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Page 60
"Well, good-night then," said the actor, waving his hand to his
friends as he moved away. "'We, who are about to die, salute you!'"
"Good luck to you," said Sloane, holding up his glass. "To the Fool
and His Money," he laughed. He turned to the table again, and sounded
the bell for the waiter. "Now let's send him a telegram and wish him
success, and all sign it," he said, "and don't you fellows tell him
that I wasn't in front to-night. I've got to go to a dinner the
Travellers' Club are giving me." There was a protesting chorus of
remonstrance. "Oh, I don't like it any better than you do," said
Sloane, "but I'll get away, early and join you before the play's over.
No one in the Travellers' Club, you see, has ever travelled farther
from New York than London or the Riviera, and so when a member starts
for Abyssinia they give him a dinner, and he has to take himself very
seriously indeed, and cry with Seldon, 'I, who am about to die, salute
you!' If that man there was any use," he added, interrupting himself
and pointing with his glass at Stuart, "he'd pack up his things
to-night and come with me."
"Oh, don't urge him," remonstrated Weimer, who had travelled all over
the world in imagination, with the aid of globes and maps, but never
had got any farther from home than Montreal. "We can't spare Stuart.
He has to stop here and invent a preliminary marriage state, so that
if he finds he doesn't like a girl, he can leave her before it is too
late."
"You sail at seven, I believe, and from Hoboken, don't you?" asked
Stuart, undisturbed. "If you'll start at eleven from the New York
side, I think I'll go with you, but I hate getting up early; and then
you see--I know what dangers lurk in Abyssinia, but who could tell
what might not happen to him in Hoboken?"
When Stuart returned to his room, he found a large package set upright
in an armchair and enveloped by many wrappings; but the handwriting on
the outside told him at once from whom it came and what it might be,
and he pounced upon it eagerly and tore it from its covers. The
photograph was a very large one, and the likeness to the original so
admirable that the face seemed to smile and radiate with all the
loveliness and beauty of Miss Delamar herself. Stuart beamed upon it
with genuine surprise and pleasure, and exclaimed delightedly to
himself. There was a living quality about the picture which made him
almost speak to it, and thank Miss Delamar through it for the pleasure
she had given him and the honor she had bestowed. He was proud,
flattered, and triumphant, and while he walked about the room deciding
where he would place it, and holding the picture respectfully before
him, he smiled upon it with grateful satisfaction.
He decided against his dressing-table as being too intimate a place
for it, and so carried the picture on from his bedroom to the
dining-room beyond, where he set it among his silver on the sideboard.
But so little of his time was spent in this room that he concluded he
would derive but little pleasure from it there, and so bore it back
again into his library, where there were many other photographs and
portraits, and where to other eyes than his own it would be less
conspicuous.
He tried it first in one place and then in another; but in each
position the picture predominated and asserted itself so markedly,
that Stuart gave up the idea of keeping it inconspicuous, and placed
it prominently over the fireplace, where it reigned supreme above
every other object in the room. It was not only the most conspicuous
object there, but the living quality which it possessed in so marked a
degree, and which was due to its naturalness of pose and the
excellence of the likeness, made it permeate the place like a presence
and with the individuality of a real person. Stuart observed this
effect with amused interest, and noted also that the photographs of
other women had become commonplace in comparison like lithographs in a
shop-window, and that the more masculine accessories of a bachelor's
apartment had grown suddenly aggressive and out of keeping. The
liquor-case and the racks of arms and of barbarous weapons which he
had collected with such pride seemed to have lost their former value
and meaning, and he instinctively began to gather up the mass of books
and maps and photographs and pipes and gloves which lay scattered upon
the table, and to put them in their proper place, or to shove them out
of sight altogether. "If I'm to live up to that picture," he thought,
"I must see that George keeps this room in better order--and I must
stop wandering round here in my bath-robe."
His mind continued on the picture while he was dressing, and he was so
absorbed in it and in analyzing the effect it had had upon him, that
his servant spoke twice before he heard him.
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