Short Fiction · The Facts In The Curious Case Of H Hyrtl Esq (6/8)

VI

In high indignation at the old man’s mulish obstinacy Hugh strode out into the street and on and beyond into other regions of the city. He was vastly annoyed, and his annoyance was increased by the fact that he had permitted it to be apparent. He should have been calm, he told himself, calm, though authoritative, and he should have displayed, with cogent reasonings, the folly of supposing that at the tail-end of the nineteenth century a young woman could be sequestrated and kept apart from her lover. It was that he should have made manifest, and with it his ability to provide not only for Jenny, but for her father, her grandfather⁠—for as many Sissetons as could be produced. And instead of that, instead of showing the slightest tact, the merest spark of common sense, he had threatened the old man with a summons and made him an enemy for life. There was now but one course left for him to pursue: to apologize as abjectly as he knew how, and that failing, to elope with Jenny on the spot. That she would go with him he did not doubt for an instant, and already he saw himself, another Lochinvar, bearing off the girl of his heart in a green car to the nearest parsonage available.

In dreams forecast he turned and retraced his steps. He would have it out with the old man at once, he determined; and on reaching Tompkins Square he marched straight upstairs and knocked, gently and deferentially at the Sisseton door. Save the beating of his own heart there was not a sound to be heard. He knocked again, a trifle more resolutely, yet still there was no reply. He peered through the keyhole. Not a glimmer of light was to be seen.

“It is I,” he called⁠—“Hugh Hyrtl. Won’t you let me in, Mr. Sisseton? I am sorry for the way I spoke.”

But there was no answer to his appeal. Again he knocked, loudly, boisterously, calling to Jenny, calling to her father and calling in vain. From the floor below a voice mounted bidding him cease that racket. He tried the door; it was locked.

“You must let me in,” he insisted. “I shall stay here until you do.”

Again the protest mounted, with it the fall of a step that he knew, and Mrs. O’Hassadam, a broom in one hand, a candle in the other suddenly appeared.

“My! my!” that lady exclaimed, “if I didn’t think it was the police. They’re after him anyway, and good riddance it is.”

“After whom?”

“The ex-convict, to be sure; who would they be after? He was off like that! But they’re on his track, he can’t have got far at all whatever, he and his blooming daughter. It was wrong you were, Mr. Hyrtl, to consort with the likes of them.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“What do I mean, Mr. Hyrtl? Indeed, and I mean what I say. An hour ago that old forger came downstairs dragging a trunk and his daughter after him. ‘I am going on a trip,’ said he, handing me his key. ‘To Sing Sing, I’ll wager,’ said I to myself. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ he continued. ‘Come, Jenny’; and, would you believe that though she was crying her eyes out, she tried to say something to me on the quiet like? But he grabbed her and whisked her off. At the rate he went it will take the cavalry to catch him. It’s a murder case, sure, Mr. Hyrtl, and a fine reputation whatever it will give to this house.”

“Gone,” Hugh murmured, dejectedly, “it can’t be possible.”

“Here is the key,” cried the janitress, triumphantly. “And if you were to unlock that door the Lord deliver us from the horrors you would find.”

With that statement for prelude, Mrs. O’Hassadam launched forth into voluble digressions and extravagant conjectures; but Hugh was not to be detained, he had no heart to listen further, and dumbly perplexed, he turned and sought his room.

For a fortnight thereafter Hugh ransacked the city, wandering like a lost dog through mazes of streets, interrogating windows, questioning lodging-house keepers, always on the alert and always disappointed. At the end of that period he learned that a secondhand furniture dealer had come, exhibited a bill of sale and carted off the Sisseton belongings. Where to? Ah! that Mrs. O’Hassadam did not know, but she took evident pleasure in losing herself in the wildest surmises.

Thereupon the Odyssey recommenced. The appalling ugliness of the suburbs, the terrors of Long Island, New Jersey wastes, one and all were visited and visited in vain. He had not a clue to work on and not a trace of the missing was to be had. Presently fatigue and disappointment had their way; a low fever overtook him and for a month he lay in bed. Mrs. O’Hassadam had a physician in for him, but Hugh was strong and young, and in spite of the physician the fever departed and the convalescent, very feeble but with clearer mind, rose to his feet. If Jenny had cared for him, he decided, at least she would have sent him a line.

Thereat he got at his easel again and painted with a grim energy which he had never displayed before. Work has the ability to dull the most ardent sorrow, and in that which Hugh undertook, though happiness had fallen by the wayside, art stood revealed. Moreover, chanced favored him. Being indifferent to both fame and fortune, he was necessarily the person whom fame and fortune elected to pursue. A dealer who heretofore had purchased his wares at prices that would have made a mad-dog blush, suddenly increased them. Not only that, he admitted that Hugh’s signature was beginning to acquire an appreciable commercial value, and as a commission for someone whose name he was not at liberty to mention, he took “Heliogabalus” in exchange for two thousand dollars in cash.

Hugh paid the debts he had contracted during his illness and set to work harder than before. He could have taken a studio now in a pleasanter part of the city, or he could have set off on that tour through the ghosts and treasures of Italy of which every artist dreams. But invisible threads detained him, and he remained where he was, consuming his heart with regrets and his strength with fatigue.

Summer passed, the Autumn came, and with it an unstillable longing to get away⁠—to be somewhere where there was youth and companionship, where there were smiles and flowers, the welcome of eyes and fields. His solitude was distressing to him. Week in, week out there was not a soul with whom he could exchange a word. He had not a friend, not a relative even, and his sweetheart he had lost. Wherever he looked was the desert, and in his heart was a blank despair. Had his mother been living, how quickly he would have gone to her. But she was dead, and he could no longer run to her side, as had been his wont, with the troubles of childhood’s years. He was alone, without a tie, a hope or an aim.

At the thought of his mother he recalled the hour when his dearest wish had been to erect a monument on her grave. He had money in plenty to do so now. Though he were forsaken by the living, why should he forsake the dead? The next day he arrived at Richmond, and by evening he was before the cottage which he loved.

Apparently nothing had happened to it. It had contented itself with continuing to be, and in the increasing darkness rose white and solitary as before. Hugh unlocked the door and entered. The shutters, he noticed, had disappeared, the broken windows were curtained with cobwebs, there was an odor and silence of the tomb, but practically it had weathered the years unchanged. Noiselessly, as though in fear of disturbing phantoms, he passed through the little hall to the kitchen beyond. It was chill and damp, but through the window the spire of the village church was just discernible, and nearby was a grave that he knew. For a minute, an hour perhaps, he loitered there, the guest of memories that came one by one and claimed him as their own⁠—the sport he had had with Dinah and his mother’s tender care; episodes long forgotten returned to him, but in that curious fashion that episodes will at times assume, as though they had occurred not to him, but to some Hugh Hyrtl who had existed in an anterior life, one in which he personally had had no part and of which only a hearsay recollection endured. There, for instance, was his mother’s sudden illness and unexpected death. Try as he might, he could not reconstruct that scene. In the dimmest manner only he recalled that one day a cry was said to have rung through the cottage and that Dinah had found his mother fainting on the floor. But what had happened he had never known. The cause was obscure.

From these meditations a gust of wind aroused him. He shivered and turned. In a corner were a few pieces of wood, and with some stray papers in his pocket he determined to make a fire. But the task was not easy; a mass of ashes that for years had rested undisturbed filled the stove. In endeavoring to remove them, he struck a hard object, which, on examination, proved to be a key, curiously formed, long and narrow, that he could have sworn he had seen before. But where? In that anterior existence, perhaps, from which certain recollections come; and he was about to put it aside and continue his work, when abruptly, from the very core of memory, a picture floated⁠—his mother standing at a table locking and unlocking a certain box. That box, he remembered, always stood on a shelf in her room; and at last, the ashes removed, he groped up the creaking stair to see if the box might be there still. The match he held went out. He lighted another and opened the door. On the shelf the box stood covered with immemorial dust. He raised it; it was so light he was sure there was nothing in it. Nevertheless he took it back to the kitchen and inserted and turned the key. Within, a letter lay, discolored and yellow. By the uncertain flicker of the fire, Hugh read from it as follows:

Madam⁠—Although I am a stranger to you, I believe it to be my duty to place you in possession of certain information which otherwise you might never obtain.

Nine years ago it was reported that your husband, Humphery Hyrtl, was lost at sea. That report was false. When the ship which he commanded sank, I was with him. Of all on board he and I alone escaped. We were picked up by a passing vessel and taken to South America. On the boat he declared that he was my brother, and, on reaching Rio, caused it to be recorded at the United States Consulate that Humphery Hyrtl and his ship were lost. It did not take me long to discover that he had left in Virginia a wife and child, to whom, for reasons of his own, he did not wish to return. I became so indignant at his conduct that he finally promised to go back to you as soon as he had made enough to live on. Since then we have worked together, sometimes lucky, often the reverse. Today our partnership is dissolved. His share amounts to ninety thousand dollars, and with it he should return to you; but, as he has told me to address his letters to Boston, I presume that it is his intention to dissipate the money which should rightfully go to your support and that of your son.”

I inform you of these facts in order that you may take such steps as seem advisable. He is to leave here tomorrow, and after making a short stop in St. Louis and in Chicago, should be in your neighborhood sometime during the first or second week of the coming month. If he does not appear, you will, by making inquiries concerning him, under his assumed name of Humphery Anderson, surely find him in Boston.

When Hugh had read the letter, for the first time he understood the cause of his mother’s death. The knowledge that the man whom she had loved and mourned was not only alive, but preferred life under an assumed name to life with her, had broken her heart. Truly, he reflected, it was sufficient: the cup was full. And as he mused over the terrible tidings that the letter contained, he saw at once that it was his father who had been killed in the collision, that the money which had been entrusted to Sisseton was the money to which the letter referred; the remarkable chain of circumstances which had permitted John Anderson to represent himself as the brother of the deceased were clear to him and the unaccountable excitement which the little man had manifested when the name of Hyrtl was pronounced easily understood.

“The money was mine,” muttered Hugh. “He knew it, and, by heavens, I will make him disgorge!”

He passed out through the empty hall to the road beyond.

“Ah, Jenny,” he cried, to the stars, “let me but find you now and you shall be rich, indeed!”