Part 25

He heard a little gasp in her throat. “My revenge? When I sent for you to warn you--to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?”

“You’re very good--but it’s rather late to talk of saving me.” He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

“How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull,” was her answer. “Don’t you see that it’s not too late for me to help you?” And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: “Take the rest--in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied to her--she’s too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I sha’n’t have been wasted.”

His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and took her hand.

“You would do it--you would do it!”

She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

“Good-by,” he said, kissing it.

“Good-by? You are going--?”

“To get my letter.”

“Your letter? The letter won’t matter, if you will only do what I ask.”

He returned her gaze. “I might, I suppose, without being out of character. Only, don’t you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?”

“Harm HER?”

“To sacrifice you wouldn’t make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been--sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to fall on HER?”

She looked at him long and deeply. “Ah, if I had to choose between you--!”

“You would let her take her chance? But I can’t, you see. I must take my punishment alone.”

She drew her hand away, sighing. “Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you.”

“For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me.”

She shook her head with a slight laugh. “There will be no letter.”

Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look. “No letter? You don’t mean--”

“I mean that she’s been with you since I saw her--she’s seen you and heard your voice. If there IS a letter, she has recalled it--from the first station, by telegraph.”

He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. “But in the mean while I shall have read it,” he said.

The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.

The End

THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND

As first published in Atlantic Monthly, August 1904

“Above all,” the letter ended, “don’t leave Siena without seeing Doctor Lombard’s Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its remotest corners, and has lately picked up an undoubted Leonardo, which came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of the missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according to the most competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched example of the best period.

“Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures; but we struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas in Siena three years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get a peep at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I hear he refuses to have it reproduced. I want badly to use it in my monograph on the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me, and if you can’t persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at least jot down a detailed description of the picture and get from him all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian governments have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he refuses to sell at any price, though he certainly can’t afford such luxuries; in fact, I don’t see where he got enough money to buy the picture. He lives in the Via Papa Giulio.”