'In that case,' Colin continued, reassured, 'I hope we may expect that the trusteeship will be a sinecure for many a long year to come. But I fail to see how all this will benefit poor Winthrop in the immediate future, if he means to sail for New York by the next steamer.'
'The two questions ought to be kept entirely distinct,' Audouin went on sharply, with perfect gravity. 'I fail myself to perceive how any possible connection can exist between them. Still, we will trust to the chapter of accidents. There's no knowing what a day may bring forth. We must try at least to keep Wintlirop here in Rome for another fortnight. That's not so very long to stay, and yet a great deal may be done in a fortnight. I'll go and look out at once for an American lawyer to draft my will for me. Meanwhile, will you just sign this joint note from both of us to Winthrop?'
He sat down hurriedly at Cohn's desk, and scribbled off a short note to poor Hiram.
'Dear Winthrop,--Will you as a personal favour to us both kindly delay your departure from Rome for another fortnight, by which time we hope we may be able to make different arrangements for you?
He passed the note to Colin, and the pen with it. Colin read the doubtfully worded note over twice in a hesitating manner, and then, after some mental deliberation, added below in his clear masculine hand--'Colin Churchill.'
'Remember, Mr. Audouin,' he said as a parting warning. 'It's a bargain between us. No suicide.'
'Oh, all right,' Audouin answered lightly with the door in his hand. 'We trust entirely to the chapter of accidents.'
|Next day, after seeing the American lawyer (caught by good luck at the Hôtel de Russie), and duly executing then and there his will in favour of Colin Churchill as trustee, Audouin sauntered down gloomily to the San Paolo station, and took the train by himself to a miserable little stopping place in the midst of the dreary desolate Campagna. It was a baking day, even in the narrow shaded streets of Rome itself; but out on the shadeless scorched-up Agro Romano the sun was pouring down with tropical fierceness upon the flat levels, one vast stretch of silent slopes, with lonely hollows interspersed at intervals, where even the sheep and cattle seemed to pant and stagger under the breathless heat of the Italian noontide. Audouin got out at the wayside road, gave up his ticket to the dirty military-looking official, passed the osteria and the half dozen feverish yellow-washed houses that clustered round the obtrusive modern railway, and turned away from the direction of the mouldering village on the projecting buttress of rock towards the mysterious, melancholy, treeless desert on the other side. It was just the place for Audouin to walk alone on such a day, with his whole heart sick and weary of a generous attempt ill frustrated by the unaccountable caprice of fate. He had tried to do his best for Hiram Winthrop, and he had only succeeded in making himself and his friend supremely unhappy. Audouin had never cared much for life, and he cared less for it that day than ever before. 'After all,' he said to himself, 'what use is existence to me? I had one mistress, nature: I have almost tired of her: she palled upon me, and I wanted another. That other would not take my homage; and nature, it seems, in a fit of jealousy, has revenged her slighted pretensions upon me, in most unfeminine fashion, by making herself less beautiful in my eyes than formerly. How dull and gloomy it all looks to-day! What a difficult world to live in, what an easy world to leave; if we had but the trick to do it!'