Herriard

“ There has never been room in the world, even when it was less crowded, for two lovers of the same lady. The angle of love is now acute, now obtuse; it is never a triangle.”
“It has,” Herriard retorted, “always been the world’s code in such cases for rivals to meet and settle the matter on fair and equal terms.”
[316] Gastineau smiled.
“Not always, by any means, my dear Herriard. Your history is at fault. In fact it has almost invariably and proverbially been the custom for a rival to take any advantage that chance might offer him. ”

“ My being a helpless cripple, a man with both feet literally in the grave, a brain without a body, meant everything to you. You played your game, taking the risk, and lost it; lost it through a miscalculation of our respective smartness.”
“You are wrong, Gastineau, utterly,” Herriard broke in with indignation.
“Am I?” he returned, with a sneer. “I know you, Geoffrey Herriard, better, possibly, than you know yourself. You have been playing a dangerous game; are playing it still; but you have made more than one false move, and the game is lost. There only remains for you to pay.” ”

“ Gastineau took the cigarette from his lips with a deprecating wave of the hand. “Don’t be in a hurry, Mr. Geoffrey Herriard,” he said, with a patronizing laugh. “I am not at all sure that I want your place, and if I did, I fancy there is room in the world, legal and political, for both of us. It is not there, in the House, or at the Bar, that we are likely to be rivals.” ”

“ The enchaining melody of the great Russian master rose and thrilled under the passionate touch of the girl at the piano; it mingled with the perfume of Alexia’s hair, as Herriard bent over her and pressed his lips to her cheek. It was [164] but a snatched kiss, for they were half in sight of the other two, but it was not to be resisted.
Alexia put up her hand in half-earnest warning. “Mr. Herriard! Geoffrey! You will be seen. Will you never learn to be opportune?” ”

“ Herriard, walking briskly, turned up Hertford Street, and presently taking a little used thoroughfare, made his way deep into the intricacies of Mayfair, that curious maze of mansions and slums where Peers live next door to slop-shops, and the chorus from a footman’s Free-and-Easy at the public-house across the street may keep awake a dowager countess or weave melody into ducal dreams. ”

“ Herriard on his way to the Countess Alexia with the news—which had been sent to him at once—called at Gastineau’s, being anxious to gather every grain of hope there might be of making the best of this bitter disappointment.
“I have not come to worry you any more about Campion,” was Herriard’s greeting, with a short bitter laugh of discomfiture. “The poor fellow will never give evidence now. He is dead.” ”

“ Indeed, as Gastineau’s limp weight lurched forward against him, his head hanging down, Herriard asked himself whether nature were not about to take a desirable, if unpleasant, task, out of human hands. ”

“ Gastineau rejoined, with a vicious drawing back of the lips into the semblance of a smile. “If you were not a fool, Geoffrey Herriard, you would know better than to oppose yourself to a man who lets nothing thwart him.” ”

“ At the same time Herriard’s mind was alert enough, with the abnormal activity of a dreamer’s. He wondered why Gastineau did not speak; then whether those sharp eyes could fail to see him; all the time searching helplessly for a solution of the miracle of his being there on his feet. As in a dream, the flash of time was lengthened out, in reality Gastineau’s look into the room lasted but two or three seconds. At length Herriard, feeling sure he must be seen, and desperate to snap the intolerable tension, made an effort to speak. ”

“ He gave Herriard the parcel of briefs with an encouraging smile and nod of confidence. “Now you had better turn in,” he said, “or you won’t be fit for Court in the morning. Who tries the tramway case?”
“Gartree.”
“That old fool? He will probably misdirect, and give you a second chance. Good-night, my dear boy. So glad you scored to-night.”
They shook hands affectionately, and in another minute Herriard, in spite of a long, exciting day, was walking, with the brisk step of that elation which knows no fatigue, towards his rooms in Mount Street. ”

“ The reason, the excuse was apt: and he, Geoffrey Herriard, would be a free man again, to stand or fall by his own abilities. That his marriage would make imperative; after this disclosure the break would be less painful; by it he would be absolved from ingratitude towards the man who had chosen to exploit his fortunes.
“He is dead,” Alexia had said, with a suggestion of relief; and Paul Gastineau was indeed dead to all the world save himself and Geoffrey Herriard. Could he come to life again—Herriard did not care to imagine the contingency except on its impossible side. ”

“ Simultaneously with the pronouncing of the name, by a curious, but not uncommon prescience, the image of Gastineau had started up in Herriard’s mind, and he had known intuitively that no other name would be spoken.
Paul Gastineau! He! That he of all men should have been in love with her. ”

“ Herriard’s held to Gastineau’s by the fascination of the evil and danger they signalled.
“Did he? did he?” The question came hissed out with sharp insistence. For Herriard, posed by the direct challenge, hesitated, at a loss for the moment as to the course he should take.
“You believe nothing I say; I will say nothing.”
“Pouf!” It was a poor evasion, and the strong man blew it aside with a contemptuous exclamation. “Just realize the position, Herriard,” he said; “the position in which you stand. I am a dead man; a man with no known or legally recognized existence. ”

“ Like accusing spirits there now rose to his mind the quasi dead fighter’s vindictive attacks on men he had hated and envied, of which he, Geoffrey Herriard, poor tool, had been the mouthpiece; the venomous stinging thrusts he had been taught to deliver so deftly; the terrible, transcendent irony and sarcasm into which he had been coached with such untiring pains. Why should a man who had, by a strange combination of accident and choice, taken leave of the world, why should he retain and revel in all this eager vindictiveness, except that his soul was black as sin? Gastineau was a very Iago ”

“ Countess—Alexia, forgive my boldness when I tell you that we, you and I, have no right, it would be an act of short-sighted folly, to throw ourselves away on inferior mates. You must know this, you who are so clever, who can read men and the world; I cannot imagine that you can be blind to the hideous mistake you would commit in allying yourself to a mere puppet, a weakling, the simulacrum of a man, such as Geoffrey Herriard. ”

“ But when once the deception had been decided on, the busy, acute brain, as keen as ever, set to work strenuously to perfect all the details of the business. And something more. The hidden light was to burn as brightly as ever behind its screen of lies; the dead hand was to strike as viciously as of old, the stilled voice to sting through other lips. Gastineau studied Herriard and came to the conclusion that he was fitted for the purpose he had in mind. ”

“ The question was put so abruptly, so pointedly, that Herriard was startled into looking up quickly into the other’s face. He felt that Hallamar was trying to read in his eyes the true state of his relationship with Gastineau; and that the result was a confirmed doubt.
“We are scarcely,” he answered, “as friendly as we were once.”
“No?” Hallamar’s manner could not be said to express even a polite regret. “Well, perhaps that may be not altogether a bad thing,” he suggested. “Mr. Murray is too clever for close friendship with most of us. Such towering intellect as his stands better alone.” ”

“ Herriard urged hopelessly, “had at least a chance, if a poor one. He was not butchered in cold blood.”
Gastineau shrugged.
“The fool had the satisfaction of dying with a weapon in his hand, against which advantage must be set the fact that he left behind him the reputation of not knowing how to use it. But, my good fellow, when you talk of advantage, surely you, who, when I was crippled, had such a pull over me, are not going to complain now that the tables are turned and the balance properly adjusted in the proportion of our respective intellects.” ”

“ The sword which Gastineau had put into his hand, and the skill in fence which he had taught him, had been greatly used to stab the disabled fencer’s rivals and enemies, to prevent them from profiting by the disappearance of their old adversary. In the intoxicating whirl of success which had hurried him onwards and upwards, Herriard had not found pause to realize the true, inevitable logic of his position. Love was now the Nemesis which was bringing it bitterly home to him. ”

“ Gastineau smiled. “If I am far from believing it, it does not follow that I doubt your sincerity in making the declaration. Only, as I have said, fortunately or unfortunately, I know more of the world in general and of Mr. Geoffrey Herriard in particular than does that person himself. No, my dear fellow,”—there was a revolting irony in the term—“when I am a great man, a very great man, as, bar accidents, I mean to be, it would be a quite irresistible temptation to one like yourself to shake the ladder just as I had reached the topmost rung. Don’t protest; I know human nature. ”

“ In this Gastineau’s advice was golden; he seemed to have the faculty of anticipating everything that would happen; not merely the line the cross-examination would take, but even the very wording of the questions which the rough-tongued Macvee would ask. So Herriard’s championship of his client was, at least on the human side of the case, successful to admiration, notwithstanding that sympathy was largely against him. The craving for scandal and for the downfall of a fair woman is a morbid growth which will eat away the innate sense of chivalry. ”

“ Why should a bed-ridden man of genius be debarred from the active exercise of his mental powers? Where was the dishonour in being his spokesman, any more than his amanuensis?
So the argument went all one way; the strange partnership began, and was not long in justifying its existence. Men who frequented the fruitful and thorny paths of the law began to speak of Geoffrey Herriard as one of the cleverest of rising counsel; some, speculating in “futures” out of the capital of their reputation for foresight, pointed at him as the coming man. ”

“ Alexia cried in her agitation, “what are we to do? Is there no hope? I would rather kill this fiend with my own hand than that he should take you from me.”
“He has not taken me yet, and I mean to make a fight for it,” Herriard assured her, assuming a confidence he did not feel. He knew his enemy’s untiring vindictiveness and resource too well.
For a long while they talked over chances and expedients for escaping from the net, spun by that busy brain, that seemed to have enmeshed them. ”

“ Gastineau laughed, still sneering. “I don’t know that I should blame you,” he said. “When a man feels his feet, the arm that has kept him up in deep water becomes an encumbrance.”
“You are utterly mistaken in the motive of my suggestion,” Herriard protested. “You have no cause to charge me with such rank ingratitude as that would be. The fact that I owe every step of my position to you makes me very unwilling to propose that we should work together no longer. Yet for some time past I have felt that our partnership must come to an end.” ”

“ How could the identity of one man be discovered? Campion was confident that he would recognize him; but where was the chance of bringing into review before him the hundreds of men who had been included in that big social sweeping-up? The dead man might be supposed to have had enemies, disappointed rivals of the notorious supplanter: but that was only vague conjecture; nothing definite of any one was known.
But one evening Herriard rushed up to the house in Mayfair with a great piece of news. To his discomfiture Gastineau was, for the second time during their acquaintance, denied him. ”

“ Gastineau, having been carried to the monastery and tended by the monks, ever ready for such an office of mercy, lay for days in a semi-comatose condition on the borderland between life and death. He was but one of some dozen victims under the care of these good brothers who, simple and practically dead to the world beyond their narrow sphere, took little heed of their patients’ identities; they were to them simply suffering men whose pain called forth their loving service. Presently, to their joy and Herriard’s satisfaction, Gastineau, who had seemed doomed, began to mend. ”

“ It cannot be denied that in a community spreading over a large extent of territory, and politically founded upon the principles proclaimed in the declaration of independence, but differing so widely in the elements of their social condition, that the inhabitants of one half the territory are wholly free, and those of the other half divided into masters and slaves, deep if not irreconcilable collisions of interest must abound. ”

“ A storm of indignation swept through the entire settlement. ... The people regarded themselves without government, and, true to the traditions of their race, they sought the solution of the difficulty in their own resources. ... It is one of the noteworthy facts in the history of institutions that the possessors of English tradition always begin with the first primal germ of local self-government at hand, be it court leet, court of quarter sessions, township, county, school district, or military company, and build upward. ”