This choice: Flip to another part of the book • Go Back...Chapter #23Silas Merriman by: Seuzz   Blinking and shaking your head to clear it you turn back to a page early in the book. It is raggedly cut, but this section is more regularly laid out and put together. It seems as though a fairly substantial chunk of a much larger and more expensive book has been butchered and sewn into the binding of this farrago of nonsense. It even comes with a title page—Silas Merriman—and a publisher's imprint. The date "1896" is prominently displayed. You turn the page and begin to read ...
It was in the April of 182_ that Silas Merriman stood in the office, built in his grandfather's time, out of which his family conducted its business, and gazed through clear glass panes into the mast-cluttered dockyard, and said, "I am being driven from this city, Dernwood. I am made unhappy— nervous— indolent. A most vexing combination, I think you will agree. And it is this city, this charming city I have called my home since I was a boy, that is driving me out."
"Baltimore is a most charming city," said Dernwood agreeably.
There was a caesura in the conversation as Merriman continued to present his back to his middle-aged lieutenant and look toward the harbor. Dernwood was unfailingly amiable, Merriman found, and it was one of his best qualities, one that had endeared him to Merriman, and to Merriman's father, and to his father before him. One could always know more or less where Dernwood stood, and one could often be sure it was several deferential steps behind and slightly to one's left. But this was not the first occasion on which Merriman had had cause to reflect that amiability does not imply acuity, and that Dernwood's admirable tendency to expand amiably upon one's own remarks did not always lead to an expansion in the direction that one intended one's remarks to lean.
"It is charming," said Merriman amiably in his own turn. "But not so charming that I should wish my troubles had befallen me in another city, from whose bosom I could quit myself with less regret." He paused so that his next remark would swell with force when it broke. "It fills me now with a horror to which I can put no name." He turned now toward Dernwood. "You understand how circumstances have changed, and have changed me and my relations."
"Your relations, sir?" said Dernwood in some puzzlement.
"I mean my cousin, of course. It has been a week, Dernwood—eight days—since we— since she— since my beloved and intended exchanged a wedding veil for a funeral shroud."
"Oh, congratulations, sir."
"Congratulations?"
"I did not realize you were intending to marry."
Merriman regarded his employee evenly. "Yes. That had been my plan— that is to say, that would have been my plan— had there not been this … mortifying intervention."
"Oh, I see, sir. I am sorry."
Merriman wasn't entirely certain that the conversation had acquired the track he desired of it, but he continued regardless. "I was at her side again this morning. Rather, I was at the … place where she now lies. That was when the determination came over me." Dernwood again looked puzzled, and so Merriman hurried on. "I have already composed the necessary letters—they are there on my desk"—he gestured at a neat stack of large envelopes—"and have already sent off one very important post. Of course, I entrust the business completely to you in my absence."
"Oh." It seemed to Merriman that Dernwood had finally caught up to his meaning and to the import of the conversation, though he was a trifle annoyed by the sense that this mild man had only fully grasped it when the subject had come around to him and the responsibilities that Merriman intended to lay upon his deferentially stooped shoulders.
"This is an old man's business," said Merriman, gently touching Dernwood at the elbow and lightly regarding him to see if the veiled implication should strike its target. "And I have not yet seen my first quarter century. There will be time enough later for me to attend to it. But for now there is the— the horror of this place. I must escape it." And that was the end.
To put aside the book and keep investigating the room: "Disposing of Lucy"    indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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