The Ghost Feeler (19 page)

The impression was so startling that Faxon forgot what was going on about him. He was just dimly aware of young Rainer's exclaiming: ‘Your turn, Mr Grisben!', of Mr Grisben's protesting: ‘No – no; Mr Faxon first', and of the pen's being thereupon transferred to his own hand. He received it with a deadly sense of being unable to move, or even to understand what was expected of him, till he became conscious of Mr Grisben's paternally pointing out the precise spot on which he was to leave his autograph. The effort to fix his attention and steady his hand prolonged the process of signing, and when he stood up – a strange weight of fatigue on all his limbs – the figure behind Mr Lavington's chair was gone.

Faxon felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man's exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door behind Mr Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon concluded that the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to pass out. At any rate he was gone, and with his withdrawal the strange weight was lifted. Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette, Mr Balch inscribing his name at the foot of the document, Mr Lavington – his eyes no longer on his nephew – examining a strange white-winged orchid in the vase at his elbow. Everything suddenly seemed to have grown natural and simple again, and Faxon found himself responding with a smile to the affable gesture with which his host declared: ‘And now, Mr Faxon, we'll dine.'

III

‘I wonder how I blundered into the wrong room just now; I thought you told me to take the second door to the left,' Faxon said to Frank Rainer as they followed the older men down the gallery.

‘So I did; but I probably forgot to tell you which staircase to take. Coming from your bedroom, I ought to have said the fourth door to the right. It's a puzzling house, because my uncle keeps adding to it from year to year. He built this room last summer for his modern pictures.'

Young Rainer, pausing to open another door, touched an electric button which sent a circle of light about the walls of a long room hung with canvases of the French impressionist school.

Faxon advanced, attracted by a shimmering Monet, but Rainer laid a hand on his arm.

‘He bought that last week. But come along – I'll show you all this after dinner. Or
he
will, rather – he loves it.'

‘Does he really love things?'

Rainer stared, clearly perplexed at the question. ‘Rather! Flowers and pictures especially! Haven't you noticed the flowers? I suppose you think his manner's cold: it seems so at first; but he's really awfully keen about things.'

Faxon looked quickly at the speaker. ‘Has your uncle a brother?'

‘Brother? No – never had. He and my mother were the only ones.'

‘Or any relation who – who looks like him? Who might be mistaken for him?'

‘Not that I ever heard of. Does he remind you of someone?'

‘Yes.'

‘That's queer. We'll ask him if he's got a double. Come on!'

But another picture had arrested Faxon, and some minutes elapsed before he and his young host reached the dining-room. It was a large room, with the same conventionally handsome furniture and delicately grouped flowers; and Faxon's first glance showed him that only three men were seated about the dining-table. The man who had stood behind Mr Lavington's chair was not present, and no seat awaited him.

When the young men entered, Mr Grisben was speaking, and his host, who faced the door, sat looking down at his untouched soup-plate and turning the spoon about in his small, dry hand.

‘It's pretty late to call them rumours – they were devilish close to facts when we left town this morning,' Mr Grisben was saying, with an unexpected incisiveness of tone.

Mr Lavington laid down his spoon and smiled interrogatively. ‘Oh, facts – what
are
facts? Just the way a thing happens to look at a given minute ...'

‘You haven't heard anything from town?' Mr Grisben persisted.

‘Not a syllable. So you see ... Balch, a little more of that
petite marmite
. Mr Faxon ... between Frank and Mr Grisben, please.'

The dinner progressed through a series of complicated courses, ceremoniously dispensed by a prelatical butler attended by three tall footmen, and it was evident that Mr Lavington took a certain satisfaction in the pageant. That, Faxon, reflected, was probably the joint in his armour – that and the flowers. He had changed the subject – not abruptly but firmly – when the young men entered, but Faxon perceived that it still possessed the thoughts of the two elderly visitors, and Mr Balch presently observed, in a voice that seemed to come from the last survivor down a mine-shaft: ‘If it
does
come, it will be the biggest crash since '93.'

Mr Lavington looked bored but polite. ‘Wall Street can stand crashes better than it could then. It's got a robuster constitution.'

‘Yes; but —'

‘Speaking of constitutions,' Mr Grisben intervened: ‘Frank, are you taking care of yourself?'

A flush rose to young Rainer's cheeks.

‘Why, of course! Isn't that what I'm here for?'

‘You're here about three days in a month, aren't you? And the rest of the time it's crowded restaurants and hot ballrooms in town. I thought, you were to be shipped off to New Mexico?'

‘Oh, I've got a new man who say that's rot.'

‘Well, you don't look as if your new man were right,' said Mr Grisben bluntly.

Faxon saw the lad's colour fade, and the rings of shadow deepen under his gay eyes. At the same moment his uncle turned to him with a renewed intensity of attention. There was such solicitude in Mr Lavington's gaze that it seemed almost to fling a shield between his nephew and Mr Grisben's tactless scrutiny.

‘We think Frank's a good deal better,' he began; ‘this new doctor –'

The butler, coming up, bent to whisper a word in his ear, and the communication caused a sudden change in Mr Lavington's expression. His face was naturally so colourless that it seemed not so much to pale as to fade, to dwindle and recede into something blurred and blotted out. He half rose, sat down again and sent a rigid smile about the table.

‘Will you excuse me? The telephone. Peters, go on with the dinner.' With small, precise steps he walked out of the door which one of the footmen had thrown open.

A momentary silence fell on the group; then Mr Grisben once more addressed himself to Rainer. ‘You ought to have gone, my boy; you ought to have gone.'

The anxious look returned to the youth's eyes. ‘My uncle doesn't think so, really.'

‘You're not a baby, to be always governed by your uncle's opinion. You came of age today, didn't you? Your uncle spoils you ... that's what's the matter ...'

The thrust evidently went home, for Rainer laughed, and looked down with a slight accession of colour.

‘But the doctor —'

‘Use your common sense, Frank! You had to try twenty doctors to find one to tell you what you wanted to be told.'

A look of apprehension overshadowed Rainer's gaiety. ‘Oh, come – I say! ... What would
you
do?' he stammered.

‘Pack up and jump on the first train.' Mr Grisben leaned forward and laid his hand kindly on the young man's arm. ‘Look here: my nephew, Jim Grisben, is out there ranching on a big scale. He'll take you in, and be glad to have you. You say your new doctor thinks it won't do you any good; but he doesn't pretend to say it will do you harm, does he? Well, then – give it a trial. It'll take you out of hot theatres and night restaurants, anyhow ... And all the rest of it ... Eh, Balch?'

‘Go!' said Mr Balch hollowly. ‘Go
at once
,' he added, as if a closer look at the youth's face had impressed on him the need of backing up his friend.

Young Rainer had turned ashy-pale. He tried to stiffen his mouth into a smile. ‘Do I look as bad as all that?'

Mr Grisben was helping himself to terrapin. ‘You look like the day after an earthquake,' he said.

The terrapin had encircled the table, and been deliberately enjoyed by Mr Lavington's three visitors (Rainer, Faxon noticed, left his plate untouched) before the door was thrown open to readmit their host.

Mr Lavington advanced with an air of recovered composure. He seated himself, picked up his napkin and consulted the gold-monogrammed menu. ‘No, don't bring back the fillet ... Some, terrapin, yes ...' He looked affably about the table. ‘Sorry to have deserted you, but the storm has played the deuce with the wires, and I had to wait a long time before I could get a good connection. It must be blowing up for a blizzard.'

‘Uncle Jack,' young Rainer broke out, ‘Mr Grisben's been lecturing me.'

Mr Lavington was helping himself to terrapin. ‘Ah – what about?'

He thinks I ought to have given New Mexico a show.'

‘I want him to go straight out to my nephew at Santa Paz and stay there till his next birthday.' Mr Lavington signed to the butler to hand the terrapin to Mr Grisben who, as he took a second helping, addressed himself again to Rainer. ‘Jim's in New York now, and going back the day after tomorrow in Olyphant's private car. I'll ask Olyphant to squeeze you in if you'll go. And when you've been out there a week or two, in the saddle all day and sleeping nine hours a night, I suspect you won't think much of the doctor who prescribed New York.'

Faxon spoke up, he knew not why. ‘I was out there once: it's a splendid life. I saw a fellow – oh, a really
bad
case – who'd been simply made over by it.'

‘It
does
sound jolly,' Rainer laughed, a sudden eagerness in his tone.

His uncle looked at him gently. ‘Perhaps Grisben's right. It's an opportunity —'

Faxon glanced up with a start: the figure dimly perceived in the study was now more visibly and tangibly planted behind Mr Lavington's chair.

‘That's right, Frank: you see your uncle approves. And the trip out there with Olyphant isn't a thing to be missed. So drop a few dozen dinners and be at the Grand Central the day after tomorrow at five.'

Mr Grisben's pleasant grey eye sought corroboration of his host, and Faxon, in a cold anguish of suspense, continued to watch him as he turned his glance on Mr Lavington. One could not look at Lavington without seeing the presence at his back, and it was clear that, the next minute, some change in Mr Grisben's expression must give his watcher a clue.

But Mr Grisben's expression did not change: the gaze he fixed on his host remained unperturbed, and the clue he gave was the startling one of not seeming to see the other figure.

Faxon's first impulse was to look away, to look anywhere else, to resort again to the champagne glass the watchful butler had already brimmed; but some fatal attraction, at war in him with an overwhelming physical resistance, held his eyes upon the spot they feared.

The figure was still standing, more distinctly, and therefore more resembling, at Mr Lavington's back; and while the latter continued to gaze affectionately at his nephew, his counterpart, as before, fixed young Rainer with eyes of deadly menace.

Faxon, with what felt like an actual wrench of the muscles, dragged his own eyes from the sight to scan the other countenances about the able; but not one revealed the least consciousness of what he saw, and a sense of mortal isolation sank upon him.

‘It's worth considering, certainly —' he heard Mr Lavington continue; and as Rainer's face lit up, the face behind his uncle's chair seemed to gather into its look all the fierce weariness of old unsatisfied hates. That was the thing that, as the minutes laboured by, Faxon was becoming most conscious of. The watcher behind the chair was no longer merely malevolent: he had grown suddenly, unutterably tired. His hatred seemed to well up out of the very depths of balked effort and thwarted hopes, and the fact made him more pitiable, and yet more dire.

Faxon's look reverted to Mr Lavington, as if to surprise in him a corresponding change. At first none was visible: his pinched smile was screwed to his blank face like a gas-light to a whitewashed wall. Then the fixity of the smile became ominous: Faxon saw that its wearer was afraid to let it go. It was evident that Mr Lavington was unutterably tired, too, and the discovery sent a colder current through Faxon's veins. Looking down at his untouched plate, he caught the soliciting twinkle of the champagne glass; but the sight of the wine turned him sick.

‘Well, we'll go into the details presently,' he heard Mr Lavington say, still on the question of his nephew's future. ‘Let's have a cigar first. No – not here, Peters.' He turned his smile on Faxon. ‘When we've had coffee I want to show you my pictures.'

‘Oh, by the way, Uncle Jack – Mr Faxon wants to know if you've got a double?'

‘A double?' Mr Lavington, still smiling, continued to address himself to his guest. ‘Not that I know of. Have you seen one, Mr Faxon?'