FullReads

“Dear Mr. Bernald! Do sit down and have a little chat. What a wonderful privilege it has been! I don’t know when I’ve had such an intense impression.”

She made way for him, hospitably, in a corner of the sofa to which she had sunk; and he echoed her vaguely: “You were impressed, then?”

“I can’t express to you how it affected me! As Alice said, it was a resurrection–it was as if John Pellerin were actually here in the room with us!”

Bernald turned on her with a half-audible gasp. “You felt that, dear Mrs. Bain?”

“We all felt it–every one of us! I don’t wonder the Greeks–it was the Greeks?–regarded eloquence as a supernatural power. As Alice says, when one looked at Howland Wade one understood what they meant by the Afflatus.”

Bernald rose and held out his hand. “Oh, I see–it was Howland who made you feel as if Pellerin were in the room? And he made Miss Fosdick feel so too?”

“Why, of course. But why are you rushing off?”

“Because I must hunt up my friend, who’s not used to such late hours.”

“Your friend?” Mrs. Bain had to collect her thoughts. “Oh, Mr. Winterman, you mean? But he’s gone already.”

“Gone?” Bernald exclaimed, with an odd twinge of foreboding. Remembering Pellerin’s signal across the crowd, he reproached himself for not having answered it more promptly. Yet it was certainly strange that his friend should have left the house without him.

“Are you quite sure?” he asked, with a startled glance at the clock.

“Oh, perfectly. He went half an hour ago. But you needn’t hurry home on his account, for Alice Fosdick carried him off with her. I saw them leave together.”

“Carried him off? She took him home with her, you mean?”

“Yes. You know what strange hours she keeps. She told me she was going to give him a Welsh rabbit, and explain Pellerinism to him.”

“Oh, if she’s going to explain–” Bernald murmured. But his amazement at the news struggled with a confused impatience to reach his rooms in time to be there for his friend’s arrival. There could be no stranger spectacle beneath the stars than that of John Pellerin carried off by Miss Fosdick, and listening, in the small hours, to her elucidation of his doctrines; but Bernald knew enough of his sex to be aware that such an experiment may present a less humorous side to its subject than to an impartial observer. Even the Uplift Club and its connotations might benefit by the attraction of the unknown; and it was conceivable that to a traveller from Mesopotamia Miss Fosdick might present elements of interest which she had lost for the frequenters of Fifth Avenue. There was, at any rate, no denying that the affair had become unexpectedly complex, and that its farther development promised to be rich in comedy.

In the charmed contemplation of these possibilities Bernald sat over his fire, listening for Pellerin’s ring. He had arranged his modest quarters with the reverent care of a celebrant awaiting the descent of his deity. He guessed Pellerin to be unconscious of visual detail, but sensitive to the happy blending of sensuous impressions: to the intimate spell of lamplight on books, and of a deep chair placed where one could watch the fire. The chair was there, and Bernald, facing it across the hearth, already saw it filled by Pellerin’s lounging figure. The autumn dawn came late, and even now they had before them the promise of some untroubled hours. Bernald, sitting there alone in the warm stillness of his room, and in the profounder hush of his expectancy, was conscious of gathering up all his sensibilities and perceptions into one exquisitely-adjusted instrument of notation. Until now he had tasted Pellerin’s society only in unpremeditated snatches, and had always left him with a sense, on his own part, of waste and shortcoming. Now, in the lull of this dedicated hour, he felt that he should miss nothing, and forget nothing, of the initiation that awaited him. And catching sight of Pellerin’s pipe, he rose and laid it carefully on a table by the arm-chair.