Phantom Wires | Page 7

he had last watched so patiently and
heroically imparting the mastery of the pianoforte to seven little

English children in a squalid Paris pension, now lapsing back into the
old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility? Why had she
weakened and surrendered, when he himself, the oldtime weakling of
the two, had clung so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude? And
what was the meaning and the direction of it all? And what would it
lead to? But why, above all, had she kept silent, and given him no
warning?
Durkin looked up and listened to the soft rustling of the palm branches.
The bray of a distant band saddened him with an unfathomable sense of
homesickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with languid
tropicality, and the waiting richness of life, he caught the belated
glimmer of lights and the throb and murmur of string music. It carried
in to him what seemed the essential and alluring note of all the
existence he had once known and lived. Yet day by day he had fought
back that sirenic call. It had not always been an open victory--the
weight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for that--but for her sake
he had at least vacillated and hesitated and temporized, waiting and
looking for that final strength which would come with her first wistful
note of warning, or with her belated return to his side.
Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick about him; here Chance
had laid the board for its most tempting game. In that way, as the young
Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the world. But he had
turned away from those clustering temptations, he had left unbroken his
veneer of honorable life, for her sake--while she herself had
surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably, whatever strange form the
surrender might even at that moment be taking.
All he could do, now, was to wait until morning. There would surely be
some message, some hint, some key to the mystery. While everything
remained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through the tangled past
in search of some casual seed of explanation for that still undeciphered
present.
He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopic
past career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraph operator,
when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-on into an Odd

Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from the railroad,
and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate struggle to work his
way up once more, his hunger for money and even a few weeks of
leisure, that his long dreamed of photo-telegraphy apparatus might be
perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in the
Postal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or two
until he and his outside confederate had been able to make their illicit
wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wandering street-cat life,
when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch of poverty had turned
him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers and vicissitudes of a
poolroom key-operator. He recalled his chance meeting with MacNutt,
the wire-tapper, and their partnership of privateer forces in that strange
campaign against Penfield, the alert and opulent poolroom king, who
had seemed always able to defy the efforts and offices of a combative
and equally alert district-attorney.
Most vividly and minutely of all, he reviewed his first meeting with
Frances Candler, and the bewilderment that had filled him when he
discovered her to be an intimate and yet a reluctant associate with
MacNutt in his work--a bewilderment which lasted until he himself
grew to realize how easy was the downward trend when once the first
false step had been made.
He brought back to mind their strange adventures and perils and
escapes together, day by day and week by week, their early interest that
had ripened into affection, their innate hatred of that underground life,
which eventually flowered into open revolt and flight, their impetuous
marriage, their precipitate journey from the shores of America.
Then came to him what seemed the bitterest memories of all. It was the
thought of that first too fragile happiness which slowly but implacably
merged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but none the less evident.
That interregnum of peace had been a Tantalus-like taste of a draught
which he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet, point by point, he
recalled their first quiet and hopeful weeks in England, when their old
ways of life seemed as far away as the America they had left behind,
when they still had unbounded faith in themselves and in the future.

Just how or where fell the first corroding touch he could never tell. But
in each of them there had grown up a