A BRIGHT PARTICULAR STAR

Wire from The Author, New York City, to Miss S. Smith, Hyndsville, South Carolina:

Photos received. Furniture noted. It's pretty, but is it art?

Wire from Miss Smith to The Author:

What is Art?

Wire from The Author:

Sometimes an invention of the devil. Is your stuff Madison Avenue or Grand Rapids? Reply.

Wire from Miss Smith:

Madison Avenue and Grand Rapids hadn't been invented when Hynds House was furnished.

Wire from The Author:

Maybe not, but mightn't be same furniture. Have been stung before. Can't be genuine. Too much of it.

Wire from Miss Smith:

Please yourself.

Wire from The Author:

Coming to investigate. Won't sleep in anything but pineapple bed; won't sit in anything but carved chair; can't pray without prie-dieu. If spurious will publicly gibbet you and probably burn your house down. Hold southwest room my arrival.

Alicia laughed, and cuddled those yellow slips.

"I knew this was an enchanted place!" she cried. "Oh, Sophy, it's working! He's coming, he's coming, and he's the biggest ever, and he's going to stay ! Sophy, think of the advertising!"

"He will probably be detestable. Geniuses are generally horrid to live with. And there will be something the matter with his digestion; there is always something the matter with their digestion."

"From swallowing all the flattery shoveled upon them, poor dears," Alicia explained charitably. "Don't worry about his digestion: leave it to Mary Magdalen's waffles. Hooray! Hynds House stock is booming!"

It was.

From the head of our firm:

Letter from Miss Emmeline Phelps-Parsons, of Boston:

"Somewhere on the firing-line of fifty," mused Alicia. "A lady with a soul. Don't you hear dear old Boston calling you, Sophy? Here's one to put Miss Martha Hopkins's light under a bushel basket!"

We had several other inquirers; and chose from them Mr. Chetwynd Harrison-Gore and his daughter, English folk "doing" America and delighted to include a Carolina colonial house in their trip; a suffrage leader, whose throat needed a rest; and Morenas, the illustrator. It seemed that Hynds House offered to each one something that had been craved for.

The Author pounced upon us two or three days before we expected him, to take stock after his own fashion. I have heard The Author commended for "the humor of his rare smile and the keen, kind intellectuality of his remarkable eyes." Well, the smile was rare enough; and of course there isn't any doubt about the man's intellectuality. For the rest, he proved to be a tall, lanky, stooping person, with a thin tanned face, outstanding ears, a high nose, and long, blue-gray eyes half-hidden under drooping lids and behind glasses. His hair was just hair. And he had the sort of mustache that bristled like a cat's when he twisted his lip.

So far as monetary success, and efficacious press-agents, and the adulation, admiration, emulation, and envy of his contemporaries went, he had nothing to complain of. He was lionized, quoted, courted, flattered, reviewed, viewed through rose-colored spectacles; and disillusioned, discontented, cynical, selfish, and, of course, most horribly bored. He was gun-shy of women; he suspected them of wanting to marry him. He was wary of men; he suspected them of wanting to exploit him. He loathed children, who were generally obstreperous and unnecessary editions of parents he didn't admire. He didn't even trust the beautiful works of men's hands. They, even they, were too often faked! If you had dug up the indubitable mummy of the first Pharaoh from under the oldest of the pyramids, The Author would have turned him over on his back and hunted for the trade-mark of The Modern Mummy-makers: London, Paris, and New York; Catalogue on Request.

He stalked through Hynds House with slitted eyes and bristling mustache—business of silent sleuth on the trail of the furniture-fakir! He'd pause at each door and with an eagle glance take a comprehensive survey; then, defensively, offensively, he examined things in detail. From our rambling attics to our vast and cavernous cellars did he go; and not a word crossed his lips until he had completed this conandoyley examination. Then:

"Telegraph form if you have one, please," he requested briefly. "I wish to wire for my car. Put Johnson in the room next mine. Johnson's my secretary." He looked at Alicia, reflectively. "Amiable ass, Johnson," he volunteered. Then he went over to the tiled fireplace—we were in the library—and bent worshipfully before it.

"The finest bit of tile-work on this continent," he said, in a hushed voice. "Absolutely perfect. And it belongs to a woman named Smith!"

"We know just how you feel about it," Alicia told him sympathetically, while The Author turned red to his ears. "I have often felt like that myself, when something I particularly wanted was bought by somebody I was sure couldn't properly appreciate it. I dare say I was mistaken," admitted Alicia, "just as mistaken as you are now in thinking that Sophy and I aren't worthy of those tiles. We are—all the more so because we never before had anything like them."

The spoiled darling of success looked at us intently; and a most curious change came over his clever, bad-tempered face. His eyes are as bright as ice, and have somewhat the same cold light in them. Now a thaw set in and melted them, and a mottled red spread over his sallow cheeks.

"Miss Gaines," he said, abruptly, "your doll-baby face does your intelligence an injustice—Miss Smith, I apologize." And before the astonished and indignant Alicia could summon a withering retort, he added heartily: "This whole place is quite the real thing, you know—almost too good to be true and too true to be good. Would you mind telling me how you happened to think of letting me in on it, eh?"

"Because we knew it was the real thing," Alicia replied, truthfully.

"Do you know,"—The Author was plainly pleased—"that that is one of the very nicest things that's ever been said to me? Because I really do know above a bit about genuine stuff."

"It must be a great relief to you to hear something pleasant about yourself that is also something true," I said with sympathy. The Author grinned like a hyena, and Alicia giggled. "Because you must be bored to extinction, having to listen to all sorts of people ascribe to you all sorts of virtues that no one man could possibly possess and remain human." I was remembering some of the fulsome flubdub I'd read about him.

"Hark to her!" grinned The Author. "What! you don't believe all the nice things you've read about me?"

"I do not."

"You don't in the least look or write like a dehumanized saint, you know," supplemented Alicia, laughing.

"What do I look like, then?" He sat on the edge of a table and cuddled a bony knee. Behind his glasses his eyes began to twinkle.

"You look more like yourself than you do like your photographs," decided Alicia.

The Author threw up his hands.

"And now, tell me this, please: How, when, where, and from whom, did you acquire the supreme art of aiding and abetting an old house to grow young again without losing its character?"

"We were born," Alicia explained, "with the inherent desire to do just what we have been able to do here. This house gave us our big chance. But it wouldn't have been so—so in keeping with itself," she was feeling for the right words, "if it hadn't been for Mr. Nicholas Jelnik."

The Author pricked up his intellectual ears. His eyes narrowed.

"Jelnik? I knew a Jelnik, an Austrian alienist; met him at dinner at the American Ambassador's in Vienna; quiet, unassuming, pleasant man, and one of the greatest doctors in Europe."

"Mr. Jelnik is Doctor Jelnik's son."

"What!" shrieked The Author. And with unfeigned amazement: "In the name of high heaven, what is Jelnik's son doing here ?"

"Mr. Jelnik's mother was a Miss Hynds. She met and married your doctor abroad."

That sixth sense possessed by him to an unusual degree, warned him that he was on the trail of Copy.

"May I ask questions?" he demanded.

"Of course."

"You inherited this property from an old aunt, I believe?"

"She wasn't my aunt, really. She married my mother's uncle, Johnny Scarlett."

"I see. And Jelnik's mother was a Miss Hynds. How long has he been here?"

"For some time before we came."

"Near neighbor of yours?"

"Yes," Alicia put in; "and Doctor Richard Geddes is our neighbor on the other side. His grandmother was a Miss Hynds."

"Pardon a writer-man's curiosity," begged The Author, smiling. "But this house is unusual, very unusual. While I am here I shall look up its history. It should make good copy."

Having a pretty shrewd idea of The Author's powers of finding out what he wanted to find out, we thought it better that he should hear that history, as we knew it. If the mystery had ever been solved, the tragedy of Hynds House would have had but passing interest for The Author. But the undiscovered piqued and puzzled him and aroused his combative egotism.

From the pictured face of Freeman—dark, stern, uncommunicative—he trotted back to the drawing room to look again at the boyish face of little Richard leaning against his pretty mother's knees; at the haughty, handsome face of James Hampden; and at beautiful dark Jessamine, who had a long black curl straying across the shoulder of a blue frock, and a curled red lip, and a breast of snow.

"Freeman was not a crook; his face is hard, stern, bigoted, secretive, but honest. Yet if he didn't do it himself what was he trying to tell when death cut off his wind? If he did it, where did he hide the plunder? Here in this house? His family must have known every nook and cranny as well as he did himself, and he could be sure they'd pull it to pieces in the search that would ensue.

"If Richard were the thief, to whom did he give the loot? If the gems had been put upon the market, some trace of them must have been discovered. Remains: Who got them? Where did they go?"

"That's what the unhappy people in this house asked a century ago, and there was no answer," I remarked, soberly.

"And that poor woman Jessamine went mad trying to solve it!" he said, looking at her with commiseration. And after a pause: "And so the lady who left her husband's grandniece the house of her forebears was Freeman's daughter: and the Austrian doctor's son is Richard's great-great-grandson! I meet Jelnik père in Vienna, and come to Hyndsville, South Carolina, to meet Jelnik fils . H'm! Decidedly, the situation has nice possibilities!"

Whereupon he took note-book and fountain-pen from his coat pocket and in the most composed manner began to jot down the outstanding features of Hynds House history.

"It will give me something to puzzle over while I'm here," he remarked, complacently. It did!

The Author approved of Hynds House. It had all the charm of a new and quaint field of exploration and research, and there was nothing in it to offend his hypercritical judgment. I have a shrewd suspicion that Mary Magdalen's cooking played no mean part in his satisfaction. His prowess as a trencherman aroused the admiration and respect of Fernolia, who waited on table. Fernolia had learned to admire herself in her smart apron and cap, and to serve creditably enough. Only twice did she fall from grace; once was the morning The Author broke his own record for waffles. Fernolia, excited and astonished, placed the last platter before him, raised the cover with a flourish, and remarked with deep meaning:

" Dem's all! "

The second time was when we had what Mary Magdalen calls "mulatto rice," which is a dish built upon a firm foundation of small strips of bacon, onion, stewed tomatoes, and rice, and a later and last addition of deliciously browned country sausages. Fernolia, beaming upon The Author hospitably, broke her parole:

"You ain't called to skimp yo'self none on dat rice," she told him confidentially. "De cook done put yo' name in de pot big . She say she glad we-all got man in de house to 'preciate vittles. Yes- suh , Ma'y Magdalen aim to make you bust yo' buttonholes whilst you hab de chanst."

I am told that The Author always makes a great hit when he tells that on himself, and is considered tremendously clever because he can imitate Fernolia's soft South Carolina drawl.

Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, whom he managed to meet within the week, aroused The Author's professional interest. For once his tried and tested powers of turning other people's minds inside out failed utterly. His innocent-sounding queries, his adroit leads, were smilingly turned aside. The defense, so far as Mr. Jelnik was concerned, was ridiculously simple: he didn't want to talk about himself and he didn't do it.

He was perfectly willing to talk, when the humor seized him, and he did talk, brilliantly, wittily, freely, and impersonally. The egoistic "I" was conspicuous by its absence. And while he talked you could see the agile antennæ of The Author's winged mind feeling after the soul-string that might lead him through the mazes of this unusual character. That he could be deftly diverted filled The Author with chagrin mingled with wonder.

He manœuvered for an invitation to the gray cottage and secured it with suspicious ease; called, and had a glass of most excellent wine in his host's simplest of bachelor living-rooms; made the closer acquaintance of Boris—he didn't care for dogs—and of self-contained, dark-faced Daoud, Mr. Jelnik's East Indian man-servant; and came home dissatisfied and determined. He scented "copy," and a born writer after copy is, next to an Apache after a scalp or a Dyak after his enemy's head, the most ruthless of created beings. He will pick his mother's naked soul to pieces, bore into his wife's living brain, dissect his daughter's quivering heart, tear across his sister's mind, rip up his father's life and his best friend's character, lay bare the tomb itself, and make for himself an ink of tears and blood that he may write what he finds. Of such is the kingdom of Genius.

And in the meantime the wondrous news that The Author himself was staying at Hynds House, percolated through Hyndsville and soaked to the bone. The Author was too big a figure to be ignored, even by South Carolina people. Something had to be done. But how shall one become acquainted with a notoriously unfriendly and gun-shy celebrity, a personage of such note that every utterance means newspaper space; and at the same time manage utterly to ignore and cast into outer darkness the people with whom the great one is staying?

The town felt itself put upon its mettle. The first move was made by Miss Martha Hopkins. It was understood that if anybody could clear the way, carry a difficult position with skill and aplomb, that somebody was Miss Martha Hopkins.

She didn't bear down directly upon The Author: that would have been crude. She opened her campaign by a flank movement upon Alicia and me, in her capacity of secretary and treasurer of the missionary society.

Miss Hopkins sailed into Hynds House on a perfect afternoon, to discuss with us a proposed rummage-sale which was to benefit the heathen. She wasn't really worrying about the heathen: he had all the rest of his benighted life to get himself saved in, hadn't he? All the while she sat there and talked about him, she was really loaded to the muzzle with pertinent remarks to affluent authors.

She had come with the hope of chancing upon the great man himself; and, failing that, she meant to pump Alicia and me of enough material to, say, enable her to use a part of her stock of pet adjectives in the paper she would prepare for the next meeting of the literary society. She had a pretty stock of adjectives—plump, purple words like lyric , and liquid , and plastic , and subtile , and poignancy , with every now and then a chiaoscuro thrown in for good measure; and a whole melting-pot full of "rare emotional experiences," "art that was almost intuitive in its passion, so subtly did it"—oh, do all sorts of things!—and "handling the plastic outlines of the theme with rare emotional skill and mastery of technique," "purest lyricism lifted to heights of poignancy,"—all that sort of stuff, you know. Next time a writer, or, better still, a fiddler or a pianist comes to your town, look in your home paper the morning after, and you'll see it.

As it happened, The Author was not at home. His secretary had arrived a day or two before, and after unloading a systemful of copy upon that faithful beast of burden, The Author had given himself a half-holiday with old Riedriech, who knew quite enough about old furniture to win his interest and affection.

Miss Hopkins, then, had Alicia and me to herself. Sedately we discussed rummage-sales, and the effect of cotton shirts upon the adolescent cannibal; and all the while Miss Hopkins was stealthily watching doors and windows and hoping that high heaven would send The Author to her hands. We hadn't so much as mentioned his name. It pleased us to sit there and watch her trying to make us do so.

The iron knocker on the front door sounded. And ushered in by Queenasheeba, there stood Nicholas Jelnik with great gray Boris beside him, and beauty and glamour and romance upon him like a light. Miss Hopkins had seen him on the streets, but hadn't met him personally. I don't think she relished the fact that she had to come to Hynds House to do so. Nor could she save herself from the crudity of staring with all her eyes at this handsome offshoot of the Hyndses, with what in a less polite person might well have been called avid curiosity.

"Miss Leetchy," (he had gaily borrowed Fernolia's pronunciation of Alicia's name), "I have brought you the butter-scotch your soul hankers after. I fear you can never hope to grow up, Miss Leetchy, while you cherish a jejune passion for butter-scotch."

"Oh, I don't know. It might have been fudge!" Alicia replied airily. "But thank you, Mr. Jelnik: it was very nice of you to remember."

"Yes. I have such an excellent memory," said he, blandly. "Miss Smith, this preserved ginger is laid at your shrine. If you offer me a piece or two, I shall accept with thanks: I like preserved ginger, myself.—Boris, you'll prefer butter-scotch. You may ask Miss Gaines to give you a piece."

Miss Hopkins, it appeared, despised butter-scotch, and abhorred preserved ginger.

"I saw The Author hiking across lots a while since. Nice, open-hearted, neighborly man, The Author.—Oh, by the way, Miss Smith: is it, or is it not written in the Book of Darwin that the gadfly is one of the distinct evolutionary links in the descent of man?"

"Good heavens, certainly not!" cried Miss Hopkins. And she looked strangely upon Mr. Nicholas Jelnik.

"No? Thank you. I was in doubt," murmured Mr. Jelnik. The golden flecks danced in and out of his eyes. "But we were speaking of The Author: may I ask how The Author appeals to you as a human being, Miss Hopkins?"

"I do not know him as a human being," Miss Hopkins admitted.

Mr. Jelnik looked surprised. His eyebrows went up.

"Oh, come, now!" he demurred. "He isn't so bad as all that !"

"Oh, dear me, no!" Alicia protested, in a shocked voice. "He may have abrupt manners and say unexpected things, but he is perfectly respectable, Miss Hopkins! There's never been a breath against his character. I thought you knew," purred the hussy, demurely. "Why, he's dined at the White House, and lunched and motored and yachted with royalties, and lectured before the D.A.R.'s themselves! And he belongs to at least a dozen societies. There are,"—Alicia was enjoying her naughty self immensely—"good authors and bad authors. Sometimes the bad authors are good, and sometimes the good authors are bad. But our author is more than either: he's It!"

"You entirely and strangely misunderstand me." Miss Hopkins spoke with the deadly gentleness of suppressed fury. "I had no slightest intention of reflecting upon the character of so eminent a writer, with whose career, Miss Gaines, I am thoroughly familiar. I was merely trying to explain that I had never met him."

"Oh, I see. Of course! I should have remembered that!"

Miss Hopkins's entire contempt for Alicia's mentality overcame any suspicion she might have entertained. Also, she had come determined to discover what she could about The Author, and she was not one lightly to be put aside. She said, smiling tolerantly:

"Of course you should! But mayn't I congratulate you upon knowing him? Having him here in Hynds House almost justifies turning the old place into a boarding-house, doesn't it?"

"The Author," Mr. Jelnik remarked gently, "has a very sensitive soul. I shudder to think what the effect upon him would be were he to hear himself referred to as a boarder. My dear Miss Hopkins, never, never let him hear you designate him 'boarder'!"

"Who's talking about boarders?" asked a hearty voice, and Doctor Richard Geddes came in like a gale of mountain air.

"Miss Hopkins. She thinks The Author's presence almost justifies the turning of Hynds House into a boarding-house," answered Mr. Jelnik. He added, thoughtfully, "Curious notion; isn't it?"

"Martha has plenty more," said the doctor, bluntly. "Boarding-house? Well, supposing? What was it before? A hyena-cage, Martha, a hyena-cage, into which you'd be the last to venture your nose, my dear woman! I say, put on your bonnets, all of you, and let's have a spin in the fresh air. The roads are gorgeous. You can come too, Jelnik: there's room for five."

Mr. Jelnik was desolated: he had a pressing engagement. Miss Hopkins rose precipitately. She also had an engagement; besides, she liked to walk. People needed to walk more than they did. The reason why one saw so many bad figures nowadays, was that people lolled around in automobiles instead of walking.

"Well, walking is certainly good for you, Martha. It helps you to reduce," the doctor agreed. Miss Hopkins said dryly that the little walking she intended to do just then wouldn't affect her weight any. And that Doctor Geddes should himself take to walking: men always got fat as they neared fifty.

"Fat! Fifty!" roared the doctor, with enraged astonishment. "Why, I'm not by some years as old as you are, Martha! You were several classes ahead of me in school, don't you remember? I am exactly thirty-nine years old, and as you know everything else, you ought to know that!"

Miss Hopkins studied him with a balefully level eye.

"You really can't blame anybody for forgetting it, Richard," she said, ambiguously.

"You are to recollect, Geddes, that a woman is always as young as she looks," (Mr. Jelnik bowed, smilingly, to Miss Hopkins), "and a man is older than he feels," he added, for the doctor's benefit.

"All right. Let's say I feel as good as Martha looks," the doctor's momentary ill humor vanished. Miss Hopkins smiled. She had stuck her claws into him and drawn blood; but her fur was still ruffled.

Mr. Jelnik made his adieus, Boris offering each of us a polite paw.

"And now," the doctor ordered briskly, "to your spinning, jades, to your spinning! Into my car, the three of you! No, Martha, I will not take a refusal; you shall not walk: you've got to come along, if I have to tuck you under my arm. I don't care if you never reduce. What do you want to reduce for, anyhow? You're all right just as you are! There! are you satisfied?"

We stood by passively while the masterful doctor heckled and hustled the unhappy Center of Culture into his car. With heaven knows what feelings, she found herself seated beside me, Sophy Smith, while Alicia, beside the doctor, tossed gay remarks over her shoulder. Miss Hopkins realized that all Hyndsville would witness what she herself knew to be high-handed capture by force, but which must hideously resemble capitulation; and she also realized that explanations never explain.

I respected her misery enough to keep silent, and she made no attempt to converse. Her hat slid forward at a rakish angle over one ear, and her hair blew about her face in stringy wisps, as the doctor broke the speed laws on the long, level stretches of quiet roads. When we came to a rough spot she bounced up and down (one might hear her breath exhaled in a—well, yes, in a grunt) but she made no complaint, uttered no protest. She was a shackled and voiceless victim, until we finally drew up at her own gate, after an hour's jaunt, and allowed her to escape.

"Why, Martha, our little spin has given you a fine color!" remarked the doctor, genuinely pleased. Two conspicuously red spots shone in Miss Hopkins's cheeks, and her eyes were extremely bright. "We'll have to take you out with us again," he added, genially.

"Shall you, Richard?" muttered Miss Hopkins, and scuttled up her front path,

Like one who in a lonesome wood
Doth walk in fear and dread,
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread!

By and large, I should say that the honors were with Alicia.

The Author's secretary was pacing up and down the garden when we reached home, with Potty Black careering after him and every now and then dashing into the shrubbery to put to flight Beautiful Dog, who was also enamored of the young man with the nice smile and the good brown eyes. He had a great affection for animals, as they seemed to understand.

Beautiful Dog laid aside, for his sake, his fear of white people, and slunk after him fawningly, wagging what did duty as a tail, and showing every tooth in an ear-to-ear grin. At sight of us, Beautiful Dog gave a dismal yelp and disappeared.

"Let's sit in the library," coaxed the secretary. "I want you please to allow me to hold in my hands your copy of 'Purchas his Pilgrimes.' The Author dreams about that book out loud. Oh, yes, another thing I want to ask you: what sort of perfume do you use, and where do you get it?"

My scalp prickled.

"I noticed it in the upper hall last night," went on the secretary, innocently. "It was pervasive, but at the same time so delicate, so elusive, that I couldn't determine what it was. I am very sensitive to perfumes."

"So are we," Alicia told him. "And if what you think you smelled is what we think we smell, it isn't a—a regular perfume. It's a—a—a something that belongs to Hynds House."

The library was flooded with the ruddy light of sunset. Every bit of color in the big room stood out against a golden background, and a great golden spear fell across the dark, brooding face of Freeman Hynds above the old tiled fireplace. In that rosy glow he seemed to look down at us with living eyes.

"Is that so?" The secretary stopped; and his head went up and his nose wrinkled. For the "something that belonged to Hynds House" walked upon the air with invisible feet.

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