The Darrow Enigma | Page 7

ears. - But he was no boy, this Maitland, and betrayed no
other sign of the tempest that was raging within him. His utterance
remained as usual, deliberate and incisive, and I thought this perplexed
the young lady. Before leaving, both Maitland and I were invited to
become parties to a six-handed game to be played the following week,
after the grounds had been redressed with gravel.
Maitland looked forward to this second meeting with Miss Darrow with
an eagerness which made every hour seem interminably long, and he
was in such a flutter of expectancy that I was sure if

"We live . . . in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a
dial We should count time by heart-throbs,"
he must have passed through a period as long as that separating the
Siege of Troy from the "late unpleasantness." The afternoon came at
last, however. The party consisted, besides Darrow and his daughter,
Maitland and myself, of two young gentlemen with whom personally I
had but a slight acquaintance, although I knew them somewhat by
reputation. The younger one, Clinton Browne, is a young artist whose
landscapes were beginning to attract wide attention in Boston, and the
elder, Charles Herne, a Western gentleman of some literary attainments,
but comparatively unknown here in the East. There is nothing about Mr.
Herne that would challenge more than passing attention. If you had said
of him, "He is well-fleshed, well-groomed, and intellectually
well-thatched," you would have voiced the opinion of most of his
acquaintances.
This somewhat elaborately upholstered old world has a deal of mere
filling of one kind and another, and Mr. Herne is a part of it. To be sure,
he leaves the category of excelsior very far behind and approaches very
nearly to the best grade of curled hair, but, in spite of all this, he is
simply a sort of social filling.
Mr. Browne, on the other hand, is a very different personage. Of
medium height, closely knit, with the latent activity and grace of the cat
flowing through every movement and even stagnating in his pose, he is
a man that the first casual gaze instantly returns to with sharpened
focus. You have seen gymnasts whose normal movements were slowly
performed springs, just as rust is a slow combustion and fire the same
thing in less time. Well, Clinton Browne strongly suggested that sort of
athlete. Add to this a regularly formed, clearly cut, and all-but-beautiful
face, with a pair of wonderfully piercing, albeit somewhat shifty, black
eyes, and one need not marvel that men as well as women stared at him.
I have spoken of his gaze as "somewhat shifty," yet am not altogether
sure that in that term I accurately describe it. What first fastened my
attention was this vague, unfocussed, roving, quasi-introspective vision
flashing with panther-like suddenness into a directness that seemed to

burn and pierce one like the thrust of a hot stiletto, His face was
clean-shaven, save for a mere thumb-mark of black hair directly under
the centre of his lower lip. This Iago-like tab and the almost fierce
brilliancy of his concentrated gaze gave to his countenance at times a
sinister, Machiavellian expression that was irresistible and which, to
my thinking, seriously marred an otherwise fine face. Of=20course due
allowance must be made for the strong prejudice I have against any
form of beard. However, I'd wager a box of my best liver-pills against
any landscape Browne ever painted, - I don't care if it's as big as a
cyclorama, - that if he had known how completely Gwen shared my
views, - how she disliked the appearance of bewhiskered men, - that
delicately nurtured little imperial would soon have been reduced to a
tender memory, - that is to say, if a physician can diagnose a case of
love from such symptoms as devouring glances and an attentiveness so
marked that it quite disgusted Maitland, who repeatedly measured his
rival with the apparent cold precision of a mathematician, albeit there
was warmth enough underneath.
This singular self-poise is one of Maitland's most noticeable
characteristics and is, I think, rather remarkable in a man of such strong
emotional tendencies and lightning-like rapidity of thought. No doubt
some small portion of it is the result of acquirement, for life can hardly
fail to teach us all something of this sort; still I cannot but think that the
larger part of it is native to him. Born of well-to-do parents, he had
never had the splendid tuition of early poverty. As soon as he had left
college he had studied law, and had been admitted to the bar. This he
had done more to gratify the wishes of his father than to further any
desires of his own, but he had