The Legend

I

ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first
conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it
in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in
retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades' must
be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn't
imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused
pattern of the century's intellectual life, to fit the stranger in
anywhere, save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years
earlier, had been left by Pellerin's unaccountable disappearance;
and conversely, such a man as the Wades' visitor couldn't have lived
for sixty years without filling, somewhere in space, a nearly
equivalent void.

At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother
that Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose
chief charms in the young man's eyes was that they remained so
robustly untainted by Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor
Wade's younger brother, Howland, was among its most impudently
flourishing high-priests.

The incident had begun by Bernald's running across Doctor Robert
Wade one hot summer night at the University Club, and by Wade's
saying, in the tone of unprofessional laxity which the shadowy
stillness of the place invited: "I got hold of a queer fish at St.
Martin's the other day--case of heat-prostration picked up in
Central Park. When we'd patched him up I found he had nowhere to go,
and not a dollar in his pocket, and I sent him down to our place at
Portchester to re-build."

The opening roused his hearer's attention. Bob Wade had an odd
unformulated sense of values that Bernald had learned to trust.

"What sort of chap? Young or old?"

"Oh, every age--full of years, and yet with a lot left. He called
himself sixty on the books."

"Sixty's a good age for some kinds of living. And age is of course
purely subjective. How has he used his sixty years?"

"Well--part of them in educating himself, apparently. He's a
scholar--humanities, languages, and so forth."

"Oh--decayed gentleman," Bernald murmured, disappointed.

"Decayed? Not much!" cried the doctor with his accustomed
literalness. "I only mentioned that side of Winterman--his name's
Winterman--because it was the side my mother noticed first. I
suppose women generally do. But it's only a part--a small part. The
man's the big thing."

"Really big?"

"Well--there again. ... When I took him down to the country,
looking rather like a tramp from a 'Shelter,' with an untrimmed
beard, and a suit of