Search for Mr. Marsh

That evening Kessler came back to his house on Pinckney Street in low spirits and ate his dinner without tasting it. It was his habit on Sundays, after the table was cleared, to sit by the fire with a volume of some dry legal history until the church on the corner struck midnight, and then to go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night he broke the habit. As soon as the plates were gone he took a lamp into his study, opened the wall safe, and from the innermost folder drew a document endorsed in his own hand: Voss, Instrument of Gift. He sat down with a clouded face to read it again.

The instrument was holograph. Adrian Voss had written it out himself, every line, and had asked Kessler only to store it, and Kessler, though he had taken charge of the paper, had refused to lend one syllable to its making. It provided that upon the death of Adrian Voss, founder of the Voss Institute, all his possessions were to pass to his friend and benefactor, a Mr. Marsh. And it provided further that in the event of Voss's disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months, the said Mr. Marsh should step into Voss's position without delay, free of any burden beyond a few small sums to the household staff. For years the paper had been an eyesore to Kessler. It offended him as a lawyer and as a man who preferred the sane and customary corners of life; the fanciful struck him as a kind of immodesty. Until tonight Mr. Marsh had been nothing but a name on a page, and the name by itself had been enough to anger him. Now the name had a body behind it: a small man stooping at a battered door with a key in his hand, and the child's screaming going up behind him on the cobbles.

"I thought it was madness," he said, replacing the paper and turning the dial. "Now I begin to fear it is something worse than madness."

He put on his overcoat and went out into the cold, in the direction of the river, toward the house of his old friend Dr. Alma Reyes on Louisburg Square. If anyone knew what bound Voss to this creature, it would be Reyes.

Reyes's housekeeper knew him and let him straight in, through to the dining room where the doctor sat alone over a glass of port. Reyes was a broad, ruddy, vigorous woman of sixty, with a shock of iron-gray hair and a laugh that arrived before her opinions did. The two had been friends since their days at the same college, years in which Kessler had studied contracts and Reyes had studied the machinery of the cell, and they had never once bored each other.

After some rambling talk about kidneys and conveyances, Kessler led the conversation where it had been pulling to go all evening.

"I suppose, Alma, that you and I are the two oldest friends Adrian Voss has."

"I wish the friends were younger," said Reyes, chuckling. "But I suppose we are. What of it? I see little of him now."

"Indeed? I thought you had a bond of common work."

"We had. But it is more than ten years since Adrian Voss became too fanciful for me. He began to go wrong. Wrong in mind, I mean. I take an interest in him still, for old sake's sake, but I see devilish little of the man. Such unscientific mysticism," she added, flushing suddenly purple, "would have estranged Damon and Pythias."

This small burst of temper was a relief to Kessler. "So it is only a difference about science," he thought, and since his own passions ran to deeds of trust rather than to enzymes, he even said so. He gave his friend a few seconds to recover, and then put the question he had come to ask. "Did you ever come across a protégé of his? One Marsh?"

"Marsh?" Reyes repeated. "No. Never heard of him. He must be since my time."

That was the whole of what Kessler carried home with him to the great dark bed where he tossed until the small hours began to grow large. Devon Parks's tale unwound before him in a scroll of lit pictures. He saw the empty lamplit streets, the man striding east, the child's bicycle flashing down the cross street, and then the meeting of the two, and the calm feet on the small body. Or else he saw a room in a fine house where his friend lay asleep, smiling at his dreams, and the door of the room would open and a figure would stand at the bedside, and Kessler could not have told whether the sleeper had summoned it or was afraid of it. The figure moved through his dreams in both shapes and had no face in either. Since it refused to have a face, there grew up in Kessler a fierce curiosity to see the face of the real Mr. Marsh. Once he had set eyes on him, he told himself, the mystery would lighten and perhaps roll away.

From that time forward, Kessler began to haunt the door on Mercer Row. In the morning before office hours, at noon when business pressed, at night under a wet orange sky, by all lights and at all hours, the lawyer kept his post across the street, patient as a stakeout is patient, telling himself, "If he be Mr. Marsh, I shall be the one who finds."

His patience was rewarded at last. It was a fine dry night with frost in the air, the street swept clean, the shop windows dark, the streetlamps drawing their regular pattern of light and shadow on the pavement. By ten o'clock Mercer Row was empty, and in spite of the low growl of the city all around it, very silent. Kessler had been some minutes at his post when he became aware of a light, quick footstep drawing near, and it was with a strong, superstitious conviction that his watch had ended that he drew back into the shadow of Baxter Court.

The steps came swiftly on and swelled suddenly louder as they turned the corner. The lawyer, peering out, could soon see what manner of man he had to deal with. The stranger was small and plainly dressed, and even at that distance the look of him went against the watcher's inclination like a hand flat against his chest. The man made straight for the door, crossing the street to save three seconds, and as he came he drew a key from his pocket with the easy movement of a man approaching his own home.

Kessler stepped out and touched him on the shoulder as he passed.

"Mr. Marsh, I think?"

Marsh shrank back with a hissing intake of breath. The fear lasted only an instant. He did not look the lawyer in the face, but he answered coolly enough. "That is my name. What do you want?"

"I see you are going in," said Kessler. "I am an old friend of Adrian Voss. Walter Kessler. You must have heard my name. Meeting you so conveniently, I thought you might admit me."

"You will not find Voss. He is from home," replied Marsh, breathing on the key. Then, suddenly, still without looking up: "How did you know me?"

"On your side," said Kessler, "will you do me a favor?"

"With pleasure. What shall it be?"

"Will you let me see your face?"

Marsh appeared to hesitate. Then, as if upon some sudden resolution, he fronted about with an air of defiance, and the pair stared at each other for a few seconds in the cold light of the lamp.

"Now I shall know you again," said Kessler. "It may be useful."

"Yes," returned Marsh, "it is as well we have met. And by the way, you should have my address." He gave a number on a street in the lower ward across the bridge, a district of warehouses turned to flats.

"Good God," thought Kessler. "Can he, too, have been thinking of the will?" But he kept his counsel and grunted acknowledgment of the address.

"And now," said the other, "how did you know me?"

"By description."

"Whose description?"

"We have common friends," said Kessler.

"Common friends," echoed Marsh, a little hoarsely. "Who are they?"

"Voss, for instance."

"He never told you," cried Marsh, and a flush of anger crossed his face. "I did not think you would have lied."

"Come," said Kessler, "that is not fitting language."

The other snarled aloud into a savage laugh, and the next moment, with extraordinary quickness, he had unlocked the door and slipped into the dark of the building.

The lawyer stood a while on the pavement, the picture of disquiet. Then he began slowly to walk up Mercer Row, pausing every step or two with his hand to his brow, a man in real perplexity. The problem he was debating rarely gets solved. Marsh was pale and dwarfish; he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation; his smile displeased; he had borne himself with a murderous mixture of timidity and boldness; his voice was husky, whispering, and a little broken. All these were points against him, yet not all of them together could account for the disgust and loathing and fear with which Kessler regarded him. He gave it up at last, walked the length of the row and on into Aldercote Square, and rang at the door of the house that fronted it.

"Is Dr. Voss at home, Mr. Doyle?" asked the lawyer.

"I will see, Mr. Kessler," said Doyle, and admitted him into a large low hall paved with stone, warmed by an open fire, and furnished with costly cabinets of walnut. "Will you wait by the fire, sir, or shall I give you a light in the dining room?"

"Here, thank you," said Kessler, and leaned on the tall fender. The hall was his friend's favorite room; Kessler himself had heard Voss call it the pleasantest interior in the city. But tonight there was a shudder in his blood. The face of Marsh sat heavy on his memory. He felt, what was rare with him, a nausea and distaste of life, and in the gloom of his spirits he seemed to read a menace in the flicker of firelight on the polished cabinets and the uneasy start of shadows on the ceiling. He was ashamed of his relief when Doyle returned to announce that Dr. Voss had gone out.

"I saw Mr. Marsh go in by the old service door, Mr. Doyle," he said. "Is that right, when Dr. Voss is from home?"

"Quite right, Mr. Kessler, sir. Mr. Marsh has a key."

"Your master seems to repose a great deal of trust in that young man."

"Yes, sir, he does indeed. We have all orders to obey him."

"I don't think I have ever met Mr. Marsh?"

"O, dear no, sir. He never dines here. Indeed we see very little of him on this side of the property. He mostly comes and goes through the lab."

"Well, good night, Mr. Doyle."

"Good night, Mr. Kessler."

And the lawyer set out homeward with a very heavy heart. "Poor Adrian," he thought. "My mind misgives me he is in deep waters. He was wild when he was young, a long while ago to be sure, but in the law of God there is no statute of limitations. It must be that. The ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace, punishment coming on slow feet years after memory has forgot and self-love excused the fault." And the lawyer, scared by the thought, brooded awhile on his own past, groping through all its corners in case some spring-loaded iniquity should leap to light there. His past was fairly clean. Few men could read the ledger of their lives with less dread. Yet he was humbled by the many ill things he had done, and raised into a sober gratitude by the many he had come near to doing and avoided. Then a spark of hope crossed his mind. "This Mr. Marsh, if he were studied, must have secrets of his own. Black secrets, by the look of him. Secrets compared to which poor Voss's worst would look like sunshine. Things cannot continue as they are. It turns me cold to think of this creature stealing to Adrian's bedside. And the danger of it! If Marsh suspects the existence of the will, he may grow impatient to inherit. I must put my shoulder to the wheel, if Voss will let me," he added, "if Voss will only let me." For once more there rose before his mind's eye, clear as a transparency, the strange clauses of the will.