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Updated: June 3, 2025
Not to save his soul could Queed have avoided seeing it: Henry G. Surface, Esq., 36 Washington Street. There was a dead silence: a silence that from matter-of-fact suddenly became unendurable. Queed handed the envelope to Nicolovius. Nicolovius glanced at it, while pretending not to, and his eyelash flickered; his face was about the color of cigar ashes. Queed walked away, waiting.
"Nothing at all,'thanks," said Queed, so indignantly that Nicolovius dropped the subject at once. The star-boarder of Mrs. Paynter's might have been fifty-five or he might have been seventy, and his clothes had long been the secret envy of Mr. Bylash. He leaned against the mantel at his ease, blowing blue smoke.
To those who called at his office, to the men he met at the sign of the Mercury, even to Nicolovius when he betook himself from the lamp-lit sitting-room, it was his carefully attained habit to say: "I hope to see you again soon." He meant the hope, with these, only in the most general and perfunctory sense.
"I'm afraid," said Nicolovius, smoothly, it was the only word he uttered during the meal, "your remark harrows Miss Weyland with reminders of the late Mr. Surface." The Major stopped short, and a silence fell over the table. It was promptly broken by Mrs. Paynter, who invited Mrs. Brooke to have a second cup of coffee. Sharlee looked at her plate and said nothing.
Tim, to whom the matter was sure to be broached, was to encourage the young man to go. But more than this: it was to be Tim's diplomatic task to steer him to the house where Surface, as Nicolovius, resided.
I cannot get away from history in the making, if I would. Ah, there is the supper bell I'm quite ready for it, too. Let us go down." They went down arm in arm. On the stairs Nicolovius said: "These Southern manifestations interest me because, though extreme, they are after all so absurdly typical of human nature. I have even seen the same sort of thing in my own land."
The level gaze of each held just the same look of faint horror, horror subdued and controlled, but still there. Their stare became fascinated; it ran on as though nothing could ever happen to break it off. To Queed it seemed as if everything in the world had dropped away but those brilliant eyes, frightened yet unafraid, boring into his. Nicolovius broke the silence.
Nicolovius did not mean to say or do anything. He meant to pass over the little incident altogether. However, the pretense had now reached a point when Queed could no longer endure it. "Perhaps, after all," said Nicolovius, in his studiously bland voice, "I am a little sweeping " Queed stood in front of him, interrupting, suddenly not at ease. "Professor Nicolovius." "Yes?"
He was in a condition of mental unrest, undefined but acute; odds and ends of curious thought kicked about within him, challenging him to follow them down to unexplored depths. But he was paying no attention to them now. He sat in the sitting-room, wondering how Nicolovius had ever happened to think of that story about the Fenian refugee.
Queed, though he knew the history of Ireland very well, could not recall any parallel to the United Confederate Veterans in the annals of that country. Still, a man capable of distorting history as Nicolovius distorted it could always find a parallel to anything anywhere. When the meal was about half over, Queed said: "You slept badly last night, didn't you?" "Yes my old enemy.
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