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Septimus

<h2>[101]CHAPTER VIII</h2> Clem Sypher stood at the front door of Penton Court a day or two afterwards, awaiting his guests and taking the air. The leaves of the oaks that lined the drive fell slowly under the breath of a southwest wind, and joined their sodden brethren on the path. The morning mist still hung around the branches. The sky threatened rain. A servant came from within the house, bringing a telegram on a tray. Sypher opened it, and his strong, pink face became as overcast as the sky. It was from the London office of the Cure, and contained the information that one of his largest buyers had reduced his usual order by half. The news was depressing. So was the prospect before him, of dripping trees and of evergreens on the lawn trying to make the best of it in forlorn bravery. Heaven had ordained that the earth should be fair and Sypher's Cure invincible. Something was curiously wrong in the execution of Heaven's decrees. He looked again at the preposterous statement, knitting his brow. Surely this was some base contrivance of the enemy. They had been underselling and outadvertising him for months, and had ousted him from the custom of several large firms already. Something had to be done. As has been remarked before, Sypher was a man of Napoleonic methods. He called for a telegraph form, and wrote as he stood, with the tray as a desk: "If you can't buy advertising rights on St. Paul's Cathe[102]dral or Westminster Abbey, secure outside pages of usual dailies for Thursday. Will draw up 'ad' myself." He gave it to the servant, smiled in anticipation of the battle, and felt better. When Zora, Emmy, and Septimus appeared at the turn of the drive, he rushed to meet them, beaming with welcome and exuberant in phrase. This was the best housewarming that could be imagined. Just three friends to luncheon—three live people. A gathering of pale-souled folk would have converted the house into a chilly barn. They would warm it with the glow of friendship. Mrs. Middlemist, looking like a rose in June, had already irradiated the wan November garden. Miss Oldrieve he likened to a spring crocus, and Septimus (with a slap on the back) could choose the vegetable he would like to resemble. They must look over the house before lunch. Afterwards, outside, the great surprise awaited them. What was it? Ah! He turned laughing eyes on them, like a boy. The great London firm to whom he had entrusted the furniture and decoration had done their splendid worst. The drawing-room had the appearance of an hotel sitting-room trying to look coy. An air of factitious geniality pervaded the dining-room. An engraving of Frans Hals's "Laughing Cavalier" hung with too great a semblance of jollity over the oak sideboard. Everything was too new, too ordered, too unindividual; but Sypher loved it, especially the high-art wall-paper and restless frieze. Zora, a woman of instinctive taste, who, if she bought a bedroom water-bottle, managed to identify it with her own personality, professed her admiration with a woman's pitying mendacity, but resolved to change many things for the good of Clem Sypher's soul. Emmy, still pale and preoccupied, said little. She was not in a mood to appreciate Clem[103] Sypher, whose loud voice and Napoleonic manners jarred upon her nerves. Septimus thought it all prodigiously fine, whereat Emmy waxed sarcastic. "I wish I could do something for you," he said, heedless of her taunts, during a moment when they were out of earshot of the others. He had already offered to go to Naples and bring back Mordaunt Prince, and had received instant orders not to be a fool. "I wish I could make you laugh again." "I don't want to laugh," she replied impatiently. "I want to sit on the floor and howl." They happened to be in the hall. At the farther end Septimus caught sight of a fluffy Persian kitten playing with a bit of paper, and guided by one of his queer intuitions he went and picked it up and laid its baby softness against the girl's cheek. Her mood changed magically. "Oh, the darling!" she cried, and kissed its tiny, wet nose. She was quite polite to Sypher during luncheon, and laughed when he told her that he called the kitten Jebusa Jones. She asked why. "Because," said he, showing his hand covered with scratches, "she produces on the human epidermis the same effect as his poisonous cuticle remedy." Whereupon Emmy decided that the man who could let a kitten scratch his hand in that fashion had elements of good in his nature. "Now for the surprise," said Sypher, when Septimus and he joined the ladies after lunch. "Come." They followed him outside, through the French windows of the drawing-room. "Other people," said he, "want [104]houses with lawns reaching down to the side of the river or the Menai Straits or Windermere. I'm the only person, I think, who has ever sought for a lawn running down to a main line of railway." "That's why this house was untenanted so long," said Zora. A row of trees separated the small garden from the lawn in question. When they passed through this screen, the lawn and the line of railway and the dreamy, undulating Surrey country came into view. Also an enormous board. Why hadn't he taken it down, Zora asked. "That's the surprise!" exclaimed Sypher eagerly. "Come round to the front." He led the way, striding some yards ahead. Presently he turned and struck a dramatic attitude, as a man might do who had built himself a new wonder house. And then on three astonished pairs of eyes burst the following inscription in gigantic capitals which he who flew by in an express train could read: SYPHER'S CURE! Clem Sypher. Friend of Humanity! I LIVE HERE! "Isn't that great?" he cried. "I've had it in my mind for years. It's the personal note that's so valuable. This brings the whole passing world into personal contact with me. It shows that Sypher's Cure isn't a quack thing run by a commercial company, but the possession of a man who has a house, who lives in the very house you can see through the trees. 'What kind of a man is he?' they ask.[105] 'He must be a nice man to live in such a nice house. I almost feel I know him. I'll try his Cure.' Don't you think it's a colossal idea?" He looked questioningly into three embarrassed faces. Emmy, in spite of her own preoccupation, suppressed a giggle. There was a moment's silence, which was broken by Septimus's mild voice: "I think, by means of levers running down to the line and worked by the trains as they passed, I could invent a machine for throwing little boxes of samples from the board into the railway carriage windows." Emmy burst out laughing. "Come and show me how you would do it." She linked her arm in his and dragged him down to the line, where she spoke with mirthful disrespect of Sypher's Cure. Meanwhile Zora said nothing to Sypher. "Don't you like it?" he asked at last, disconcerted. "Do you want me to be the polite lady you've asked to lunch or your friend?" "My friend and my helper," said he. "Then," she replied, touching his coat sleeve, "I must say that I don't like it. I hate it. I think it's everything that is most abominable." The board was one pride of his heart, and Zora was another. He looked at them both alternately in a piteous, crestfallen way. "But why?" he asked. Zora's eyes filled with tears. She saw that her lack of appreciation had hurt him to the heart. She was a generous woman, and did not convict him, as she would have done another man, of blatant vulgarity. Yet she felt preposterously pained. Why could not this great, single-[106]minded creature, with ideas as high as they were queer, perceive the board's rank abomination? "It's unworthy of you," she said bravely. "I want everyone to respect you as I do. You see the Cure isn't everything. There's a man behind it." "That's the object of the board," said Sypher. "To show the man." "But it doesn't show the chivalrous gentleman that I think you are," she replied quickly. "It gives the impression of some one quite different—a horrid creature who would sell his self-respect for money. Oh, don't you understand? It's as bad as walking through the streets with 'Sypher's Cure' painted on your hat." "What can I do about it?" he asked. "Take it down at once," said Zora. "But to exhibit the board was my sole reason for buying the place." "I'm very sorry," she said gently, "but I can't change my opinion." He cast a lingering glance at the board, and then turned. "Let us go back to the house," he said. They walked a little way in silence. As they passed by the shrubbery at the side of the house, he gravely pushed aside a wet, hanging branch for her to proceed dry. Then he joined her again. "You are angry with me for speaking so," said Zora. He stopped and looked at her, his eyes bright and clear. "Do you think I'm a born fool? Do you think I can't tell loyalty when I see it, and am such an ass as not to prize it above all things? It cost you a lot to say that to me. You're right. I suppose I've lost sense of myself in the Cure. When I think of it, I seem just to be the machine [107]that is distributing it over the earth. And that, too, I suppose, is why I want you. The board is an abomination that cries to heaven. It shall be instantly removed. There!" He held out his hand. She gave him hers and he pressed it warmly. "Are you going to give up the house now that it's useless?" she asked. "Do you wish me to?" "What have I to do with it?" "Zora Middlemist," said he, "I'm a superstitious man in some things. You have everything to do with my success. Sooner than forfeit your respect I would set fire to every stick I possessed. I would give up everything I had in the world except my faith in the Cure." "Wouldn't you give up that—if it were necessary so as to keep my respect?" she asked, prompted by the insane devil that lurks in the heart of even the most sainted of women and does not like its gracious habitat to be reckoned lower than a quack ointment. It is the same little devil that makes a young wife ask her devoted husband which of the two he would save if she and his mother were drowning. It is the little devil that is responsible for infinite mendacity on the part of men. "Have you ever said that to another woman?" No; of course he hasn't; and the wretch is instantly, perjured. "Would you sell your soul for me?" "My immortal soul," says the good fellow, instantaneously converted into an atrocious liar; and the little devil coos with satisfaction and curls himself up snugly to sleep. But on this occasion the little devil had no success. "I would give up my faith in the Cure for nothing in the wide world," said Sypher gravely. "[108]I'm very glad to hear it," said Zora, in her frankest tone. But the little devil asked her whether she was quite sure; whereupon she hit him smartly over the head and bade him lie down. Her respect, however, for Sypher increased. They were joined by Emmy and Septimus. "I think I could manage it," said the latter, "if I cut a hole a foot square in the board and fixed a magazine behind it." "There will be no necessity," returned Sypher. "Mrs. Middlemist has ordered its immediate removal." That was the end of the board episode. The next day he had it taken down and chopped into fire-wood, a cart-load of which he sent with his humble compliments to Mrs. Middlemist. Zora called it a burnt offering. She found more satisfaction in the blaze that roared up the chimney than she could explain to her mother; perhaps more than she could explain to herself. Septimus had first taught her the pleasantness of power. But that was nothing to this. Anybody, even Emmy, curly-headed baby that she was, could turn poor Septimus into a slave. For a woman to impose her will upon Clem Sypher, Friend of Humanity, the Colossus of Curemongers, was no such trumpery achievement. Emmy, when she referred to the matter, expressed the hope that Zora had rubbed it into Clem Sypher. Zora deprecated the personal bearing of the slang metaphor, but admitted, somewhat grandly, that she had pointed out the error in taste. "I can't see, though, why you take all this trouble over Mr. Sypher," said Emmy. "I value his friendship," replied Zora, looking up from a letter she was reading. [109]This was at breakfast. When the maid had entered with the post Emmy had gripped the table and watched with hungry eyes, but the only letter that had come for her had been on theatrical business. Not the one she longed for. Emmy's world was out of joint. "You've changed your opinion, my dear, as to the value of men," she sneered. "There was a time when you didn't want to see them or speak to them or have anything to do with them. Now it seems you can't get on without them." "My dear Emmy," said Zora calmly, "men as possible lovers and men as staunch friends are two entirely different conceptions." Emmy broke a piece of toast viciously. "I think they're beasts," she exclaimed. "Good heavens! Why?" "Oh, I don't know. They are." Then, after the quick, frightened glance of the woman who fears she has said too much, she broke into a careless half-laugh. "They are such liars. Fawcett promised me a part in his new production and writes to-day to say I can't have it." As Emmy's professional disappointments had been many, and as Zora in her heart of hearts did not entirely approve of her sister's musical-comedy career, she tempered her sympathy with philosophic reflections. She had never taken Emmy seriously. All her life long Emmy had been the kitten sister, with a kitten's pretty but unimportant likes, dislikes, habits, occupations, and aspirations. To regard her as being under the shadow of a woman's tragedy had never entered her head. The kitten playing Antigone, Ophelia, or such like distressed heroines, in awful, grim earnest is not a conception that readily occurs even to the [110]most affectionate and imaginative of kitten owners. Zora accepted Emmy's explanation of her petulance with a spirit entirely unperturbed, and resumed the perusal of her letter. It was from the Callenders, who wrote from California. Zora must visit them on her way round the world. She laid down the letter and stirred her tea absently, her mind full of snow-capped sierras, and clear blue air, and peach forests, and all the wonders of that wonderland. And Emmy stirred her tea, too, in an absent manner, but her mind was filled with the most terrible thoughts wherewith a woman's mind can be haunted. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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