Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 3 (1926-03).djvu/82

368 ple that if lack of virtue would bring me no reward, I might better guard my health and talents for such usefulness as my future might prove to others. I had at least good reason to believe that I had capabilities for achieving great things as a medical practitioner, to which profession I was finally graduated with high honors.

Meanwhile, my twin brother Philip became an architect, at which calling, as the building world knows, he gained international renown.

shortly before I took out my final degree in medicine that I met Helen Paterson, the most wonderful woman in the world, the one whose sympathetic influence most helped to tide me over those drab dread years.

With me it was infatuation from the first. I will not here dilate upon her many charms and her fine qualities of mind and heart I would, in that case, be sorely tempted to write of nothing else. Suffice it to say that our intimacy grew, and I cherished a hope that she was in nowise averse to my attentions. Here, at last, I seemed to have gained the companionship for which my heart cried out; for, if I had had a million choices of whom I must fall in love with, Helen Paterson would have been the one selection, first and last. She encompassed all the fond ideals I had previously conjured of perfect womanhood. We were much together. Away from her side the world seemed to me a sad, empty place.

My new-found Eden, nevertheless, was destined to produce its adder—the vague, sinister thing that had embittered all my previous pleasures. This time, at first, it came in a new guise, but eventually it showed the selfsame ugly head.

Philip, who had become the junior member of a firm of eastern architects, came home on a holiday. I shall not forget the night of Helen Paterson's first meeting with Philip. If ever the primitive impulse to destroy leapt within the being of a man, it leapt within mine when I saw Helen turn from me to Philip as the needle in the mariner's compass will swing from its time position when magnetic steel is brought into close proximity.

For that evening I might quite as well not have existed so far as Helen was concerned. Even such words as I addressed to her went unanswered, unnoticed, until at last in despair I gave up the effort to break in upon the spell my brother's presence had cast over her.

As for Philip, I could see he quite enjoyed his apparent conquest and gloated equally over the misery he knew I was suffering under a cloak of such light-heartedness as I could assume. Satiated as he was with the mixed admiration and envy of men and the undisguised worship of womenfolk, prime pleasure with him had become a sort of devil's sport in observing the tortures when he won away from them a cherished one.

That same night during a brief interval while I had her company to myself I put this question to her with an affectation of light concern: "Now, Helen, what do you think of my brother Philip?"

"Oh, I think he's wonderful," she flashed. Then she added more quietly: "But he's too compelling, too self-centralized."

"You mean he is what they call a dangerous man?"

She was silent a moment, then: "It would be hard to define it, Amos. It is not exactly masterfulness, not a mental quality with him. It is an intangible something in the personality of the man that attracts and commands without his even willing it.