Bartlett. "Anything more, Mr. Cummings? I give you benefit of clergy."
Cummings. "I take it to denounce your proceeding as something that you'll always be sorry for and ashamed of."
Bartlett. "Oh! Then, if you have quite freed your mind, I think I may go."
Cummings. "No, no! You mustn't go. Don't go, my dear fellow. Forgive me! I know how insulted you feel, but upon my soul it's all a mistake, it is, indeed. General Wyatt" Bartlett falters a moment and stands as if irresolute whether to stay and listen or push on out of the room "the young lady I don't know how to begin!"
Bartlett, relenting a little. "Well? I'm sorry for you, Cummings. I left a very awkward business to you, and it wasn't yours either. As for General Wyatt, as he chooses to call himself"
Cummings, in amaze. "Call himself? It's his name!"
Bartlett. "Oh, very likely! So is King David his name, when he happens to be in a Scriptural craze. What explanation have you been commissioned to make me? What apology?"
Cummings. "The most definite, the most satisfactory. You resemble in a most extraordinary manner a man who has inflicted an abominable wrong upon these people, a treacherous and cowardly villain"
Bartlett, in a burst of fury. "Stop! Is that your idea of an apology, an explanation? Isn't it enough that I should be threatened, and vilified, and have people fainting at the sight of me, but I must be told by way of reparation that it all happens because I look like a rascal?"
Cummings. "My dear friend! Do listen to me!"
Bartlett. "No, sir, I won't listen to you! I've listened too much! What right, I should like to know, have they to find this resemblance in me? And do they suppose that I'm going to be placated by being told that they treat me like a rogue because I look like one? It is a little too much. A man calls 'Stop thief' after me and expects me to be delighted when he tells me I look like a thief! The reparation is an additional insult. I don't choose to know that they fancy this infamous resemblance in me. Their pretending it is an outrage; and your reporting it to me is an offence. Will you tell them what I say? Will you tell this General Wyatt and the rest of his Bedlam-broke-loose, that they may all go to the"
Cummings. "For shame, for shame! You outrage a terrible sorrow! You insult a trouble sore to death! You trample upon, an anguish that should be sacred to your tears!"
Bartlett, resting his elbow on the corner of the piano. "What what do you mean, Cummings?"
Cummings. "What do I mean? What you are not worthy to know! I mean that these people, against whom you vent your stupid rage, are worthy of angelic pity. I mean that by some disastrous mischance you resemble to the life, in tone, manner, and feature, the wretch who won that poor girl's heart, and then crushed it; who Bartlett, look here! These are the people this is the young lady of whom my friend wrote me from Paris: do you understand?"
Bartlett, in a dull bewilderment. "No, I don't understand."
Cummings. "Why, you know what we were talking of just before they came in: you know what I told you of that cruel business."
Bartlett. "Well?"
Cummings. "Well, this is the young lady"
Bartlett, dauntedly. "Oh, come now! You don't expect me to believe that! It isn't a stage-play."
Cummings. "Indeed, indeed, I tell you the miserable truth."
Bartlett. "Do you mean to say that this is the young girl who was jilted in that way? Who Do you mean Do you intend to tell me Do you suppose Cummings"
Cummings. "Yes, yes, yes!"
Bartlett. "Why, man, she's in Paris, according to your own showing!"
Cummings. "She was in Paris three weeks ago. They have just brought her home, to help her hide her suffering, as if it were her shame, from all who know it. They are in this house by chance, but they are here. I mean what I say. You must believe it, shocking and wild as it is."
Bartlett, after a prolonged silence in which he seems trying to realise the fact. "If you were a man capable of such a ghastly joke but that's impossible." He is silent again, as before. "And I What did you say about me? That I look like a man who" He stops and stares into Cummings's face without speaking, as if he were trying to puzzle the mystery out; then, with fallen head, he muses in a voice of devout and reverent tenderness: "That that broken lily! Oh!" With a sudden start he flings his burden upon the closed piano, whose hidden strings hum with the blow, and advances upon Cummings: "And you can tell it? Shame on you! It ought to be known to no one upon earth! And you you show that gentle creature's death-wound to teach something like human reason to a surly dog like me? Oh, it's monstrous! I wasn't worth it. Better have let me go, where I would, how I would. What did it matter what I thought or said? And I I look like that devil, do I? I have his voice, his face, his movement? Cummings, you've over-avenged yourself."
Cummings. "Don't take it that way, Bartlett. It is hideous. But I didn't make it so, nor you. It's a fatality, it's a hateful chance. But you see now, don't you, Bartlett, how the sight of you must affect them, and how anxious her father must be to avoid you? He most humbly asked your forgiveness, and he hardly knew how to ask that you would not let her see you again. But I told him there could be no question with you; that of course you would prevent it, and at once. I know it's a great sacrifice to expect you to go"
Bartlett. "Go? What are you talking about?" He breaks again from the daze into which he had relapsed. "If there's a hole on the face of the earth where I can hide myself from them, I want to find it. What do you think I'm made of? Go? I ought to be shot away out of a mortar; I ought to be struck away by lightning! Oh, I can't excuse you, Cummings! The indelicacy, the brutality of telling me that! No, no, I can't overlook it." He shakes his head and walks away from his friend; then he returns, and bends on him a look of curious inquiry. "Am I really such a ruffian" he speaks very gently, almost meekly, now "that you didn't believe anything short of that would bring me to my senses? Who told you this of her?"
Cummings. "Her father."
Bartlett. "Oh, that's too loathsome! Had the man no soul, no mercy? Did he think me such a consummate beast that nothing less would drive me away? Yes, he did! Yes, I made him think so! Oh!" He hangs his head and walks away with a shudder.
Cummings. "I don't know that he did you that injustice; but I'm afraid I did. I was at my wits' end."
Bartlett, very humbly. "Oh, I don't know that you were wrong."
Cummings. "I suppose that his anxiety for her life made it comparatively easy for him to speak of the hurt to her pride. She can't be long for this world."