BLAISE OLIFANT sat over his work in the room which once, for want of a better name, the late Mr. Gale called his study; but it was a room transformed to studious use. The stuffed trout and the large scale-map of the neighbourhood and the country auctioneer’s carelessly bestowed oddments had been replaced by cases of geological specimens and bookshelves filled with a specialist’s library. The knee-hole writing-desk, with its cigarette-burned edge, had joined the rest of the old lares and penates in honourable storage, and a long refectory-table, drawn across the window overlooking the garden, and piled with papers, microscopes, and other apparatus, reigned in its stead. Olifant loved the room’s pleasant austerity. It symbolized himself, his aims and his life’s limitations. A fire burned in the grate, for it was a cold, raw morning, and, outside, miserable rain defaced the April day. He smoked a pipe as he corrected proofs, so absorbed in the minute and half-mechanical task that he did not hear the door open and the quiet entrance of a maid.
“Mr. Triona, sir.”
The words cut through the silence so that he started and swung round in his chair.
“Mr. Triona? Where?”
“In the dining-room.”
“Show him in here.”
The maid retired. Olifant rose and stood before the fire with a puzzled expression on his face. Triona in Medlow at ten o’clock in the morning? Something serious must have brought a man, unannounced, from London to Shropshire. His thoughts flew to Olivia.
A moment afterwards the dishevelled spectre of Triona burst into the room and closed the door behind him. His coat was wet with rain, his boots and trouser hems muddy. His eyes stared out of a drawn, unshaven face.
“Thank God I’ve found you. During the journey I had a sickening dread lest you might be away.”
“But how did you manage to get here at this hour?” asked Olifant, for Medlow is far from London and trains are few. “You must have arrived last night. Why the deuce didn’t you come to me?”
“I got to Worcester by the last train and put up for the night and came on first thing this morning,” replied Triona impatiently.
“And you’ve walked from the station. You’re wet through. Let me get you a jacket.”
Olifant moved to the bell, but Triona arrested him.
“No—no. I’m taking the next train back to London. Don’t talk of jackets and foolery. I’ve left Olivia.”
Olifant made a stride, almost menacing, towards him, the instinctive gesture of his one arm curiously contrasting with the stillness of the pinned sleeve of the other.
“What?”
“What I say,” cried Triona. “I’ve left Olivia. I’ve left her for ever. I’m cutting myself out of her life.”
“You’re mad. Olivia——”
Triona put up a checking hand. “Oh, no, not Olivia.” He laughed bitterly at the indignant advocacy in Olifant’s tone. “Olivia’s there—where she always has been—among the stars. It’s I that have fallen. Good God! like Lucifer. It’s I that crawl.” He caught an accusing question in the other’s hardening eyes. “It isn’t what you might naturally think. There’s not the ghost of another woman. There never has been—never shall be. It’s my only clean record. And I love her—my God! My soul’s in Hell, aching and burning and shrieking for her. I shall live in Hell for the rest of my life.”
Olifant turned, and wheeling round his writing-chair sat down and pointed to an arm-chair by the fire.
“Sit down and tell me quietly what is the matter.”
But Triona waved aside the invitation and remained standing. “The matter is that I’m an impostor and a liar, and Olivia has found it out. Listen. Don’t ask questions until I’ve done. I’m here for Olivia’s sake. You’re the only creature in the world that can understand—the only one that can help her through. And she couldn’t tell you. Her pride wouldn’t let her. And if it did, the ordeal for her! You’ll be able to go to her now and say, ‘I know everything.’?”
“Up to now, my dear fellow,” said Olifant, “you’ve been talking in riddles. But before you begin, let me remind you that there are two sides to every story. What I mean is—get it into your head that I realize I’m listening to your side.”
“But there aren’t two sides,” cried Triona. “You don’t suppose I’ve come down here to defend myself! If you see when I’ve done that I’ve had some excuse, that there is a grain of saving grace lying somewhere hidden—all well and good. But I’m not here to plead a case. Haven’t I cleared the ground by telling you I’m a liar and an impostor?”
Olifant again looked searchingly at the pale and haggard-eyed young man, his brown hair unkempt and falling across his broad forehead, his lips twitching nervously; and the elder man’s glance turned to one of pitying kindness. He rose, laid his hand on the lapel of the wet coat.
“You’ll take this off, at any rate. There—we’ll hang it over the fender-seat to dry. Sit beside it and dry your legs. It’s no good catching your death of cold.”
Triona submitted to the friendly authority and sat down in his shirt sleeves before the blaze. Olifant, aware of the sedative value of anticlimax, smiled and offered refreshments. Tea—coffee—a drop of something to keep out the cold. Triona suddenly glanced at him.
“I’ll never touch alcohol again as long as I live.”
A cigarette, then? Olifant handed the box, held a match. Triona smoked. Olifant re-lit his pipe and leaned back in his chair.
“Now let me have the plain, unvarnished tale.”
They smoked many cigarettes and many pipes during the telling of the amazing story. As his life had unfolded itself in the grimness of the little Newcastle kitchen, so he recounted it to Olifant. In his passionate final grip on Truth, which for the last few months of his awakening had proved so elusive, he tried to lay bare the vain secret of every folly and the root of every lie. The tangled web of the hackneyed aphorism he unwove, tracking every main filament to its centre, every cross-thread from the beginning to end of its vicious circle.
Plain unvarnished tale it was not in the man’s nature to give. Even in his agony of avowal he must be dramatic, must seize on the picturesque. Now he sat on the narrow leather-covered fender-seat, hunched up, his eyes ablaze, narrating the common actualities of his life; and now he strode about the room, with great gestures of his pink-shirted arms, picturing vividly the conflicting emotions of his soul. First he sketched—so it seemed to the temperamentally remote Olifant—in broad outlines of flame, his true career. Then in strokes, like red-hot wire, he filled in the startling details. The grizzled head and sharp-cut features of the naked body of the dead man Krilov in the ditch—the cold grey waste around—the finding of the odds and ends, the glint of the pocket-compass behind a few spikes of grass, the false teeth, the little black book, the thing of sortilege, of necromantic influence . . . the spell of the book in the night watches in the North Sea, its obsession; his pixy-led infatuation which made him cast aside the slough of John Briggs and sun himself in the summer of the world as the dragonfly, Alexis Triona. In swift lines, too, of a Will-o’-the-Wisp’s dance he revealed the course of his love. Then, unconsciously, before the concentrated gaze of the other man he dropped a baffling gauze curtain, as on a stage, through which his motives and his actions appeared uncertain and unreal.
Olifant had listened in astounded silence. His first instinct was one of indignation. He had been unforgivably deceived by this exterior of friendship under false pretences. The blow dealt to unregenerate man’s innate vanity hurt like a stab. His own clear soul rose in revolt. The fellow’s mendacity, bewildering in its amplitude, would have set Hell agape. He shivered at the cold craft of his imposture; besides, he was a ghoul, a stripper of the dead. He lost the man he had loved in a new and incomprehensible monster. But as Triona went on he gradually fell under the spell of his passionate remorse, and found himself setting the human against the monstrous and wondering which way the balance would turn. And then he became suddenly aware of the impostor’s real and splendid achievemen............