taken another step,he encountered the hurrying figure of Doris,who was returning to her guests with an air of marked relief.

"He does not know that you are here,"she whispered to Mr.Challoner,as she passed him.Then,as she again confronted Orlando who hastened to dismiss his trouble at her approach,she said quite gaily,"Mr.Brotherson heard your voice,and is glad to know that you're here.He bade me give you this key and say that you would have found things in better shape if he had been in condition to superintend the removal of the boxes to the place he had prepared for you before he became ill.I was the one to do that,"she added,controlling her aversion with manifest effort."When Mr.Brotherson came to himself he asked if I had heard about any large boxes having arrived at the station shipped to his name.I said that several notices of such had come to the house.At which he requested me to see that they were carried at once to the strange looking shed he had had put up for him in the woods.I thought that they were for him,and I saw to the thing myself.Two or three others have come since and been taken to the same place.I think you will find nothing broken or disturbed;Mr.Brotherson's wishes are usually respected.""That is fortunate for me,"was the courteous reply.

But Orlando Brotherson was not himself,not at all himself as he bowed a formal adieu and past the drawn-up sentinel-like figure of Mr.Challoner,without a motion on his part or on the part of that gentleman to lighten an exit which had something in it of doom and dread presage.

XXX

CHAOS

It is not difficult to understand Mr.Challoner's feelings or even those of Doris at the moment of Mr.Brotherson's departure.But why this change in Brotherson himself?Why this sense of something new and terrible rising between him and the suddenly beclouded future?

Let us follow him to his lonely hotel-room and see if we can solve the puzzle.

But first,does he understand his own trouble?He does not seem to.

For when,his hat thrown aside,he stops,erect and frowning under the flaring gas-jet he had no recollection of lighting,his first act was to lift his hand to his head in a gesture of surprising helplessness for him,while snatches of broken sentences fell from his lips among which could be heard:

"What has come to me?Undone in an hour!Doubly undone!First by a face and then by this thought which surely the devils have whispered to me.Mr.Challoner and Oswald!What is the link between them?Great God!what is the link?Not myself?Who then or what?"Flinging himself into a chair,he buried his face in his hands.

There were two demons to fight -the first in the guise of an angel.

Doris!Unknown yesterday,unknown an hour ago;but now!Had there ever been a day -an hour -when she had not been as the very throb of his heart,the light of his eyes,and the crown or all imaginable blisses?

He was startled at his own emotion as he contemplated her image in his fancy and listened for the lost echo of the few words she had spoken -words so full of music when they referred to his brother,so hard and cold when she simply addressed himself.

This was no passing admiration of youth for a captivating woman.

This was not even the love he had given to Edith Challoner.This was something springing full-born out of nothing!a force which,for the first time in his life,made him complaisant to the natural weaknesses of man!a dream and yet a reality strong enough to blot out the past,remake the present,change the aspect of all his hopes,and outline a new fate.He did not know himself.There was nothing in his whole history to give him an understanding of such feelings as these.

Can a man be seized as it were by the hair,and swung up on the slopes of paradise or down the steeps of hell -without a forewarning,without the chance even to say whether he wished such a cataclysm in his life or no?