Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
“What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
“Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a bit of Stendhal—one of the Italian stories—and here are some letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame Commanville?”
“His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for this kind of thing.”
“I don’t—at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many collections of letters?”
“Lord, no—very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though—the rarest thing I’ve got—half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them—a lot of collectors were after them.”
Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was the one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent. to their value,” he said, meditatively.
Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel. He was in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
“I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an engagement.”
He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and unbosom himself to Flamel.
The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure on his arm.
“Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I don’t often have the luck of seeing you here.”
“I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
Flamel, thrown back in his capacious armchair, surveyed him through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air. It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge. Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
“I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
“Oh, so-do—depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him thoughtfully. “Are you thinking of collecting?”
Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”
“Selling?”
“Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap—”
Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
“A poor chap I used to know—who died—he died last year—and who left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of—he was fond of me and left ‘em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that they might benefit me somehow—I don’t know—I’m not much up on such things—” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.
“A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”
“Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him—by one person, you understand; a woman, in fact—”
“Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently.
Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”
Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”
“Oh, just—the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They were tremendous friends, he and she.”
“And she wrote a clever letter?”
“Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”
A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
“Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret Aubyn’s letters? Did you say YOU had them?”
“They were left me—by my friend.”
“I see. Was he—well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any rate. What are you going to do with them?”
Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that some fellow was writing her life—”
“Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”
Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
Flamel sat with meditative eye. “What do you WANT to do with them?” he asked.
“I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden energy—“If I can—”
“If you can? They’re yours, you say?”
“They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent—I mean there are no restrictions—” he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his action.
“And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his cigar-tip.
Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine framed in tarnished gilding.
“It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are as personal as—as these of my friend’s…. Well, I don’t mind telling you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that it rather obscures my judgment—the fact is if I could lay my hand on a few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified—under the circumstances….” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out—“You don’t think people could say… could criticise the man….”
“But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”
“He’s dead—yes; but can I assume the responsibility without—”
Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune reluctance—!
The older man’s answer reassured him. “Why need you assume any responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity himself, I suppose?”
“No, no.”
“Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it all right?”
Glennard’s hesitation revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them at all?”
“Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the best advantage—to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”