The Uttermost Farthing | Page 5

to a little
autobiography, h'm?"
"By all means. You will satisfy your own inclinations and my curiosity
at the same time."
"You're a deuced polite fellow, Wharton. But I'm not going to bore you.
You'll be really interested in what I'm going to tell you; and especially
will you be interested when you come to go through the museum by the
light of the little history that you are going to hear. For you must know
that my life for the last twenty years has been bound up with my
collection. The one is, as it were, a commentary on and an illustration
of the other. Did you know that I had ever been married?"

"No," I answered in some surprise; for Challoner had always seemed to
me the very type of the solitary, self-contained bachelor.
"I have never mentioned it," said he. "The subject would have been a
painful one. It is not now. The malice of sorrow and misfortune loses
its power as I near the end of my pilgrimage. Soon I shall step across
the border and be out of its jurisdiction forever."
He paused, lit his cigar, took a few labored draughts of the fragrant
smoke, and resumed: "I did not marry until I was turned forty. I had no
desire to. I was a solitary man, full of my scientific interests and not at
all susceptible to the influence of women. But at last I met my late wife
and found her different from all other women whom I had seen. She
was a beautiful girl, some twenty years younger than I, highly
intelligent, cultivated and possessed of considerable property. Of
course I was no match for her. I was nothing to look at, was double her
age, was only moderately well off and had no special standing either
socially or in the world of science. But she married me and, as I may
say, she married me handsomely; by which I mean that she always
treated our marriage as a great stroke of good fortune for her, as if the
advantages were all on her side instead of on mine. As a result, we
were absolutely devoted to each other. Our life was all that married life
could be and that it so seldom is. We were inseparable. In our work, in
our play, in every interest and occupation, we were in perfect harmony.
We grudged the briefest moment of separation and avoided all society
because we were so perfectly happy with each other. She was a wife in
a million; and it was only after I had married her that I realized what a
delightful thing it was to be alive. My former existence, looked back on
from that time, seemed but a blank expanse through which I had
stagnated as a chrysalis lingers on, half alive, through the dreary
months of winter.
"We lived thus in unbroken concord, with mutual love that grew from
day to day, until two years of perfect happiness had passed.
"And then the end came."
Here Challoner paused, and a look of unutterable sadness settled on his

poor, misshapen face. I watched him with an uncomfortable
premonition of something disagreeable in the sequel of his narrative as,
with his trembling, puffy hand, he re-lighted the cigar that had gone out
in the interval.
"The end came," he repeated presently. "The perfect happiness of two
human beings was shattered in a moment. Let me describe the
circumstances.
"I am usually a light sleeper, like most men of an active mind, but on
this occasion I must have slept more heavily than usual. I awoke,
however, with somewhat of a start and the feeling that something had
happened. I immediately missed my wife and sat up in bed to listen.
Faint creakings and sounds of movement were audible from below and
I was about to get up and investigate when a door slammed, a bell rang
loudly and then the report of a pistol or gun echoed through the house.
"I sprang out of bed and rushed down the stairs. As I reached the hall,
someone ran past me in the darkness. There was a blinding flash close
to my face and a deafening explosion; and when I recovered my sight,
the form of a man appeared for an instant dimly silhouetted in the
opening of the street door. The door closed with a bang, leaving the
house wrapped in silence and gloom.
"My first impulse was to pursue the man, but it immediately gave way
to alarm for my wife. I groped my way into the dining-room and was
creeping towards the place where the matches were kept when my bare
foot touched something soft and bulky. I stooped to examine it and my
outspread hand came in contact with