There was a man in our town,
And he was wondrous wise,
He jump'd into a bramble-bush,
And scratch'd out both his eyes;
But when he saw his eyes were out,
With all his might and main
He jump'd into another bush,
And scratch'd them in again.
—Old Ballad.
As I neared the boat-house I saw a dark figure sprawled on the veranda and my Japanese boy spoke to me softly. The moon was at full and I drew up in the shadow of the house and waited. Ijima had been with me for several years and was a boy of unusual intelligence. He spoke both English and French admirably, was deft of hand and wise of mind, and I was greatly attached to him. His courage, fidelity and discretion I had tested more than once. He lay quite still on the pier, gazing out upon the lake, and I knew that something unusual had attracted his attention. He spoke to me in a moment, but without turning his head.
"A man has been rowing up and down the shore for an hour. When he came in close here I asked him what he wanted and he rowed away without answering. He is now off there by the school."
"Probably a summer boarder from across the lake."
"Hardly, sir. He came from the direction of the village and acts queerly."
I flung myself down on the pier and crawled out to where Ijima lay. Every pier on the lake had its distinctive lights; the Glenarm sea-mark was—and remains—red, white and green. We lay by the post that bore the three lanterns, and watched the slow movement of a rowboat along the margin of the school grounds. The boat was about a thousand yards from us in a straight line, though farther by the shore; but the moonlight threw the oarsman and his craft into sharp relief against the overhanging bank. St. Agatha's maintains a boathouse for the use of students, and the pier lights—red, white and red—lay beyond the boatman, and he seemed to be drawing slowly toward them. The fussy little steamers that run the errands of the cottagers had made their last rounds and sought their berths for the night, and the lake lay still in the white bath of light.
"Drop one of the canoes into the water," I said; and I watched the prowling boatman while Ijima crept back to the boat-house. The canoe was launched silently and the boy drove it out to me with a few light strokes. I took the paddle, and we crept close along the shore toward the St. Agatha light, my eyes intent on the boat, which was now drawing in to the school pier. The prowler was feeling his way carefully, as though the region were unfamiliar; but he now landed at the pier and tied his boat. I hung back in the shadows until he had disappeared up the bank, then paddled to the pier, told Ijima to wait, and set off through the wood-path toward St. Agatha's.
Where the wood gave way to the broad lawn that stretched up to the school buildings I caught sight of my quarry. He was strolling along under the beeches to the right of me, and I paused about a hundred feet behind him to watch events. He was a young fellow, not above average height, but compactly built, and stood with his hands thrust boyishly in his pockets, gazing about with frank interest in his surroundings. He was bareheaded and coatless, and his shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbow. He walked slowly along the edge of the wood, looking off toward the school buildings, and while his manner was furtive there was, too, an air of unconcern about him and I heard him whistling softly to himself.
He now withdrew into the wood and started off with the apparent intention of gaining a view of St. Agatha's from the front, and I followed. He seemed harmless enough; he might be a curious pilgrim from the summer resort; but I was just now the guardian of St. Agatha's and I intended to learn the stranger's business before I had done with him. He swung well around toward the driveway, threading the flower garden, but hanging always close under the trees, and the mournful whistle would have guided me had not the moon made his every movement perfectly clear. He reached the driveway leading in from the Annandale road without having disclosed any purpose other than that of viewing the vine-clad walls with a tourist's idle interest. The situation had begun to bore me, when the school gardener came running out of the shrubbery, and instantly the young man took to his heels.
"Stop! Stop!" yelled the gardener.
The mysterious young man plunged into the wood and was off like the wind.
"After him, Andy! After him!" I yelled to the Scotchman.
I shouted my own name to reassure him and we both went thumping through the beeches. The stranger would undoubtedly seek to get back to his boat, I reasoned, but he was now headed for the outer wall, and as the wood was free of underbrush he was sprinting away from us at a lively gait. Whoever the young gentleman was, he had no intention of being caught; he darted in and out among the trees with astounding lightness, and I saw in a moment that he was slowly turning away to the right.
"Run for the gate!" I called to the gardener, who was about twenty feet away from me, blowing hard. I prepared to gain on the turn if the young fellow dashed for the lake; and he now led me a pretty chase through the flower garden. He ran with head up and elbows close at his sides, and his light boat shoes made scarcely any sound. He turned once and looked back and, finding that I was alone, began amusing himself with feints and dodges, for no other purpose, I fancied, than to perplex or wind me. There was a little summer-house mid-way of the garden, and he led me round this till my head swam. By this time I had grown pretty angry, for a foot-race in a school garden struck me with disgust as a childish enterprise, and I bent with new spirit and drove him away from his giddy circling about the summer-house and beyond the only gate by which he could regain the wood and meadow that lay between the garden and his boat. He turned his head from side to side uneasily, slackening his pace to study the bounds of the garden, and I felt myself gaining.
Ahead of us lay a white picket fence that set off the vegetable garden and marked the lawful bounds of the school. There was no gate and I felt that here the chase must end, and I rejoiced to find myself so near the runner that I heard the quick, soft patter of his shoes on the walk. In a moment I was quite sure that I should have him by the collar, and I had every intention of dealing severely with him for the hard chase he had given me.
But he kept on, the white line of fence clearly outlined beyond him; and then when my hand was almost upon him he rose at the fence, as though sprung from the earth itself, and hung a moment sheer above the sharp line of the fence pickets, his whole figure held almost horizontal, in the fashion of trained high-jumpers, for what seemed an infinite time, as though by some witchery of the moonlight.
I plunged into the fence with a force that knocked the wind out of me and as I clung panting to the pickets the runner dropped with a crash into the midst of a glass vegetable frame on the farther side. He turned his head, grinned at me sheepishly through the pickets, and gave a kick that set the glass to tinkling. Then he held up his hands in sign of surrender and I saw that they were cut and bleeding. We were both badly blown, and while we regained our wind we stared at each other. He was the first to speak.
"Kicked, bit or stung!" he muttered dolefully; "that saddest of all words, 'stung!' It's as clear as moonlight that I'm badly mussed, not to say cut."
"May I trouble you not to kick out any more of that glass? The gardener will be here in a minute and fish you out."
"Lawsy, what is it? An aquarium, that you fish for me?"
He chuckled softly, but sat perfectly quiet, finding, it seemed, a certain humor in his situation. The gardener came running up and swore in broad Scots at the destruction of the frame. We got over the fence and released our captive, who talked to himself in doleful undertones as we hauled him to his feet amid a renewed clink of glass.
"Gently, gentlemen; behold the night-blooming cereus! Not all the court-plaster in the universe can glue me together again." He gazed ruefully at his slashed arms, and rubbed his legs. "The next time I seek the garden at dewy eve I'll wear my tin suit."
"There won't be any next time for you. What did you run for?"
"Trying to lower my record—it's a mania with me. And as one good question deserves another, may I ask why you didn't tell me there was a glass-works beyond that fence? It wasn't sportsmanlike to hide a murderous hazard like that. But I cleared those pickets with a yard to spare, and broke my record."
"You broke about seven yards of glass," I replied. "It may sober you to know that you are under arrest. The watchman here has a constable's license."
"He also has hair that suggests the common garden or boiled carrot. The tint is not to my liking; yet it is not for me to be captious where the Lord has hardened His heart."
"What is your name?" I demanded.
"Gillespie. R. Gillespie. The 'R' will indicate to you the depth of my humility: I make it a life work to hide the fact that I was baptized Reginald."
"I've been expecting you, Mr. Gillespie, and now I want you to come over to my house and give an account of yourself. I will take charge of this man, Andy. I promise that he shan't set foot here again. And, Andy, you need mention this affair to no one."
"Very good, sir."
He touched his hat respectfully.
"I have business with this person. Say nothing to the ladies at St. Agatha's about him."
He saluted and departed; and with Gillespie walking beside me I started for the boat-landing.
He had wrapped a handkerchief about one arm and I gave him my own for the other. His right arm was bleeding freely below the elbow and I tied it up for him.
"That jump deserved better luck," I volunteered, as he accepted my aid in silence.
"I'm proud to have you like it. Will you kindly tell me who the devil you are?"
"My name is Donovan."
"I don't wholly care for it," he observed mournfully. "Think it over and see if you can't do better. I'm not sure that I'm going to grow fond of you. What's your business with me, anyhow?"
"My business, Mr. Gillespie, is to see that you leave this lake by the first and fastest train."
"Is it possible?" he drawled mockingly.
"More than that," I replied in his own key; "it is decidedly probable."
"Meanwhile, it would be diverting to know where you're taking me. I thought the other chap was the constable."
"I'm taking you to the house of a friend where I'm visiting. I'm going to row you in your boat. It's only a short distance; and when we get there I shall have something to say to you."
He made no reply, but got into the boat without ado. He found a light flannel coat and I flung it over his shoulders and pulled for Glenarm pier, telling the Japanese boy to follow with the canoe. I turned over in my mind the few items of information that I had gained from Miss Pat and her niece touching the young man who was now my prisoner, and found that I knew little enough about him. He was the unwelcome and annoying suitor of Miss Helen Holbrook, and I had caught him prowling about St. Agatha's in a manner that was indefensible.
He sat huddled in the stern, nursing his swathed arms on his knees and whistling dolefully. The lake was a broad pool of silver. Save for the soft splash of Ijima's paddle behind me and the slight wash of water on the near shore, silence possessed the world. Gillespie looked about with some curiosity, but said nothing, and when I drove the boat to the Glenarm landing he crawled out and followed me through the wood without a word.
I flashed on the lights in the library and after a short inspection of his wounds we went to my room and found sponges, plasters and ointments in the family medicine chest and cared for his injuries.
"There's no honor in tumbling into a greenhouse, but such is R. Gillespie's luck. My shins look like scarlet fever, and without sound legs a man's better dead."
"Your legs seem to have got you into trouble; don't mourn the loss of them!" And I twisted a bandage under his left knee-cap where the glass had cut savagely.
"It's my poor wits, if we must fix the blame. It's an awful thing, sir, to be born with weak intellectuals. As man's legs carry him on orders from his head, there lies the seat of the difficulty. A weak mind, obedient legs, and there you go, plump into the bosom of a blooming asparagus bed, and the enemy lays violent hands on you. If you put any more of that sting-y pudding on that cut I shall undoubtedly hit you, Mr. Donovan. Ah, thank you, thank you so much!"
As I finished with the vaseline he lay back on the couch and sighed deeply and I rose and sent Ijima away with the basin and towels.
"Will you drink? There are twelve kinds of whisky—"
"My dear Mr. Donovan, the thought of strong drink saddens me. Such poor wits as mine are not helped by alcoholic stimulants. I was drunk once—beautifully, marvelously, nobly drunk, so that antiquity came up to date with the thud of a motor-car hitting an orphan asylum; and I saw Julius Caesar driving a chariot up Fifth Avenue and Cromwell poised on one foot on the shorter spire of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Are you aware, my dear sir, that one of those spires is shorter than the other?"
"I certainly am not," I replied bluntly, wondering what species of madman I had on my hands.
"It's a fact, confided to me by a prominent engineer of New York, who has studied those spires daily since they were put up. He told me that when he had surrounded five high-balls the north spire was higher; but that the sixth tumblerful always raised the south spire about eleven feet above it. Now, wouldn't that doddle you?"
"It would, Mr. Gillespie; but may I ask you to cut out this rot—"
"My dear Mr. Donovan, it's indelicate of you to speak of cutting anything—and me with my legs. But I'm at your service. You have tended my grievous wounds like a gentleman and now do you wish me to unfold my past, present and future?"
"I want you to get out of this and be quick about it. Your biography doesn't amuse me; I caught you prowling disgracefully about St. Agatha's. Two ladies are domiciled there who came here to escape your annoying attentions. Those ladies were put in my charge by an old friend, and I don't propose to stand any nonsense from you, Mr. Gillespie. You seem to be at least half sane—"
Reginald Gillespie raised himself on the couch and grinned joyously.
"Thank you—thank you for that word! That's just twice as high as anybody ever rated me before."
"I was trying to be generous," I said. "There's a point at which I begin to be bored, and when that's reached I'm likely to grow quarrelsome. Are there any moments of the day or night when you are less a fool than others?"
"Well, Donovan, I've often speculated about that, and my conclusion is that my mind is at its best when I'm asleep and enjoying a nightmare. I find the Welsh rabbit most stimulating to my thought voltage. Then I am, you may say, detached from myself; another mind not my own is building towers and palaces, and spiders as large as the far-famed though extinct ichthyosaurus are waltzing on the moon. Then, I have sometimes thought, my intellectual parts are most intelligently employed."
"I may well believe you," I declared with asperity. "Now I hope I can pound it into you in some way that your presence in this neighborhood is offensive—to me—personally."
He stared at the ceiling, silent, imperturbable.
"And I'm going to give you safe conduct through the lines—or if necessary I'll buy your ticket and start you for New York. And if there's an atom of honor in you, you'll go peaceably and not publish the fact that you know the whereabouts of these ladies."
He reflected gravely for a moment.
"I think," he said, "that on the whole that's a fair proposition. But you seem to have the impression that I wish to annoy these ladies."
"You don't for a moment imagine that you are likely to entertain them, do you? You haven't got the idea that you are necessary to their happiness, have you?"
He raised himself on his elbow with some difficulty; flinched as he tried to make himself comfortable and began:
"The trouble with Miss Pat is—"
"There is no trouble with Miss Pat," I snapped.
"The trouble between Miss Pat and me is the same old trouble of the buttons," he remarked dolorously.
"Quite so. Buttons, just plain every-day buttons; buttons for buttoning purposes. Now I shall be grateful to you if you will refrain from saying
"'Button, button,
Who's got the button?'"
The fellow was undoubtedly mad. I looked about for a weapon; but he went on gravely.
"What does the name Gillespie mean? Of what is it the sign and symbol wherever man hides his nakedness? Button, button, who'll buy my buttons? It can't be possible that you never heard of the Gillespie buttons? Where have you lived, my dear sir?"
"Will you please stop talking rot and explain what you want here?" I demanded with growing heat.
"That, my dear sir, is exactly what I'm doing. I'm a suitor for the hand of Miss Patricia's niece. Miss Patricia scorns me; she says I'm a mere child of the Philistine rich and declines an alliance without thanks, if you must know the truth. And it's all on account of the fact, shameful enough I admit, that my father died and left me a large and prosperous button factory."
"Why don't you give the infernal thing away—sell it out to a trust—"
"Ah! ah!"—and he raised himself again and pointed a bandaged hand at me. "I see that you are a man of penetration! You have a keen notion of business! You anticipate me! I did sell the infernal thing to a trust, but there was no shaking it! They made me president of the combination, and I control more buttons than any other living man! My dear sir, I dictate the button prices of the world. I can tell you to a nicety how many buttons are swallowed annually by the babies of the universe. But I hope, sir, that I use my power wisely and without oppressing the people."
Gillespie lay on his back, wrapped in my dressing-gown, his knees raised, his bandaged arms folded across his chest. Since bringing him into the house I had studied him carefully and, I must confess, with increasing mystification. He was splendidly put up, the best-muscled man I had ever seen who was not a professional athlete. His forearms and clean-shaven face were brown from prolonged tanning by the sun, but otherwise his skin was the pink and white of a healthy baby. His short light hair was combed smoothly away from a broad forehead; his blue eyes were perfectly steady—they even invited and held scrutiny; when he was not speaking he closed his lips tightly. He appeared in nowise annoyed by his predicament; the house itself seemed to have no interest for him, and he accepted my ministrations in murmurs of well-bred gratitude.
I half believed the fellow to be amusing himself at my expense; but he met my eyes calmly. If I had not caught a lunatic I had certainly captured an odd specimen of humanity. He was the picture of wholesome living and sound health; but he talked like a fool. The idea of a young woman like Helen Holbrook giving two thoughts to a silly youngster like this was preposterous, and my heart hardened against him.
"You are flippant, Mr. Gillespie, and my errand with you is serious. There are places in this house where I could lock you up and you would never see your button factory again. You seem to have had some education—"
"The word does me great honor, Donovan. They chucked me from Yale in my junior year. Why, you may ask? Well, it happened this way: You know Rooney, the Bellefontaine Cyclone? He struck New Haven with a vaudeville outfit, giving boxing exhibitions, poking the bag and that sort of fake. At every town they invited the local sports to dig up their brightest amateur middle-weight and put him against the Cyclone for five rounds. I brushed my hair the wrong way for a disguise and went against him."
"And got smashed for your trouble, I hope," I interrupted.
"No. The boys in the gallery cheered so that they fussed him, and he thought I was fruit. We shook hands, and he turned his head to snarl at the applause, and, seeing an opening, I smashed him a hot clip in the chin, and he tumbled backward and broke the ring rope. I vaulted the orchestra and bolted, and when the boys finally found me I was over near Waterbury under a barn. Eli wouldn't stand for it, and back I went to the button factory; and here I am, sir, by the grace of God, an ignorant man."
He lay blinking as though saddened by his recollections, and I turned away and paced the floor. When I glanced at him again he was still staring soberly at the wall.
"How did you find your way here, Gillespie?" I demanded.
"I suppose I ought to explain that," he replied. I waited while he reflected for a moment. He seemed to be quite serious, and his brows wrinkled as he pondered.
"I guessed it about half; and for the rest, I followed the heaven-kissing stack of trunks."
He glanced at me quickly, as though anxious to see how I received his words.
"Have you seen anything of Henry Holbrook in your travels? Be careful now; I want the truth."
"I certainly have not. I hope you don't think—" Gillespie hesitated.
"It's not a matter for thinking or guessing; I've got to know."
"On my honor I have not seen him, and I have no idea where he is."
I had thrown myself into a chair beside the couch and lighted my pipe. My captive troubled me. It seemed odd that he had found the abiding-place of the two women; and if he had succeeded so quickly, why might not Henry Holbrook have equal luck?
"You probably know this troublesome brother well," I ventured.
"Yes; as well as a man of my age can know an older man. My father's place at Stamford adjoined the Holbrook estate. Henry and Arthur Holbrook married sisters; both women died long ago, I believe; but the brothers had a business row and went to smash. Arthur embezzled, forged, and so on, and took to the altitudinous timber, and Henry has been busy ever since trying to pluck his sister. He's wild on the subject of his wrongs—ruined by his own brother, deprived of his inheritance by his sister and abandoned by his only child. There wasn't much to Arthur Holbrook; Henry was the genius, but after the bank went to the bad he sought the consolations of rum. He and Henry married the Hartridge twins who were the reigning Baltimore belles in the early eighties—so runneth the chronicle. But I gossip, my dear sir; I gossip, which is against my principles. Even the humble button king of Strawberry Hill must draw the line."
When Ijima brought in a plate of sandwiches he took one gingerly in his swathed hand, regarded it with cool inquiry, and as he munched it, remarked upon sandwiches in general as though they were botanical specimens that were usually discussed and analyzed in a scientific spirit.
"The sandwich," he began, "not unhappily expresses one of the saddest traits of our American life. I need hardly refer to our deplorable national habit of hiding our shame under a blithe and misleading exterior. Now this article, provided by your generous hospitality for a poor prisoner of war, contains a bit of the breast of some fowl, presumably chicken—we will concede that it is chicken—taken from rather too near the bone to be wholly palatable. Chicken sandwiches in some parts of the world are rather coarsely marked, for purposes of identification, with pin-feathers. You may covet no nobler fame than that of creator of the Flying Sandwich of Annandale. Yet the feathered sandwich, though more picturesque, points rather too directly to the strutting lords of the barn-yard. A sandwich that is decorated like a fall bonnet, that suggests, we will say, the milliner's window—or the plumed knights of sounding war—"
With a little sigh, a slow relaxation of muscles, Mr. Gillespie slept. I locked the doors, put out the lights, and tumbled into my own bed as the chapel clock chimed two.
In the disturbed affairs of the night the blinds had not been drawn, and I woke at six to find the room flooded with light and my prisoner gone. The doors were locked as I had left them. Mr. Gillespie had departed by the window, dropping from a little balcony to the terrace beneath. I rang for Ijima and sent him to the pier; and before I had finished shaving, the boy was back, and reported Gillespie's boat still at the pier, but one of the canoes missing. It was clear that in the sorry plight of his arms Gillespie had preferred paddling to rowing. Beneath my watch on the writing-table I found a sheet of note-paper on which was scrawled:
DEAR OLD MAN—I am having one of those nightmares I mentioned in our delightful conversation. I feel that I am about to walk in my sleep. As my flannels are a trifle bluggy, pardon loss of your dressing-gown. Yours,
R. G.
P. S.—I am willing to pay for the glass and medical attendance; but I want a rebate for that third sandwich. It really tickled too harshly as it went down. Very likely this accounts for my somnambulism.
G.
When I had dressed and had my coffee I locked my old portfolio and tossed it into the bottom of my trunk. Something told me that for a while, at least, I should have other occupation than contributing to the literature of Russian geography.