I took the letter to my rooms, and composed a letter to Professor Nordon, narrating the whole affair and telling him of the letter, explaining that I did not enclose for the reason that it might be of use in Van Dorn's trial to prove the friendship existing between him and the late professor.
This done, I went out into the warm star-light of the late summer night for a stroll, feeling fagged somehow, though I had done nothing to justify such a feeling. As I went along the poorly lighted and almost deserted street--for it was late--I was aware of the strange actions of an individual just in front of me. His progress seemed to be measured by the areas of street lights. He would hesitate beneath the glow of a light, then suddenly dart swiftly along the street until he came to another light, where he would halt as if loath to leave its radiance.
Feeling some interest, I hastened my step and soon overtook him, for in spite of his haste between the lamp posts, his lingering beneath them made his progress very slow. He was standing directly beneath one, staring this way and that, when I came up behind him and spoke to him. He whirled, hand clenched and raised and struck wildly at me. I blocked the blow easily and caught his arm, supposing he thought I was a foot-pad. However, the evident terror on his face seemed abnormal, somehow. His eyes bulged and his mouth gaped while his complexion was as near white as the human skin can become.
Yet before I could explain my honest intentions, he breathed a gusty sigh.
"Ah, you; pardon me, mister. I thought--I thought it--it was somethin' else."
"What's up?" I asked, bluntly curious.
He shuffled his feet and lowered his eyes, in a manner that reminded me strangely of Costigan's attitude.
"Nothin'," he said rather sullenly, then modified the statement. "That is--I dunno. I'll tell you somethin', though," his face took on an air of low cunning. "Stay in the light and you'll be alright. They won't come out of the dark, not Them!"
"They? Who are They?"
At this moment, just as his lips were opening to reply, the street light beneath which we stood gave a flicker as though about to go out, and with a scream, the man turned and fled up the street, his frantic heels drumming a receding tattoo on the sidewalk.
Completely dumfounded, I continued my stroll and returned to my apartments, wondering idly at the number of lights burning in so many houses at such a late hour.
Again at my apartments I settled myself for an hour or so of reading. Selecting a work expounding material monism, I made myself comfortable and upon opening the pages, was reminded, by contrast, of Malcolm Hallworthy and his extreme idealism. I smiled and reflected:
"Maybe Joan hasn't a husband who will control her as she needs to be, but at least she is married to a man who will never mistreat her."
At that very instant there sounded a scurry of feminine high heels outside, the door was hurled open and a girl staggered into the room and threw herself panting into my arms.
"Joan! What in God's name--"
"Steve!" It was the wail of a frightened and abused child. "Malcolm beat me!"
"Nonsense." If she had grown wings and flown before my eyes, I could not have been more dumfounded. "What are you talking about, child?"
"He did, he did!" she wailed, sobbing and clinging tightly to me. Her curls were disheveled, her clothing disarranged. "I went to sleep on the lounge and when I woke up, he had me bound there by my wrists and was flogging me with a riding whip! Look!" With a whimper she slipped the flimsy fabric from her back and I saw long, ugly red weals across her slim shoulders.
"You see?"
"Yes, but I don't understand. Why, he thought it was brutal to spank you."
The House
"And so you see," said my friend James Conrad, his pale, keen face alight, "why I am studying the strange case of Justin Geoffrey--seeking to find, either in his own life, or in his family line, the reason for his divergence from the family type. I am trying to discover just what made Justin the man he was."
"Have you met with success?" I asked. "I see you have procured not only his personal history but his family tree. Surely, with your deep knowledge of biology and psychology, you can explain this strange poet, Geoffrey."
Conrad shook his head, a baffled look in his scintillant eyes. "I admit I cannot understand it. To the average man, there would appear to be no mystery--Justin Geoffrey was simply a freak, half genius, half maniac. He would say that he 'just happened' in the same manner in which he would attempt to explain the crooked growth of a tree. But twisted minds are no more causeless than twisted trees. There is always a reason--and save for one seemingly trivial incident I can find no reason for Justin's life, as he lived it.
"He was a poet. Trace the lineage of any rhymer you wish, and you will find poets or musicians among his ancestors. But I have studied his family tree back for five hundred years and find neither poet nor singer, nor any thing that might suggest there had ever been one in the Geoffrey family. They are people of good blood, but of the most staid and prosaic type you could find. Originally an old English family of the country squire class, who became impoverished and came to America to rebuild their fortunes, they settled in New York in 1690 and though their descendants have scattered over the country, all--save Justin alone--have remained much of a type--sober, industrious merchants. Both of his parents are of this class, and likewise his brothers and sisters. His brother John is a successful banker in Cincinnati. Eustace is the junior partner of a law firm in New York, and William, the younger brother, is in his junior year in Harvard, already showing the ear-marks of a successful bond salesman. Of the three sisters of Justin, one is married to the dullest business man imaginable, one is a teacher in a grade school and the other graduates from Vassar this year. Not one of them shows the slightest sign of the characteristics which marked Justin. He was like a stranger, an alien among them. They are all known as kindly, honest people.
Granted; but I found them intolerably dull and apparently entirely without imagination. Yet Justin, a man of their own blood and flesh, dwelt in a world of his own making, a world so fantastic and utterly bizarre that it was quite outside and beyond my own gropings--and I have never been accused of a lack of imagination.
"Justin Geoffrey died raving in a madhouse, just as he himself had often predicted. This was enough to explain his mental wanderings to the average man; to me it is only the beginning of the question. What drove Justin Geoffrey mad? Insanity is either acquired or inherited. In his case it was certainly not inherited. I have proved that to my own satisfaction. As far back as the records go, no man, woman or child in the Geoffrey family has ever showed the slightest taint of a diseased mind. Justin, then, acquired his lunacy. But how? No disease made him what he was; he was unusually healthy, like all his family. His people said he had never been sick a day in his life. There were no abnormalities present at birth. Now comes the strange part. Up to the age of ten he was no whit different from his brothers. When he was ten, the change came over him.
"He began to be tortured by wild and fearful dreams which occurred almost nightly and which continued until the day of his death. As we know, instead of fading as most dreams of childhood do, these dreams increased in vividness and terror, until they shadowed his whole life. Toward the last, they merged so terribly with his waking thoughts that they seemed grisly realities and his dying shrieks and blasphemies shocked even the hardened keepers of the madhouse.
"Coincidental with these dreams came a drawing away from his companions and his own family. From a completely extrovert, gregarious little animal he became almost a recluse. He wandered by himself more than is good for a child and he preferred to do his roaming at night. Mrs. Geoffrey has told how time and again she would come into the room where he and his brother Eustace slept, after they had gone to bed, to find Eustace sleeping peacefully, but the open window telling her of Justin's departure. The lad would be out under the stars, pushing his way through the silent willows along some sleeping river, or wading through the dew-wet grass, or rousing the drowsy cattle in some quiet meadow by his passing.