Marche, pacing the shabby sitting room after supper, an unlighted
cigarette between his fingers, listened to Jim recite his Latin lesson.
"Atque ea qui ad efeminandos animos pertinent important," repeated the
boy; and Marche nodded absently.
"Do you understand what that means, Jim?"
"Not exactly, sir."
Marche explained, then added smilingly: "But there is nothing luxurious
to corrupt manhood among the coast marshes down here. Barring fever and
moccasins, Jim, you ought to emerge, some day, into the larger world
equipped for trouble."
"I shall go out some day," said the boy.
Marche glanced up at the portrait of the boy's mother in its pale-gilt
oval. Near it, another nail had been driven, and on the faded wall paper
was an oval discoloration, as though another picture had once hung
there.
"I wish I might see your father before I go North," said Marche, half to
himself. "Isn't he well enough to let me talk to him for a few minutes?"
"I will ask him," said the boy.
Marche paced the ragged carpet until the return of Jimmy.
"Father is sorry, and asks you to please excuse him," he said.
Marche had picked up the boy's schoolbook and was looking at the writing
on the flyleaf again. Then he raised his head, eyes narrowing on the boy
as though searching for some elusive memory connected with him--with his
name in the Latin book--perhaps with the writing, which, somehow, had
stirred in him, once more, the same odd and uncomfortable sensation
which he had experienced when he first saw it.
"Jim," he said, "where did you live when you lived in New York?"
"In Eighty-seventh Street."
"West?"
"Yes, sir."
"Do you remember the house--the number?"
"No, sir."
"Was it a private house?"
"I don't know. It was very tall. We lived on one floor and used an
elevator."
"I see. It was an apartment house."
The boy stood, with blonde head lowered, silently turning over the
leaves of an old magazine.
Marche walked out to the porch; his brows were bent slightly inward, and
he bit the end of his unlighted cigarette until the thing became
useless. Then he flung it away. A few stars watched him above the black
ramparts of the pines; a gentle wind was abroad, bringing inland the
restless voice of the sea.
In Marche's mind a persistent thought was groping in darkness, vainly
striving to touch and awaken memories of things forgotten. What was it
he was trying to remember? What manner of episode, and how connected
with this place, with the boy's book, with the portrait of his mother in
its oval frame? Had he seen that portrait before? Perhaps he had seen it
here, five years ago; yet that could not be, because Herold had not been
here then.