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Page 45
"In the service of the commonwealth," replied my father coldly,
"I am always to be commanded."
The man flicked a bit of dust from his immaculate coat sleeve.
"It will be a conference of high powers. I shall represent Eros;
Mr. Pendleton, Virginia; and Zindorf" and he laughed - "his
Imperial Master!"
And to the eye the three men fitted to their legend. The
Hellenic God of pleasure in his sacred groves might have chosen
for his disciple one from Athens with a face and figure like this
youth. My father bore the severities of the law upon him. And I
have written how strange a creature the third party to this
conference was.
He now answered with an oath.
"You have a very pretty wit, Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said. "I add
to my price a dozen eagles for it."
The young man shrugged his shoulders in his English coat.
"Smart money, eh, Zindorf . . . Well, it does not make me smart.
It only makes me remember that Count Augsburg educated you in
Bavaria for the Church and you fled away from it to be a slave
trader in Virginia."
He got on his feet, and my father saw that the man was in liquor.
He was not drunken, but the effect was on him with its daring and
its indiscretions.
It was an April morning, bright with sun. The world was white
with apple blossoms, the soft air entered through the great open
windows. And my father thought that the liquor in the man had
come with him out of a night of bargaining or revel.
Morrow put his hands on the table and looked at Zindorf ; then,
suddenly, the laughter in his face gave way to the comprehension
of a swift, striking idea.
"Why, man," he cried, "it's the devil's truth! Everything about
you is a negation! You ought to be a priest by all the lines and
features of you; but you're not. . . Scorch me, but you're not!"
His voice went up on the final word as though to convey some
impressive, sinister discovery.
It was true in every aspect of the man. The very clothes he
wore, somber, wool-threaded homespun, crudely patched, reminded
one of the coarse fabrics that monks affect for their abasement.
But one saw, when one remembered the characteristic of the man,
that they represented here only an extremity of avarice.
Zindorf looked coldly at his guest.
"Mr. Lucian Morrow," he said, "you will go on, and my price will
go on!"
But the young blood, on his feet, was not brought up by the
monetary threat. He looked about the room, at the ceiling, the
thick walls. And, like a man who by a sudden recollection
confounds his adversary with an overlooked illustrative fact, he
suddenly cried out:
"By the soul of Satan, you're housed to suit! Send me to the
pit! It's the very place for you! Eh! Zindorf, do you know who
built the house you live in?"
"I do not, Mr. Lucian Morrow," said the man. "Who built it?"
One could see that he wished to divert the discourses of his
guest. He failed.
"God built it!" cried Morrow.
He put out his hands as though to include the hose.
"Pendleton," he said, "you will remember. The people built these
walls for a church. It burned, but the stone walls could not
burn; they remained overgrown with creeper. Then, finally, old
Wellington Monroe built a house into the walls for the young wife
he was about to marry, but he went to the coffin instead of the
bride-bed, and the house stood empty. It fell into the courts
with the whole of Monroe's tangled business and finally Zindorf
gets it at a sheriff's sale."
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