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Arcadia In Avernus
by
This morning, the perspective of the little man was anything but normal. Worse than that, he could not reduce it to the normal, try as he might.
His meeting with Camilla yesterday had produced a deep and abiding shock; for either of them to have been so moved signified the stirring of dangerous forces. They–and especially himself–who had always accepted life, even crises, so calmly; who had heretofore laughed at all display of emotion–for them to have acted as they had, for them to have spoken to each other the things they had spoken, the things they could not forget, that he never could forgive–it was unbelievable! It upset all the established order of things!
His anger of yesterday against Camilla had died out. She was not to blame; she was a woman, and women were all alike. He had thought differently before; that she was an exception; but now he knew better. One and all they were mere puppets of emotion, and fickle.
In a measure, though, as he had excused Camilla he had incriminated Ichabod. Ichabod was the guilty one, and a man. Ichabod had filched from him his possession of most value; and without even the form of a by-your-leave. The incident of last evening at the saloon (for he had heard of it in the hour, as had every one in the little town) had but served to make more implacable his resentment. By the satire of circumstances it had come about that he again, Asa Arnold, had been the cause of another’s defending the honor of his own wife,–for she was his wife as yet,–and that other, the defender, was Ichabod Maurice!
The little man’s face did not change at the thought. He only smoked harder, until the room was blue; but though he did not put the feeling in words even to himself, he knew in the depths of his own mind that the price of that last day was death. Whether it was his own death, or the death of Ichabod, he did not know; he did not care; but that one of them must die was inevitable. Horrible as was the thought, it had no terror for him, now. He wondered that it did not have; but, on the contrary, it seemed to him very ordinary, even logical–as one orders a dinner when he is hungry.
He lit another cigar, calmly. It was this very imperturbability of the little man which made him terrible. Like a great movement of Nature, it was awful from its very resistlessness; its imperviability to appeal. Steadily, as he had lit the cigar, he smoked until the air became bluer than before. In a ghastly way, he was trying to decide whose death it should be,–as one decides a winter’s flitting, whether to Florida or California; only now the question was: should it be suicide, or,–as in the saloon yesterday,–leave the decision to Chance? For the time the personal equation was eliminated; the man weighed the evidence as impartially as though he were deciding the fate of another.
He sat long and very still; until even in the daylight the red cigar-end grew redder in the haze. Without being conscious of the fact, he was probably doing the most unselfish thinking of his life. What the result of that thought would have been no man will ever know, for of a sudden, interrupting, Hans Becher’s round face appeared in the doorway.
“Ichabod Maurice to see you,” coughed the German, obscured in the cloud of smoke which passed out like steam through the opening.
It cannot be said that Asa Arnold’s face grew impassive; it was that already. Certain it was, though, that behind the mask there occurred, at that moment, a revolution. Born of it, the old mocking smile sprang to his lips.
“The devil fights for his own,” he soliloquized. “I really believe I,”–again the smile,–“I was about to make a sacrifice.”
“Sir?”
“Thank you, Hans.”
The German’s jaw dropped in inexpressible surprise.