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And Brooke has told me much, the doting old ass. "But the life grew unbearable to a man of my temper. I could afford the decency of privacy in my old age. For I had worked hard and saved since.... "And then you came ... a scholar and a gentleman." It was quite dark in the room. Surface's voice had suddenly changed. The bitterness faded out of it; it became gentler than Queed had ever heard it.
He had hardly added a sentence to this composition before West came in and, with a cheery word of greeting, passed into his own office. The assistant editor went on with his writing. He looked worn this morning, Henry Surface's son, and not without reason. Half the night he had shared the nurse's vigil at the bedside of Surface, who lay in unbroken stupor.
And the probability was that Surface had never worked at all until, returning to his own city, he had needed a position as a cover and a blind. Mathematical computations danced through the young man's brain. He figured that their present scale of living must run anywhere from $3500 to $5000 a year. Surface's income from the school was known to be $900 a year.
The cold fear seized him that the money and the papers were hidden beyond his finding that they lay tucked away in some safety-deposit vault in New York, where his eye would never hunt them out. Surface's son leaned against the elaborate mantel, illimitably weary. He shifted his position ever so little; and thereupon luck did for him what reason would never have done.
In old newspaper files at the State Library, he had found the facts of his father's defalcations. The total embezzlement from the Weyland estate, allowing for $14,000 recovered in the enforced settlement of Surface's affairs, stood at $203,000.
Put it all down to besotted prejudice.... Can't you restore this money because I ask it? Won't you do it as a favor to me?" Surface's face became agitated. "I believe there is nothing else in the world that I wouldn't do for you a thousand times over but " Then Queed threw the last thing that he had to offer into the scales, namely himself.
"No one must know," he said sadly, "until his death. That is not far away, I think." She dropped into a chair, and suddenly buried her face in her hands. Surface's son had risen with her, but he did not resume his seat. He stood looking down at her bowed head, and the expression in his eyes, if she had looked up and captured it, might have taken her completely by surprise.
Surface, said Tim, had been a great scholard, and used to sit up to all hours reading books that Thomason, the butler, couldn't make head nor tail of; and so with Surface's boy. He was the strange duckling among chickens who, with no guidance, straightway plumed himself for the seas of printed knowledge. Time rolled on.
It was a flaw in his little lady that she could believe him capable of baseness.... But not an unforgivable flaw, it would seem, since every hour that he had spent in her presence had become roses and music in his memory, and the thought that he would see her no more stabbed ceaselessly at his heart. Yes, Surface's son knew very well what was the matter with him now.
We are entranced, and it follows, therefore, that the actress must be entranced likewise. Mayhap Miss Smith does not share the same ecstacy; perhaps, as she stands behind the screen in Joseph Surface's rooms, Sir Peter's wife is wishing that the comedy were ended and she were comfortably ensconced in her cosy little lodgings round the corner. Smith, who does nothing but spend his lady's salary.
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