The Rest Hollow Mystery by Rebecca Porter

Author:Rebecca Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press

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CHAPTER XIII

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IT WAS SEVEN O’CLOCK ON a rainy evening, and Kenwick turned up the collar of his coat as he left the St. Germaine. Inside the Hartshire Building there was a cheerful warmth that promised well for the evening. He ignored the elevator and walked up the three flights of stairs to the floor where the photographer had his rooms. On the way, he tried to persuade himself that he was not doing this in order to gain time. But there was a good hour intervening between now and time to start for the theater, and at the end of that hour, he reflected Jarvis might not care to keep the engagement.

As he toiled upward Kenwick considered every possible detail of the scene that was before him, and then wearily discarded them all. “Why do I do it?” he challenged himself, as he reached the last landing. “How do I dare to do it? My God! I can’t afford to do it; I’ve got to have one friend left!”

But as he had once told Jarvis, those scenes of life whose settings are scrupulously ordered usually lack dramatic climax. At the end of what he was pleased to characterize as his “confession,” the photographer surveyed him with sympathetic but unastonished eyes.

“I’d begun to think that there might be something personal in it,” he commented. “I could see that there was something lying heavy on your chest. It’s a devilish mess, isn’t it?”

The other man was looking at him with a disconcerting sharpness. But the thing for which he probed was not in Granville Jarvis’s eyes.

“I seem to be such a helpless sort of brute,” his host went on, and pushed a box of cigars across the table as though in an unconscious effort to make up with tobacco what he lacked in counsel. “I never can think of the right thing to do just on the spur of the minute. Inspiration has an uncomfortable habit of failing to keep her engagements with me.”

“I didn’t expect any advice,” Kenwick told him. “But it’s a relief to tell you and get it off my mind; to tell you and yet not have you think that I ought to be locked up.”

“Somebody ought to be locked up,” Jarvis remarked grimly. “And it’s your job to find that person. Why don’t you go East?”

“I am going East. I’ve decided to go next week. It would be hard to make you understand why I haven’t done it before, but——Well, this sort of an—illness does a terrible thing to a man’s soul, Jarvis. It paralyzes his initiative. It gives him the most deadly thing in this world; the patience of despair. I’m constantly waiting for things to clear up instead of going at them hammer and tongs.”

His companion nodded. “I think I understand. It would be the hell of a situation for you back there among people you’ve always known, and who presumably know all about you, and not being able to bridge the gap. I can see why you wanted to get a line on yourself first, and you’re right, too.

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