PAGE 7
The Angel at the Grave
by
“Why this, you know,” he exclaimed, “is simply immense!”
The words, which did not immediately present themselves as slang to Miss Anson’s unaccustomed ear, echoed with an odd familiarity through the academic silence.
“The room, you know, I mean,” he explained with a comprehensive gesture. “These jolly portraits, and the books–that’s the old gentleman himself over the mantelpiece, I suppose?–and the elms outside, and–and the whole business. I do like a congruous background–don’t you?”
His hostess was silent. No one but Hewlett Winsloe had ever spoken of her grandfather as “the old gentleman.”
“It’s a hundred times better than I could have hoped,” her visitor continued, with a cheerful disregard of her silence. “The seclusion, the remoteness, the philosophic atmosphere–there’s so little of that kind of flavor left! I should have simply hated to find that he lived over a grocery, you know.–I had the deuce of a time finding out where he did live,” he began again, after another glance of parenthetical enjoyment. “But finally I got on the trail through some old book on Brook Farm. I was bound I’d get the environment right before I did my article.”
Miss Anson, by this time, had recovered sufficient self-possession to seat herself and assign a chair to her visitor.
“Do I understand,” she asked slowly, following his rapid eye about the room, “that you intend to write an article about my grandfather?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Mr. Corby genially responded; “that is, if you’re willing to help me; for I can’t get on without your help,” he added with a confident smile.
There was another pause, during which Miss Anson noticed a fleck of dust on the faded leather of the writing-table and a fresh spot of discoloration in the right-hand upper corner of Raphael Morghen’s “Parnassus.”
“Then you believe in him?” she said, looking up. She could not tell what had prompted her; the words rushed out irresistibly.
“Believe in him?” Corby cried, springing to his feet. “Believe in Orestes Anson? Why, I believe he’s simply the greatest–the most stupendous–the most phenomenal figure we’ve got!”
The color rose to Miss Anson’s brow. Her heart was beating passionately. She kept her eyes fixed on the young man’s face, as though it might vanish if she looked away.
“You–you mean to say this in your article?” she asked.
“Say it? Why, the facts will say it,” he exulted. “The baldest kind of a statement would make it clear. When a man is as big as that he doesn’t need a pedestal!”
Miss Anson sighed. “People used to say that when I was young,” she murmured. “But now–“
Her visitor stared. “When you were young? But how did they know–when the thing hung fire as it did? When the whole edition was thrown back on his hands?”
“The whole edition–what edition?” It was Miss Anson’s turn to stare.
“Why, of his pamphlet–the pamphlet–the one thing that counts, that survives, that makes him what he is! For heaven’s sake,” he tragically adjured her, “don’t tell me there isn’t a copy of it left!”
Miss Anson was trembling slightly. “I don’t think I understand what you mean,” she faltered, less bewildered by his vehemence than by the strange sense of coming on an unexplored region in the very heart of her dominion.
“Why, his account of the amphioxus, of course! You can’t mean that his family didn’t know about it–that you don’t know about it? I came across it by the merest accident myself, in a letter of vindication that he wrote in 1830 to an old scientific paper; but I understood there were journals–early journals; there must be references to it somewhere in the ‘twenties. He must have been at least ten or twelve years ahead of Yarrell; and he saw the whole significance of it, too–he saw where it led to. As I understand it, he actually anticipated in his pamphlet Saint Hilaire’s theory of the universal type, and supported the hypothesis by describing the notochord of the amphioxus as a cartilaginous vertebral column. The specialists of the day jeered at him, of course, as the specialists in Goethe’s time jeered at the plant-metamorphosis. As far as I can make out, the anatomists and zoologists were down on Dr. Anson to a man; that was why his cowardly publishers went back on their bargain. But the pamphlet must be here somewhere–he writes as though, in his first disappointment, he had destroyed the whole edition; but surely there must be at least one copy left?”