It was really, then, a triumph for my ancestors that I did not throw myself on my knees beside her chair--the true romantic attitude, when all's said--and draw her dark-bright face down to mine. I halted instead just within the doorway, retaining a deathlike grip on the door-knob.
"Dear," I blurted, "it won't do. It's the end of the road. We can't go on."
I wonder the solid bronze knob did not shatter like hollow glass in my hand.
"Yes," said Susan, all quiet shadow now, gleamless; "I'll help you."
Half an hour after I left her she telephoned and dispatched the following telegram, signed "Susan Blake," to Gertrude at her New York address:
"_Either come back to him or set him free. Urgent._"
The reply--a note from Gertrude, the ink hardly dry on it, written from the Egyptian tomb of the Misses Carstairs--came directly to me that evening; and Mrs. Parrot was the messenger. Her expression, as she mutely handed me the note, was ineffable. I read the note with sensations of suffocation; an answer was requested.
"Tell Mrs. Hunt," I said firmly to Mrs. Parrot, "that it was she who left me, and I am stubbornly determined to make no advances. If she cares to see me I shall be glad to see her. She has only to walk a few yards, climb a few easy steps, and ring the bell."
My courtesy was truly elaborate as I conducted Mrs. Parrot to the door. Her response was disturbing.
"It's not for me to make observations," said Mrs. Parrot, "the situation being delicate, and not likely to improve. But if I was you, Mr. Hunt, I'd not be too stiff. No; I'd not be. I would not. No. Not if I valued the young lady's reputation."
Like the Pope's mule, Mrs. Parrot had saved her kick many years. I can testify to its power.
Thirty minutes later this superkick landed me, when I came crashing back to earth, at the door of the Egyptian tomb.
"How hard it is," says Dante, "to climb another's stairs," and he might have added to ring another's bell, under certain conditions of spiritual humiliation and stress. Thank the gods--all of them--it was not Mrs. Parrot who admitted me and took my card!
I waited miserably in the large, ill-lighted reception vault of the tomb, which smelt appropriately of lilies, as if the undertaker had recently done his worst. How well I remembered it, how long I had avoided it! It was here of all places, under the contemptuous eye of old Ephraim Carstairs, grim ancestral founder of this family's fortunes, that Gertrude had at last consented to be my wife. And there he still lorded it above the fireplace, unchanged, glaring down malignantly through the shadows, his stiff neck bandaged like a mummy's, his hard, high cheek bones and cavernous eyes making him the very image of bugaboo death. What an eavesdropper for the approaching reconciliation; for that was what it had come to. That was what it would have to be!
