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"Do you remember a note signed Hester Macklin that came three or four weeks ago? Married misunderstood Western army post wanted to correspond?" Betton seemed to grope among his memories; then he assented vaguely. "A short note," Vyse went on: "the whole story in half a page. The shortness struck me so much and the directness that I wrote her: wrote in my own name, I mean." "In your own name?"
A passage cut in the floor, and carefully hidden, gave access to a lower chamber. There lay the mummy in a sarcophagus of sculptured basalt. The sarcophagus was still perfect at the beginning of this century. Removed thence by Colonel Howard Vyse, it foundered on the Spanish coast with the ship which was bearing it to England.
There've been no letters the last day or two," he explained. Betton drew a quick breath of relief. The man had some sense of decency, then! He meant to dismiss himself. "I told you so, my dear fellow; the book's a flat failure," he said, almost gaily. Vyse made a deprecating gesture. "I don't know that I should regard the absence of letters as the ultimate test.
They had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had left Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at his business and Vyse poor devil! trying to write. The novelist recalled his friend's attempts with a smile; then the memory of one small volume came back to him. It was a novel: "The Lifted Lamp." There was stuff in that, certainly.
We might have known the weather would break up soon; and now Lucy wants to go to Greece. I don't know what the world's coming to." "Mrs. Honeychurch," he said, "go to Greece she must. Come up to the house and let's talk it over. Do you, in the first place, mind her breaking with Vyse?" "Mr. Beebe, I'm thankful simply thankful." "So am I," said Freddy. "Good. Now come up to the house."
"You say Mr. Vyse wants me to listen to him, Mr. Emerson. Pardon me for suggesting that you have caught the habit." And he took the shoddy reproof and touched it into immortality. He said: "Yes, I have," and sank down as if suddenly weary. "I'm the same kind of brute at bottom.
"Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and seventy-five souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be sent to the Dead Letter Office." Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn. "After all, the same thing happened to me with 'Hester Macklin, I mean," he recalled sheepishly.
And Siward went on: "I knew perfectly well what sort of women I was to meet at that fool supper Billy Fleetwood gave; and you must have, too, for the girl you took in was no stranger to you. Her name is Lydia Vyse, I believe." The slightest possible glimmer in the elder man's eyes was all the answer he granted.
"After all, I hated them only because I had to answer them"; and he told Vyse carelessly that he wished all his letters submitted to him before the secretary answered them. At first he pushed aside those beginning: "I have just laid down 'Abundance' after a third reading," or: "Every day for the last month I have been telephoning my bookseller to know when your novel would be out."
"Muddy gasoline," nodded Millbank tersely an iron-jawed, over-groomed man of forty, with a florid face shaved blue. "We passed Mr. Plank's big touring-car," observed Lydia Vyse, shifting Tinto to the couch and brushing the black and white hairs from her automobile coat. "How much does a car like that cost, Leroy?" "About twenty-five thousand," he said gloomily.
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