第38章

"Queer kinder fellow," said a wrinkled old bayman with whom I walked up the sandy road, "I seen him a good deal round here, but 'twan't like havin' any 'quaintance with him.He allus kep' himself to himself, pooty much.Used ter stay round 'Squire Ladoo's place most o' the time--keepin' comp'ny with the gal I guess.Larmone? Yaas, that's what THEY called it, but we don't go much on fancy names down here.No, the painter didn' 'zactly live there, but it 'mounted to the same thing.Las' summer they was all away, house shet up, painter hangin' round all the time, 's if he looked fur 'em to come back any minnit.Purfessed to be paintin', but I don' see's he did much.Lived up to Mort Halsey's; died there too; year ago this fall.Guess Mis' Halsey can tell ye most of any one 'bout him."At the boarding-house (with wide, low verandas, now forsaken by the summer boarders), which did duty for a village inn, I found Mrs.

Halsey; a notable housewife, with a strong taste for ancestry, and an uncultivated world of romance still brightening her soft brown eyes.She knew all the threads in the story that I was following;and the interest with which she spoke made it evident that she had often woven them together in the winter evenings on patterns of her own.

Judge Ledoux had come to Quantock from the South during the war, and built a house there like the one he used to live in.There were three things he hated: slavery and war and society.But he always loved the South more than the North, and lived like a foreigner, polite enough, but very retired.His wife died after a few years, and left him alone with a little girl.Claire grew up as pretty as a picture, but very shy and delicate.About two years ago Mr.

Falconer had come down from the city; he stayed at Larmone first, and then he came to the boarding-house, but he was over at the Ledoux' house almost all the time.He was a Southerner too, and a relative of the family; a real gentleman, and very proud though he was poor.It seemed strange that he should not live with them, but perhaps he felt more free over here.Every one thought he must be engaged to Claire, but he was not the kind of a man that you could ask questions about himself.A year ago last winter he had gone up to the city and taken all his things with him.He had never stayed away so long before.In the spring the Ledoux had gone to Europe;Claire seemed to be falling into a decline; her sight seemed to be failing, and her father said she must see a famous doctor and have a change of air.

"Mr.Falconer came back in May," continued the good lady, "as if he expected to find them.But the house was shut up and nobody knew just where they were.He seemed to be all taken aback; it was queer if he didn't know about it, intimate as he had been; but he never said anything, and made no inquiries; just seemed to be waiting, as if there was nothing else for him to do.We would have told him in a minute, if we had anything to tell.But all we could do was to guess there must have been some kind of a quarrel between him and the Judge, and if there was, he must know best about it himself.

"All summer long he kept going over to the house and wandering around in the garden.In the fall he began to paint a picture, but it was very slow painting; he would go over in the afternoon and come back long after dark, damp with the dew and fog.He kept growing paler and weaker and more silent.Some days he did not speak more than a dozen words, but always kind and pleasant.He was just dwindling away; and when the picture was almost done a fever took hold of him.The doctor said it was malaria, but it seemed to me more like a trouble in the throat, a kind of dumb misery.And one night, in the third quarter of the moon, just after the tide turned to run out, he raised up in the bed and tried to speak, but he was gone.

"We tried to find out his relations, but there didn't seem to be any, except the Ledoux, and they were out of reach.So we sent the picture up to our cousin in Brooklyn, and it sold for about enough to pay Mr.Falconer's summer's board and the cost of his funeral.

There was nothing else that he left of any value, except a few books; perhaps you would like to look at them, if you were his friend?

"I never saw any one that I seemed to know so little and like so well.It was a disappointment in love, of course, and they all said that he died of a broken heart; but I think it was because his heart was too full, and wouldn't break.

"And oh!--I forgot to tell you; a week after he was gone there was a notice in the paper that Claire Ledoux had died suddenly, on the last of August, at some place in Switzerland.Her father is still away travelling.And so the whole story is broken off and will never be finished.Will you look at the books?"Nothing is more pathetic, to my mind, than to take up the books of one who is dead.Here is his name, with perhaps a note of the place where the volume was bought or read, and the marks on the pages that he liked best.Here are the passages that gave him pleasure, and the thoughts that entered into his life and formed it; they became part of him, but where has he carried them now?

Falconer's little library was an unstudied choice, and gave a hint of his character.There was a New Testament in French, with his name written in a slender, woman's hand; three or four volumes of stories, Cable's "Old Creole Days," Allen's "Kentucky Cardinal,"Page's "In Old Virginia," and the like; "Henry Esmond" and Amiel's "Journal" and Lamartine's "Raphael"; and a few volumes of poetry, among them one of Sidney Lanier's, and one of Tennyson's earlier poems.

There was also a little morocco-bound book of manuscript notes.

This I begged permission to carry away with me, hoping to find in it something which would throw light upon my picture, perhaps even some message to be carried, some hint or suggestion of something which the writer would fain have had done for him, and which I promised myself faithfully to perform, as a test of an imagined friendship--imagined not in the future, but in the impossible past.