"My dear fellow," I began; "why, have you dropped from the moon?"
"They--they told me you were here," said Jasper Hardress, and paused to moisten his lips. "My wife died, yonder in Montana, ten days ago last Thursday,--yes, it was on a Tuesday she died, I think."
And I was silent for a breathing-space. "Yes?" I said, at last; for I had seen the shining thing in Jasper Hardress's hand, and I was wondering now why he had pocketed the toy, and for how long.
"It was of a fever she died. She was delirious,--oh, quite three days. And she talked in her delirium."
I began to smile; it was like witnessing a play. "Yonder is Bettie and my one chance of manhood; and blind chance, just the machination of a tiny microbe, entraps me as I tread toward all this. I was wrong about Setebos. Heine was right; there is an Aristophanes in heaven."
I said, aloud: "Well, Hardress, you wouldn't have me dispute the veracity of a lady?"
But the man did not appear to hear me. "Oh, it was very horrible," he said. "Oh, I would like you, first of all, to comprehend how horrible it was. She was always calling--no, not calling exactly, but just moaning one name, and over and over again. He had been so cruel, she said. He didn't really care for anything, she said, except to write his hateful books. And I had loved her, you understand. And for three whole days I must sit there and hear her tell of what another man had meant to her! I have not been wholly sane, I think, since then, for I had loved her for a long time. And her throat was so little that I often thought how easy it would be to stop the moaning and talking, but somehow I did not like to do it. And it isn't my honour that I mean to avenge. It is Gillian that I must avenge,--Gillian who died because a coward had robbed her of the will to live. For it was that in chief. Why, even you must understand that," he said, as though he pleaded with me.
And yonder Bettie played,--with lithe fingers which caressed the keys rather than struck them, I remembered. And always at the back of my mind some being that was not I was taking notes as to how unruffled the man was; and I smiled a little, in recognition of the air, as Bettie began _The Funeral March of a Marionette_....