“My father whispered to me: ‘Take no notice, boy! Walk straight on,’ and in a moment dived into the silence of the street opposite. I turned my head after we had travelled a few yards in our new direction and I saw the man with the medals at the angle of the street peering after us as if he were undecided whether to follow us or not. There the incident ended, but it was—well—significant, wasn’t it?”
Mr. Ferguson was distinctly uncomfortable. A pair of very steady and watchful grey eyes were fixed upon his. He was being cross-examined and not clumsily, and by a boy; and all of this he fretfully resented. To do the cross-examining was his function in life, not the other fellow’s. Besides, how was he to answer that word significant? Such a good word! For it opened no glimpses of the questioner’s point of view and was a trap for the questioned.
Paul suddenly smiled, and Mr. Ferguson was more perplexed than ever. The boy was not obtuse—that was clear. It was no less clear, then, that he attached some quite special significance of his own invention to the incident he had related. Monsieur Ravenel was in hiding—that’s what the incident signified. How had Paul missed it? What strange amulet was he wearing that saved him from the desolating truth?
“Did you ever read ‘Balaustion’s Adventure’?” Paul inquired, and Mr. Ferguson jumped.
“I wish you wouldn’t spring from one subject to another like that,” he answered, testily.
“Well, then, I did. I used it as a crib for the Alcestis when I was at school.”
“But the translation of the Alcestis isn’t the whole of the poem, is it? The Alcestis makes things pretty black for Admetus, doesn’t it? You’d call him a bit of a rotter, wouldn’t you? That is, if you take the first surface meaning of the play. But Balaustion found another meaning underneath which transfigures Admetus, turns the black to white. Well, humbly, but just as confidently, I look underneath the first obvious meaning of what I told you. That’s disgrace, isn’t it? Let’s be frank about it! A man in disgrace shunning his friends! There’s the surface reading. And there’s no other—except mine.”
“Let me hear it,” said Mr. Ferguson quickly. He returned to the chair at his table. Here might be, after all, a pleasant way out of this disconcerting interview. “Will you smoke?” he asked, and he held out a tin of cigarettes to his visitor.