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Updated: May 14, 2025
Jaffery asked me as we thundered through the railway arch. Then I remembered. I had told him little or nothing of my fears. Ever since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches to his novel, I had dismissed them from my mind. Such accounts as I had given of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein.
"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a parrot in a cage." Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to become of the forty-odd colis that we passed through the customs this morning?" "You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery.
But, to those gifted with normal vision, signs were not wanting that he chafed, to put it mildly, under this forced worship of Adrian; and to those who knew Jaffery it was obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not last forever. Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one should kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find august recompense.
He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away. I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she stood unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking sidewise down. Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had mastered her fury, but now we had to deal with her shame and humiliation. "Let her go!" I whispered. Jaffery freed her.
"I'll send it up to her room." But Doria with Adrian's impeccability on the brain and how could a work of Adrian's be impeccable when an alien hand, however imperceptible, had touched it? was not satisfied. Towards noon, when she came downstairs, she met Jaffery on the terrace, with a familiar little knitting of the brow before which his welcoming smile faded.
"Oh, Uncle Jaff, you are strong!" Doria smiled at him admiringly and declared she couldn't lift the thing an inch from the ground with both her hands. "Do you know," she laughed, "when he used to carry me about, I felt as if I had been picked up by an iron crane." Jaffery beamed with delight. He was just a little vain of his physical strength.
A short while afterwards I was in the club again and there I came across Arbuthnot, the manager of Jaffery's newspaper, whom I had known for some years originally I think through Jaffery. I accepted the offer of a seat at his luncheon table, and, as men will, we began to discuss our common friend. "I wonder what has come over him lately," said he after a while. "Have you noticed any difference?"
Even I didn't know till to-day what a great genius Adrian was. All these things he describes he never saw them. He imagined, created. Oh, my God! If only he had lived to finish it." She put her two hands before her eyes and dashed them swiftly away "Jaffery has done his best, poor fellow. But oh! the bridges he speaks of they're so crude, so crude! I can see every one. The murder you remember?"
But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery.
The more vividly did they present the details of their life, the more heartfelt were my thanksgivings to a merciful Providence for having been spared so dreadful an experience. Our two friends, however, found indiscriminate joy in everything; I have their letters to prove it. And Jaffery especially found perpetual enjoyment in the vagaries of Liosha.
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