Bot-S: The Complete Works of Edith Wharton

THE GREATER INCLINATION


By Edith Wharton


TABLE OF CONTENTS


THE GREATER INCLINATION


I _The Muse’s Tragedy_.

II _A Journey_.

III _The Pelican_.

IV _Souls Belated_.

V _A Coward_.

VI _The Twilight of the God_.

VII _A Cup of Cold Water_.

VIII _The Portrait_.




THE GREATER INCLINATION




THE MUSE’S TRAGEDY


Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at
once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of
her--she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph
to the most privileged--and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and
cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist
phrase: “Oh, well, she’s like one of those old prints where the lines
have the value of color.”

He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs.
Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and
that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the
table near the window, he had said to himself, “_That might be she_.”

Ever since his Harvard days--he was still young enough to think of them
as immensely remote--Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia
of Vincent Rendle’s immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the _Life and
Letters_. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of
the nineteenth century--and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers,
from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. The first
reading of certain poems--of the _Antinous_, the _Pia Tolomei_, the
_Sonnets to Silvia_,--had been epochs in Danyers’s growth, and the verse
seemed to gain in mellowness, in amplitude, in meaning as one brought
to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense.
Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere
beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush
and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed
significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word--his
imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and
perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already
discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored. Danyers
had written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle’s poetry (it chanced
to be the moment of the great man’s death); he had fashioned the
fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms which
Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years later
the _Life and Letters_ appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took
substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman
who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender,
incomparable prose.

Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to mention that
she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for a year or more,
and had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the kind of woman who
runs cheap excursions to celebrities; when one afternoon she remarked,
as she put a second lump of sugar in his tea:

“Is it right this time? You’re almost as particular as Mary Anerton.”

“Mary Anerton?”

“Yes, I never _can_ remember how she likes her tea. Either it’s lemon
_with_ sugar, or lemon without sugar, or cream without either, and
whichever it is must be put into the cup before the tea is poured in;
and if one hasn’t remembered, one must begin all over again. I suppose
it was Vincent Rendle’s way of taking his tea and has become a sacred
rite.”

“Do you _know_ Mrs. Anerton?” cried Danyers, disturbed by this careless
familiarity with the habits of his divinity.

“‘And did I once see Shelley plain?’ Mercy, yes! She and I were at
school together--she’s an American, you know. We were at a _pension_
near Tours for nearly a year; then she went back to New York, and I
didn’t see her again till after her marriage. She and Anerton spent a
winter in Rome while my husband was attached to our Legation there,
and she used to be with us a great deal.” Mrs. Memorall smiled
reminiscently. “It was _the_ winter.”

“The winter they first met?”

“Precisely--but unluckily I left Rome just before the meeting took
place. Wasn’t it too bad? I might have been in the _Life and Letters_.
You know he mentions that stupid Madame Vodki, at whose house he first
saw her.”

“And did you see much of her after that?”

“Not during Rendle’s life. You know she has lived in Europe almost
entirely, and though I used to see her off and on when I went abroad,
she was always so engrossed, so preoccupied, that one felt one wasn’t
wanted. The fact is, she cared only about his friends--she separated
herself gradually from all her own people. Now, of course, it’s
different; she’s desperately lonely; she’s taken to writing to me now
and then; and last year, when she heard I was going abroad, she asked me
to meet her in Venice, and I spent a week with her there.”

“And Rendle?”

Mrs. Memorall smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I never was allowed a
peep at _him_; none of her old friends met him, except by accident.
Ill-natured people say that was the reason she kept him so long. If one
happened in while he was there, he was hustled into Anerton’s study,
and the husband mounted guard till the inopportune visitor had departed.
Anerton, you know, was really much more ridiculous about it than his
wife. Mary was too clever to lose her head, or at least to show she’d
lost it--but Anerton couldn’t conceal his pride in the conquest. I’ve
seen Mary shiver when he spoke of Rendle as _our poet_. Rendle always
had to have a certain seat at the dinner-table, away from the draught
and not too near the fire, and a box of cigars that no one else
was allowed to touch, and a writing-table of his own in Mary’s
sitting-room--and Anerton was always telling one of the great man’s
idiosyncrasies: how he never would cut the ends of his cigars, though
Anerton himself had given him a gold cutter set with a star-sapphire,
and how untidy his writing-table was, and how the house-maid had orders
always to bring the waste-paper basket to her mistress before emptying
it, lest some immortal verse should be thrown into the dust-bin.”

“The Anertons never separated, did they?”

“Separated? Bless you, no. He never would have left Rendle! And besides,
he was very fond of his wife.”

“And she?”

“Oh, she saw he was the kind of man who was fated to make himself
ridiculous, and she never interfered with his natural tendencies.”

From Mrs. Memorall, Danyers further learned that Mrs. Anerton, whose
husband had died some years before her poet, now divided her life
between Rome, where she had a small apartment, and England, where
she occasionally went to stay with those of her friends who had been
Rendle’s. She had been engaged, for some time after his death, in
editing some juvenilia which he had bequeathed to her care; but that
task being accomplished, she had been left without definite occupation,
and Mrs. Memorall, on the occasion of their last meeting, had found her
listless and out of spirits.

“She misses him too much--her life is too empty. I told her so--I told
her she ought to marry.”

“Oh!”

“Why not, pray? She’s a young woman still--what many people would call
young,” Mrs. Memorall interjected, with a parenthetic glance at the
mirror. “Why not accept the inevitable and begin over again? All the
King’s horses and all the King’s men won’t bring Rendle to life-and
besides, she didn’t marry _him_ when she had the chance.”

Danyers winced slightly at this rude fingering of his idol. Was it
possible that Mrs. Memorall did not see what an anti-climax such a
marriage would have been? Fancy Rendle “making an honest woman” of
Silvia; for so society would have viewed it! How such a reparation
would have vulgarized their past--it would have been like “restoring”
 a masterpiece; and how exquisite must have been the perceptions of the
woman who, in defiance of appearances, and perhaps of her own secret
inclination, chose to go down to posterity as Silvia rather than as Mrs.
Vincent Rendle!

Mrs. Memorall, from this day forth, acquired an interest in Danyers’s
eyes. She was like a volume of unindexed and discursive memoirs, through
which he patiently plodded in the hope of finding embedded amid layers
of dusty twaddle some precious allusion to the subject of his thought.
When, some months later, he brought out his first slim volume, in which
the remodelled college essay on Rendle figured among a dozen, somewhat
overstudied “appreciations,” he offered a copy to Mrs. Memorall; who
surprised him, the next time they met, with the announcement that she
had sent the book to Mrs. Anerton.

Mrs. Anerton in due time wrote to thank her friend. Danyers was
privileged to read the few lines in which, in terms that suggested the
habit of “acknowledging” similar tributes, she spoke of the author’s
“feeling and insight,” and was “so glad of the opportunity,” etc.
He went away disappointed, without clearly knowing what else he had
expected.

The following spring, when he went abroad, Mrs. Memorall offered him
letters to everybody, from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Louise
Michel. She did not include Mrs. Anerton, however, and Danyers knew,
from a previous conversation, that Silvia objected to people who
“brought letters.” He knew also that she travelled during the summer,
and was unlikely to return to Rome before the term of his holiday should
be reached, and the hope of meeting her was not included among his
anticipations.

The lady whose entrance broke upon his solitary repast in the restaurant
of the Hotel Villa d’Este had seated herself in such a way that her
profile was detached against the window; and thus viewed, her domed
forehead, small arched nose, and fastidious lip suggested a silhouette
of Marie Antoinette. In the lady’s dress and movements--in the very turn
of her wrist as she poured out her coffee--Danyers thought he detected
the same fastidiousness, the same air of tacitly excluding the obvious
and unexceptional. Here was a woman who had been much bored and keenly
interested. The waiter brought her a _Secolo,_ and as she bent above it
Danyers noticed that the hair rolled back from her forehead was
turning gray; but her figure was straight and slender, and she had the
invaluable gift of a girlish back.

The rush of Anglo-Saxon travel had not set toward the lakes, and with
the exception of an Italian family or two, and a hump-backed youth with
an _abbé_, Danyers and the lady had the marble halls of the Villa d’Este
to themselves.

When he returned from his morning ramble among the hills he saw her
sitting at one of the little tables at the edge of the lake. She was
writing, and a heap of books and newspapers lay on the table at her
side. That evening they met again in the garden. He had strolled out to
smoke a last cigarette before dinner, and under the black vaulting of
ilexes, near the steps leading down to the boat-landing, he found her
leaning on the parapet above the lake. At the sound of his approach she
turned and looked at him. She had thrown a black lace scarf over her
head, and in this sombre setting her face seemed thin and unhappy. He
remembered afterwards that her eyes, as they met his, expressed not so
much sorrow as profound discontent.

To his surprise she stepped toward him with a detaining gesture.

“Mr. Lewis Danyers, I believe?”

He bowed.

“I am Mrs. Anerton. I saw your name on the visitors’ list and wished to
thank you for an essay on Mr. Rendle’s poetry--or rather to tell you
how much I appreciated it. The book was sent to me last winter by Mrs.
Memorall.”

She spoke in even melancholy tones, as though the habit of perfunctory
utterance had robbed her voice of more spontaneous accents; but her
smile was charming. They sat down on a stone bench under the ilexes, and
she told him how much pleasure his essay had given her. She thought it
the best in the book--she was sure he had put more of himself into it
than into any other; was she not right in conjecturing that he had been
very deeply influenced by Mr. Rendle’s poetry? _Pour comprendre il faut
aimer_, and it seemed to her that, in some ways, he had penetrated the
poet’s inner meaning more completely than any other critic. There were
certain problems, of course, that he had left untouched; certain aspects
of that many-sided mind that he had perhaps failed to seize--

“But then you are young,” she concluded gently, “and one could not wish
you, as yet, the experience that a fuller understanding would imply.”


II

She stayed a month at Villa d’Este, and Danyers was with her daily. She
showed an unaffected pleasure in his society; a pleasure so obviously
founded on their common veneration of Rendle, that the young man could
enjoy it without fear of fatuity. At first he was merely one more grain
of frankincense on the altar of her insatiable divinity; but gradually a
more personal note crept into their intercourse. If she still liked
him only because he appreciated Rendle, she at least perceptibly
distinguished him from the herd of Rendle’s appreciators.

Her attitude toward the great man’s memory struck Danyers as perfect.
She neither proclaimed nor disavowed her identity. She was frankly
Silvia to those who knew and cared; but there was no trace of the Egeria
in her pose. She spoke often of Rendle’s books, but seldom of himself;
there was no posthumous conjugality, no use of the possessive tense, in
her abounding reminiscences. Of the master’s intellectual life, of his
habits of thought and work, she never wearied of talking. She knew
the history of each poem; by what scene or episode each image had been
evoked; how many times the words in a certain line had been transposed;
how long a certain adjective had been sought, and what had at last
suggested it; she could even explain that one impenetrable line, the
torment of critics, the joy of detractors, the last line of _The Old
Odysseus_.

Danyers felt that in talking of these things she was no mere echo of
Rendle’s thought. If her identity had appeared to be merged in his it
was because they thought alike, not because he had thought for her.
Posterity is apt to regard the women whom poets have sung as chance pegs
on which they hung their garlands; but Mrs. Anerton’s mind was like
some fertile garden wherein, inevitably, Rendle’s imagination had
rooted itself and flowered. Danyers began to see how many threads of
his complex mental tissue the poet had owed to the blending of her
temperament with his; in a certain sense Silvia had herself created the
_Sonnets to Silvia_.

To be the custodian of Rendle’s inner self, the door, as it were, to the
sanctuary, had at first seemed to Danyers so comprehensive a privilege
that he had the sense, as his friendship with Mrs. Anerton advanced, of
forcing his way into a life already crowded. What room was there,
among such towering memories, for so small an actuality as his? Quite
suddenly, after this, he discovered that Mrs. Memorall knew better: his
fortunate friend was bored as well as lonely.

“You have had more than any other woman!” he had exclaimed to her one
day; and her smile flashed a derisive light on his blunder. Fool that
he was, not to have seen that she had not had enough! That she was young
still--do years count?--tender, human, a woman; that the living have
need of the living.

After that, when they climbed the alleys of the hanging park, resting
in one of the little ruined temples, or watching, through a ripple of
foliage, the remote blue flash of the lake, they did not always talk of
Rendle or of literature. She encouraged Danyers to speak of himself; to
confide his ambitions to her; she asked him the questions which are the
wise woman’s substitute for advice.

“You must write,” she said, administering the most exquisite flattery
that human lips could give.

Of course he meant to write--why not to do something great in his turn?
His best, at least; with the resolve, at the outset, that his best
should be _the_ best. Nothing less seemed possible with that mandate in
his ears. How she had divined him; lifted and disentangled his groping
ambitions; laid the awakening touch on his spirit with her creative _Let
there be light!_

It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and
happy.

“You ought to write a book about _him,”_ she went on gently.

Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Rendle’s way of walking in
unannounced.

“You ought to do it,” she insisted. “A complete interpretation--a
summing-up of his style, his purpose, his theory of life and art. No one
else could do it as well.”

He sat looking at her perplexedly. Suddenly--dared he guess?

“I couldn’t do it without you,” he faltered.

“I could help you--I would help you, of course.”

They sat silent, both looking at the lake.

It was agreed, when they parted, that he should rejoin her six weeks
later in Venice. There they were to talk about the book.


III

_Lago d’Iseo, August 14th_.

When I said good-by to you yesterday I promised to come back to Venice
in a week: I was to give you your answer then. I was not honest in
saying that; I didn’t mean to go back to Venice or to see you again.
I was running away from you--and I mean to keep on running! If _you_
won’t, _I_ must. Somebody must save you from marrying a disappointed
woman of--well, you say years don’t count, and why should they, after
all, since you are not to marry me?

That is what I dare not go back to say. _You are not to marry me_. We
have had our month together in Venice (such a good month, was it not?)
and now you are to go home and write a book--any book but the one
we--didn’t talk of!--and I am to stay here, attitudinizing among my
memories like a sort of female Tithonus. The dreariness of this enforced
immortality!

But you shall know the truth. I care for you, or at least for your love,
enough to owe you that.

You thought it was because Vincent Rendle had loved me that there was
so little hope for you. I had had what I wanted to the full; wasn’t that
what you said? It is just when a man begins to think he understands
a woman that he may be sure he doesn’t! It is because Vincent Rendle
_didn’t love me_ that there is no hope for you. I never had what I
wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.

Do you begin to understand? It was all a sham then, you say? No, it was
all real as far as it went. You are young--you haven’t learned, as you
will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one’s
way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn’t it strike you,
sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about
him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round
between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving
the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little
pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his
way of always calling me _you--dear you_, every letter began--I never
told you a word of all that, did I? Do you suppose I could have helped
telling you, if he had loved me? These little things would have been
mine, then, a part of my life--of our life--they would have slipped out
in spite of me (it’s only your unhappy woman who is always reticent
and dignified). But there never was any “our life;” it was always “our
lives” to the end....

If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear
with me, you would let me hurt you! I shall never be quite so lonely
again, now that some one knows.

Let me begin at the beginning. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not
twenty-five. That was twenty years ago. From that time until his death,
five years ago, we were fast friends. He gave me fifteen years, perhaps
the best fifteen years, of his life. The world, as you know, thinks that
his greatest poems were written during those years; I am supposed
to have “inspired” them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the
intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have
been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he
was never tired of playing. Some one told me of his once saying of me
that I “always understood;” it is the only praise I ever heard of his
giving me. I don’t even know if he thought me pretty, though I hardly
think my appearance could have been disagreeable to him, for he hated to
be with ugly people. At all events he fell into the way of spending more
and more of his time with me. He liked our house; our ways suited
him. He was nervous, irritable; people bored him and yet he disliked
solitude. He took sanctuary with us. When we travelled he went with
us; in the winter he took rooms near us in Rome. In England or on the
continent he was always with us for a good part of the year. In small
ways I was able to help him in his work; he grew dependent on me. When
we were apart he wrote to me continually--he liked to have me share in
all he was doing or thinking; he was impatient for my criticism of every
new book that interested him; I was a part of his intellectual life. The
pity of it was that I wanted to be something more. I was a young woman
and I was in love with him--not because he was Vincent Rendle, but just
because he was himself!

People began to talk, of course--I was Vincent Rendle’s Mrs. Anerton;
when the _Sonnets to Silvia_ appeared, it was whispered that I was
Silvia. Wherever he went, I was invited; people made up to me in the
hope of getting to know him; when I was in London my doorbell never
stopped ringing. Elderly peeresses, aspiring hostesses, love-sick girls
and struggling authors overwhelmed me with their assiduities. I hugged
my success, for I knew what it meant--they thought that Rendle was in
love with me! Do you know, at times, they almost made me think so too?
Oh, there was no phase of folly I didn’t go through. You can’t imagine
the excuses a woman will invent for a man’s not telling her that he
loves her--pitiable arguments that she would see through at a glance if
any other woman used them! But all the while, deep down, I knew he had
never cared. I should have known it if he had made love to me every day
of his life. I could never guess whether he knew what people said about
us--he listened so little to what people said; and cared still less,
when he heard. He was always quite honest and straightforward with me;
he treated me as one man treats another; and yet at times I felt he
_must_ see that with me it was different. If he did see, he made no
sign. Perhaps he never noticed--I am sure he never meant to be cruel. He
had never made love to me; it was no fault of his if I wanted more than
he could give me. The _Sonnets to Silvia_, you say? But what are they? A
cosmic philosophy, not a love-poem; addressed to Woman, not to a woman!

But then, the letters? Ah, the letters! Well, I’ll make a clean breast
of it. You have noticed the breaks in the letters here and there,
just as they seem to be on the point of growing a little--warmer?
The critics, you may remember, praised the editor for his commendable
delicacy and good taste (so rare in these days!) in omitting from the
correspondence all personal allusions, all those _détails intimes_ which
should be kept sacred from the public gaze. They referred, of course, to
the asterisks in the letters to Mrs. A. Those letters I myself prepared
for publication; that is to say, I copied them out for the editor, and
every now and then I put in a line of asterisks to make it appear
that something had been left out. You understand? The asterisks were a
sham--_there was nothing to leave out_.

No one but a woman could understand what I went through during those
years--the moments of revolt, when I felt I must break away from it
all, fling the truth in his face and never see him again; the inevitable
reaction, when not to see him seemed the one unendurable thing, and I
trembled lest a look or word of mine should disturb the poise of our
friendship; the silly days when I hugged the delusion that he _must_
love me, since everybody thought he did; the long periods of numbness,
when I didn’t seem to care whether he loved me or not. Between these
wretched days came others when our intellectual accord was so perfect
that I forgot everything else in the joy of feeling myself lifted up
on the wings of his thought. Sometimes, then, the heavens seemed to be
opened....

       *       *       *       *       *

All this time he was so dear a friend! He had the genius of friendship,
and he spent it all on me. Yes, you were right when you said that I have
had more than any other woman. _Il faut de l’adresse pour aimer_, Pascal
says; and I was so quiet, so cheerful, so frankly affectionate with him,
that in all those years I am almost sure I never bored him. Could I have
hoped as much if he had loved me?

You mustn’t think of him, though, as having been tied to my skirts. He
came and went as he pleased, and so did his fancies. There was a girl
once (I am telling you everything), a lovely being who called his
poetry “deep” and gave him _Lucile_ on his birthday. He followed her to
Switzerland one summer, and all the time that he was dangling after her
(a little too conspicuously, I always thought, for a Great Man), he was
writing to _me_ about his theory of vowel-combinations--or was it his
experiments in English hexameter? The letters were dated from the very
places where I knew they went and sat by waterfalls together and he
thought out adjectives for her hair. He talked to me about it quite
frankly afterwards. She was perfectly beautiful and it had been a pure
delight to watch her; but she _would_ talk, and her mind, he said, was
“all elbows.” And yet, the next year, when her marriage was announced,
he went away alone, quite suddenly ... and it was just afterwards that
he published _Love’s Viaticum_. Men are queer!

After my husband died--I am putting things crudely, you see--I had a
return of hope. It was because he loved me, I argued, that he had
never spoken; because he had always hoped some day to make me his wife;
because he wanted to spare me the “reproach.” Rubbish! I knew well
enough, in my heart of hearts, that my one chance lay in the force of
habit. He had grown used to me; he was no longer young; he dreaded new
people and new ways; _il avait pris son pli_. Would it not be easier to
marry me?

I don’t believe he ever thought of it. He wrote me what people call “a
beautiful letter;” he was kind; considerate, decently commiserating;
then, after a few weeks, he slipped into his old way of coming in every
afternoon, and our interminable talks began again just where they had
left off. I heard later that people thought I had shown “such good
taste” in not marrying him.

So we jogged on for five years longer. Perhaps they were the best years,
for I had given up hoping. Then he died.

After his death--this is curious--there came to me a kind of mirage of
love. All the books and articles written about him, all the reviews of
the “Life,” were full of discreet allusions to Silvia. I became again
the Mrs. Anerton of the glorious days. Sentimental girls and dear lads
like you turned pink when somebody whispered, “that was Silvia you were
talking to.” Idiots begged for my autograph--publishers urged me to
write my reminiscences of him--critics consulted me about the reading
of doubtful lines. And I knew that, to all these people, I was the woman
Vincent Rendle had loved.

After a while that fire went out too and I was left alone with my
past. Alone--quite alone; for he had never really been with me. The
intellectual union counted for nothing now. It had been soul to soul,
but never hand in hand, and there were no little things to remember him
by.

Then there set in a kind of Arctic winter. I crawled into myself as into
a snow-hut. I hated my solitude and yet dreaded any one who disturbed
it. That phase, of course, passed like the others. I took up life again,
and began to read the papers and consider the cut of my gowns. But there
was one question that I could not be rid of, that haunted me night and
day. Why had he never loved me? Why had I been so much to him, and no
more? Was I so ugly, so essentially unlovable, that though a man might
cherish me as his mind’s comrade, he could not care for me as a woman? I
can’t tell you how that question tortured me. It became an obsession.

My poor friend, do you begin to see? I had to find out what some other
man thought of me. Don’t be too hard on me! Listen first--consider. When
I first met Vincent Rendle I was a young woman, who had married early
and led the quietest kind of life; I had had no “experiences.” From the
hour of our first meeting to the day of his death I never looked at any
other man, and never noticed whether any other man looked at me. When
he died, five years ago, I knew the extent of my powers no more than a
baby. Was it too late to find out? Should I never know _why?_

Forgive me--forgive me. You are so young; it will be an episode, a mere
“document,” to you so soon! And, besides, it wasn’t as deliberate, as
cold-blooded as these disjointed lines have made it appear. I didn’t
plan it, like a woman in a book. Life is so much more complex than any
rendering of it can be. I liked you from the first--I was drawn to you
(you must have seen that)--I wanted you to like me; it was not a mere
psychological experiment. And yet in a sense it was that, too--I must
be honest. I had to have an answer to that question; it was a ghost that
had to be laid.

At first I was afraid--oh, so much afraid--that you cared for me only
because I was Silvia, that you loved me because you thought Rendle had
loved me. I began to think there was no escaping my destiny.

How happy I was when I discovered that you were growing jealous of my
past; that you actually hated Rendle! My heart beat like a girl’s when
you told me you meant to follow me to Venice.

After our parting at Villa d’Este my old doubts reasserted themselves.
What did I know of your feeling for me, after all? Were you capable of
analyzing it yourself? Was it not likely to be two-thirds vanity and
curiosity, and one-third literary sentimentality? You might easily
fancy that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with
Silvia--the heart is such a hypocrite! Or you might be more calculating
than I had supposed. Perhaps it was you who had been flattering _my_
vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope!) of turning me, after a decent
interval, into a pretty little essay with a margin.

When you arrived in Venice and we met again--do you remember the music
on the lagoon, that evening, from my balcony?--I was so afraid you
would begin to talk about the book--the book, you remember, was your
ostensible reason for coming. You never spoke of it, and I soon saw your
one fear was _I_ might do so--might remind you of your object in being
with me. Then I knew you cared for me! yes, at that moment really cared!
We never mentioned the book once, did we, during that month in Venice?

I have read my letter over; and now I wish that I had said this to you
instead of writing it. I could have felt my way then, watching your face
and seeing if you understood. But, no, I could not go back to Venice;
and I could not tell you (though I tried) while we were there together.
I couldn’t spoil that month--my one month. It was so good, for once in
my life, to get away from literature....

You will be angry with me at first--but, alas! not for long. What I have
done would have been cruel if I had been a younger woman; as it is, the
experiment will hurt no one but myself. And it will hurt me horribly
(as much as, in your first anger, you may perhaps wish), because it has
shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed....




A JOURNEY


As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of
the wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles
of wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence.
Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long
stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and
looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband’s curtains
across the aisle....

She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear him
if he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months
and it irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this
increasing childish petulance seemed to give expression to their
imperceptible estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another
through a sheet of glass they were close together, almost touching, but
they could not hear or feel each other: the conductivity between them
was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation, and she
fancied sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look with which he
supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the fault was hers. She was
too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease.
Her self-reproachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his
irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in
his helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so
unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both
had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their
energies no longer kept step: hers still bounded ahead of life,
preëmpting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while his lagged
behind, vainly struggling to overtake her.

When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her
days had been as bare as the whitewashed school-room where she forced
innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in
on the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the
encloser of remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed.
Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread her
wings.

At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air would set him
right; but when he came back this assurance was explained as having of
course included a winter in a dry climate. They gave up their pretty
house, storing the wedding presents and new furniture, and went to
Colorado. She had hated it there from the first. Nobody knew her or
cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had
made, or to envy her the new dresses and the visiting-cards which were
still a surprise to her. And he kept growing worse. She felt herself
beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought by so direct a
temperament. She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually,
undefinably ceasing to be himself. The man she had married had been
strong, active, gently masterful: the male whose pleasure it is to clear
a way through the material obstructions of life; but now it was she who
was the protector, he who must be shielded from importunities and given
his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling. The routine
of the sick-room bewildered her; this punctual administering of medicine
seemed as idle as some uncomprehended religious mummery.

There were moments, indeed, when warm gushes of pity swept away her
instinctive resentment of his condition, when she still found his old
self in his eyes as they groped for each other through the dense
medium of his weakness. But these moments had grown rare. Sometimes
he frightened her: his sunken expressionless face seemed that of a
stranger; his voice was weak and hoarse; his thin-lipped smile a mere
muscular contraction. Her hand avoided his damp soft skin, which had
lost the familiar roughness of health: she caught herself furtively
watching him as she might have watched a strange animal. It frightened
her to feel that this was the man she loved; there were hours when to
tell him what she suffered seemed the one escape from her fears. But
in general she judged herself more leniently, reflecting that she
had perhaps been too long alone with him, and that she would feel
differently when they were at home again, surrounded by her robust and
buoyant family. How she had rejoiced when the doctors at last gave their
consent to his going home! She knew, of course, what the decision meant;
they both knew. It meant that he was to die; but they dressed the truth
in hopeful euphuisms, and at times, in the joy of preparation, she
really forgot the purpose of their journey, and slipped into an eager
allusion to next year’s plans.

At last the day of leaving came. She had a dreadful fear that they would
never get away; that somehow at the last moment he would fail her; that
the doctors held one of their accustomed treacheries in reserve; but
nothing happened. They drove to the station, he was installed in a seat
with a rug over his knees and a cushion at his back, and she hung out
of the window waving unregretful farewells to the acquaintances she had
really never liked till then.

The first twenty-four hours had passed off well. He revived a little and
it amused him to look out of the window and to observe the humours of
the car. The second day he began to grow weary and to chafe under the
dispassionate stare of the freckled child with the lump of chewing-gum.
She had to explain to the child’s mother that her husband was too ill
to be disturbed: a statement received by that lady with a resentment
visibly supported by the maternal sentiment of the whole car....

That night he slept badly and the next morning his temperature
frightened her: she was sure he was growing worse. The day passed
slowly, punctuated by the small irritations of travel. Watching his
tired face, she traced in its contractions every rattle and jolt of the
tram, till her own body vibrated with sympathetic fatigue. She felt the
others observing him too, and hovered restlessly between him and the
line of interrogative eyes. The freckled child hung about him like
a fly; offers of candy and picture-books failed to dislodge her: she
twisted one leg around the other and watched him imperturbably. The
porter, as he passed, lingered with vague proffers of help, probably
inspired by philanthropic passengers swelling with the sense that
“something ought to be done;” and one nervous man in a skull-cap was
audibly concerned as to the possible effect on his wife’s health.

The hours dragged on in a dreary inoccupation. Towards dusk she sat
down beside him and he laid his hand on hers. The touch startled her. He
seemed to be calling her from far off. She looked at him helplessly and
his smile went through her like a physical pang.

“Are you very tired?” she asked.

“No, not very.”

“We’ll be there soon now.”

“Yes, very soon.”

“This time to-morrow--”

He nodded and they sat silent. When she had put him to bed and crawled
into her own berth she tried to cheer herself with the thought that in
less than twenty-four hours they would be in New York. Her people would
all be at the station to meet her--she pictured their round unanxious
faces pressing through the crowd. She only hoped they would not tell him
too loudly that he was looking splendidly and would be all right in no
time: the subtler sympathies developed by long contact with suffering
were making her aware of a certain coarseness of texture in the family
sensibilities.

Suddenly she thought she heard him call. She parted the curtains and
listened. No, it was only a man snoring at the other end of the car. His
snores had a greasy sound, as though they passed through tallow. She lay
down and tried to sleep... Had she not heard him move? She started up
trembling... The silence frightened her more than any sound. He might
not be able to make her hear--he might be calling her now... What made
her think of such things? It was merely the familiar tendency of an
over-tired mind to fasten itself on the most intolerable chance within
the range of its forebodings.... Putting her head out, she listened; but
she could not distinguish his breathing from that of the other pairs of
lungs about her. She longed to get up and look at him, but she knew the
impulse was a mere vent for her restlessness, and the fear of disturbing
him restrained her.... The regular movement of his curtain reassured
her, she knew not why; she remembered that he had wished her a cheerful
good-night; and the sheer inability to endure her fears a moment longer
made her put them from her with an effort of her whole sound tired body.
She turned on her side and slept.

She sat up stiffly, staring out at the dawn. The train was rushing
through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It
looked like the first day of creation. The air of the car was close, and
she pushed up her window to let in the keen wind. Then she looked at
her watch: it was seven o’clock, and soon the people about her would be
stirring. She slipped into her clothes, smoothed her dishevelled
hair and crept to the dressing-room. When she had washed her face and
adjusted her dress she felt more hopeful. It was always a struggle for
her not to be cheerful in the morning. Her cheeks burned deliciously
under the coarse towel and the wet hair about her temples broke
into strong upward tendrils. Every inch of her was full of life and
elasticity. And in ten hours they would be at home!

She stepped to her husband’s berth: it was time for him to take his
early glass of milk. The window-shade was down, and in the dusk of the
curtained enclosure she could just see that he lay sideways, with his
face away from her. She leaned over him and drew up the shade. As she
did so she touched one of his hands. It felt cold....

She bent closer, laying her hand on his arm and calling him by name. He
did not move. She spoke again more loudly; she grasped his shoulder and
gently shook it. He lay motionless. She caught hold of his hand again:
it slipped from her limply, like a dead thing. A dead thing? ... Her
breath caught. She must see his face. She leaned forward, and hurriedly,
shrinkingly, with a sickening reluctance of the flesh, laid her hands on
his shoulders and turned him over. His head fell back; his face looked
small and smooth; he gazed at her with steady eyes.

She remained motionless for a long time, holding him thus; and they
looked at each other. Suddenly she shrank back: the longing to scream,
to call out, to fly from him, had almost overpowered her. But a strong
hand arrested her. Good God! If it were known that he was dead they
would be put off the train at the next station--

In a terrifying flash of remembrance there arose before her a scene she
had once witnessed in travelling, when a husband and wife, whose child
had died in the train, had been thrust out at some chance station. She
saw them standing on the platform with the child’s body between them;
she had never forgotten the dazed look with which they followed the
receding train. And this was what would happen to her. Within the next
hour she might find herself on the platform of some strange station,
alone with her husband’s body.... Anything but that! It was too
horrible--She quivered like a creature at bay.

As she cowered there, she felt the train moving more slowly. It was
coming then--they were approaching a station! She saw again the husband
and wife standing on the lonely platform; and with a violent gesture she
drew down the shade to hide her husband’s face.

Feeling dizzy, she sank down on the edge of the berth, keeping away from
his outstretched body, and pulling the curtains close, so that he and
she were shut into a kind of sepulchral twilight. She tried to think. At
all costs she must conceal the fact that he was dead. But how? Her mind
refused to act: she could not plan, combine. She could think of no way
but to sit there, clutching the curtains, all day long....

She heard the porter making up her bed; people were beginning to move
about the car; the dressing-room door was being opened and shut. She
tried to rouse herself. At length with a supreme effort she rose to her
feet, stepping into the aisle of the car and drawing the curtains tight
behind her. She noticed that they still parted slightly with the motion
of the car, and finding a pin in her dress she fastened them together.
Now she was safe. She looked round and saw the porter. She fancied he
was watching her.

“Ain’t he awake yet?” he enquired.

“No,” she faltered.

“I got his milk all ready when he wants it. You know you told me to have
it for him by seven.”

She nodded silently and crept into her seat.

At half-past eight the train reached Buffalo. By this time the other
passengers were dressed and the berths had been folded back for the day.
The porter, moving to and fro under his burden of sheets and pillows,
glanced at her as he passed. At length he said: “Ain’t he going to get
up? You know we’re ordered to make up the berths as early as we can.”

She turned cold with fear. They were just entering the station.

“Oh, not yet,” she stammered. “Not till he’s had his milk. Won’t you get
it, please?”

“All right. Soon as we start again.”

When the train moved on he reappeared with the milk. She took it from
him and sat vaguely looking at it: her brain moved slowly from one idea
to another, as though they were stepping-stones set far apart across a
whirling flood. At length she became aware that the porter still hovered
expectantly.

“Will I give it to him?” he suggested.

“Oh, no,” she cried, rising. “He--he’s asleep yet, I think--”

She waited till the porter had passed on; then she unpinned the curtains
and slipped behind them. In the semi-obscurity her husband’s face stared
up at her like a marble mask with agate eyes. The eyes were dreadful.
She put out her hand and drew down the lids. Then she remembered the
glass of milk in her other hand: what was she to do with it? She thought
of raising the window and throwing it out; but to do so she would have
to lean across his body and bring her face close to his. She decided to
drink the milk.

She returned to her seat with the empty glass and after a while the
porter came back to get it.

“When’ll I fold up his bed?” he asked.

“Oh, not now--not yet; he’s ill--he’s very ill. Can’t you let him stay
as he is? The doctor wants him to lie down as much as possible.”

He scratched his head. “Well, if he’s _really_ sick--”

He took the empty glass and walked away, explaining to the passengers
that the party behind the curtains was too sick to get up just yet.

She found herself the centre of sympathetic eyes. A motherly woman with
an intimate smile sat down beside her.

“I’m real sorry to hear your husband’s sick. I’ve had a remarkable
amount of sickness in my family and maybe I could assist you. Can I take
a look at him?”

“Oh, no--no, please! He mustn’t be disturbed.”

The lady accepted the rebuff indulgently.

“Well, it’s just as you say, of course, but you don’t look to me as if
you’d had much experience in sickness and I’d have been glad to assist
you. What do you generally do when your husband’s taken this way?”

“I--I let him sleep.”

“Too much sleep ain’t any too healthful either. Don’t you give him any
medicine?”

“Y--yes.”

“Don’t you wake him to take it?”

“Yes.”

“When does he take the next dose?”

“Not for--two hours--”

The lady looked disappointed. “Well, if I was you I’d try giving it
oftener. That’s what I do with my folks.”

After that many faces seemed to press upon her. The passengers were on
their way to the dining-car, and she was conscious that as they passed
down the aisle they glanced curiously at the closed curtains. One
lantern-jawed man with prominent eyes stood still and tried to shoot his
projecting glance through the division between the folds. The freckled
child, returning from breakfast, waylaid the passers with a buttery
clutch, saying in a loud whisper, “He’s sick;” and once the conductor
came by, asking for tickets. She shrank into her corner and looked out
of the window at the flying trees and houses, meaningless hieroglyphs of
an endlessly unrolled papyrus.

Now and then the train stopped, and the newcomers on entering the car
stared in turn at the closed curtains. More and more people seemed to
pass--their faces began to blend fantastically with the images surging
in her brain....

Later in the day a fat man detached himself from the mist of faces. He
had a creased stomach and soft pale lips. As he pressed himself into
the seat facing her she noticed that he was dressed in black broadcloth,
with a soiled white tie.

“Husband’s pretty bad this morning, is he?”

“Yes.”

“Dear, dear! Now that’s terribly distressing, ain’t it?” An apostolic
smile revealed his gold-filled teeth.

“Of course you know there’s no sech thing as sickness. Ain’t that a
lovely thought? Death itself is but a deloosion of our grosser senses.
On’y lay yourself open to the influx of the sperrit, submit yourself
passively to the action of the divine force, and disease and dissolution
will cease to exist for you. If you could indooce your husband to read
this little pamphlet--”

The faces about her again grew indistinct. She had a vague recollection
of hearing the motherly lady and the parent of the freckled child
ardently disputing the relative advantages of trying several medicines
at once, or of taking each in turn; the motherly lady maintaining that
the competitive system saved time; the other objecting that you couldn’t
tell which remedy had effected the cure; their voices went on and on,
like bell-buoys droning through a fog.... The porter came up now and
then with questions that she did not understand, but that somehow she
must have answered since he went away again without repeating them;
every two hours the motherly lady reminded her that her husband ought to
have his drops; people left the car and others replaced them...

Her head was spinning and she tried to steady herself by clutching
at her thoughts as they swept by, but they slipped away from her like
bushes on the side of a sheer precipice down which she seemed to be
falling. Suddenly her mind grew clear again and she found herself
vividly picturing what would happen when the train reached New York.
She shuddered as it occurred to her that he would be quite cold and that
some one might perceive he had been dead since morning.

She thought hurriedly:--“If they see I am not surprised they will
suspect something. They will ask questions, and if I tell them the
truth they won’t believe me--no one would believe me! It will be
terrible”--and she kept repeating to herself:--“I must pretend I don’t
know. I must pretend I don’t know. When they open the curtains I must go
up to him quite naturally--and then I must scream.” ... She had an idea
that the scream would be very hard to do.

Gradually new thoughts crowded upon her, vivid and urgent: she tried
to separate and restrain them, but they beset her clamorously, like
her school-children at the end of a hot day, when she was too tired
to silence them. Her head grew confused, and she felt a sick fear of
forgetting her part, of betraying herself by some unguarded word or
look.

“I must pretend I don’t know,” she went on murmuring. The words had lost
their significance, but she repeated them mechanically, as though they
had been a magic formula, until suddenly she heard herself saying: “I
can’t remember, I can’t remember!”

Her voice sounded very loud, and she looked about her in terror; but no
one seemed to notice that she had spoken.

As she glanced down the car her eye caught the curtains of her husband’s
berth, and she began to examine the monotonous arabesques woven through
their heavy folds. The pattern was intricate and difficult to trace;
she gazed fixedly at the curtains and as she did so the thick stuff grew
transparent and through it she saw her husband’s face--his dead face.
She struggled to avert her look, but her eyes refused to move and her
head seemed to be held in a vice. At last, with an effort that left her
weak and shaking, she turned away; but it was of no use; close in
front of her, small and smooth, was her husband’s face. It seemed to be
suspended in the air between her and the false braids of the woman who
sat in front of her. With an uncontrollable gesture she stretched out
her hand to push the face away, and suddenly she felt the touch of his
smooth skin. She repressed a cry and half started from her seat. The
woman with the false braids looked around, and feeling that she must
justify her movement in some way she rose and lifted her travelling-bag
from the opposite seat. She unlocked the bag and looked into it; but
the first object her hand met was a small flask of her husband’s, thrust
there at the last moment, in the haste of departure. She locked the bag
and closed her eyes ... his face was there again, hanging between her
eye-balls and lids like a waxen mask against a red curtain....

She roused herself with a shiver. Had she fainted or slept? Hours seemed
to have elapsed; but it was still broad day, and the people about her
were sitting in the same attitudes as before.

A sudden sense of hunger made her aware that she had eaten nothing since
morning. The thought of food filled her with disgust, but she dreaded a
return of faintness, and remembering that she had some biscuits in her
bag she took one out and ate it. The dry crumbs choked her, and she
hastily swallowed a little brandy from her husband’s flask. The burning
sensation in her throat acted as a counter-irritant, momentarily
relieving the dull ache of her nerves. Then she felt a gently-stealing
warmth, as though a soft air fanned her, and the swarming fears relaxed
their clutch, receding through the stillness that enclosed her, a
stillness soothing as the spacious quietude of a summer day. She slept.

Through her sleep she felt the impetuous rush of the train. It seemed
to be life itself that was sweeping her on with headlong inexorable
force--sweeping her into darkness and terror, and the awe of unknown
days.--Now all at once everything was still--not a sound, not a
pulsation... She was dead in her turn, and lay beside him with smooth
upstaring face. How quiet it was!--and yet she heard feet coming, the
feet of the men who were to carry them away... She could feel too--she
felt a sudden prolonged vibration, a series of hard shocks, and then
another plunge into darkness: the darkness of death this time--a
black whirlwind on which they were both spinning like leaves, in wild
uncoiling spirals, with millions and millions of the dead....

       *       *       *       *       *

She sprang up in terror. Her sleep must have lasted a long time, for
the winter day had paled and the lights had been lit. The car was in
confusion, and as she regained her self-possession she saw that the
passengers were gathering up their wraps and bags. The woman with the
false braids had brought from the dressing-room a sickly ivy-plant in a
bottle, and the Christian Scientist was reversing his cuffs. The porter
passed down the aisle with his impartial brush. An impersonal figure
with a gold-banded cap asked for her husband’s ticket. A voice shouted
“Baig-gage express!” and she heard the clicking of metal as the
passengers handed over their checks.

Presently her window was blocked by an expanse of sooty wall, and the
train passed into the Harlem tunnel. The journey was over; in a few
minutes she would see her family pushing their joyous way through the
throng at the station. Her heart dilated. The worst terror was past....

“We’d better get him up now, hadn’t we?” asked the porter, touching her
arm.

He had her husband’s hat in his hand and was meditatively revolving it
under his brush.

She looked at the hat and tried to speak; but suddenly the car grew
dark. She flung up her arms, struggling to catch at something, and fell
face downward, striking her head against the dead man’s berth.




THE PELICAN


She was very pretty when I first knew her, with the sweet straight nose
and short upper lip of the cameo-brooch divinity, humanized by a dimple
that flowered in her cheek whenever anything was said possessing the
outward attributes of humor without its intrinsic quality. For the dear
lady was providentially deficient in humor: the least hint of the real
thing clouded her lovely eye like the hovering shadow of an algebraic
problem.

I don’t think nature had meant her to be “intellectual;” but what can a
poor thing do, whose husband has died of drink when her baby is hardly
six months old, and who finds her coral necklace and her grandfather’s
edition of the British Dramatists inadequate to the demands of the
creditors?

Her mother, the celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt, had written a poem in
blank verse on “The Fall of Man;” one of her aunts was dean of a girls’
college; another had translated Euripides--with such a family, the poor
child’s fate was sealed in advance. The only way of paying her husband’s
debts and keeping the baby clothed was to be intellectual; and, after
some hesitation as to the form her mental activity was to take, it was
unanimously decided that she was to give lectures.

They began by being drawing-room lectures. The first time I saw her
she was standing by the piano, against a flippant background of Dresden
china and photographs, telling a roomful of women preoccupied with their
spring bonnets all she thought she knew about Greek art. The ladies
assembled to hear her had given me to understand that she was “doing it
for the baby,” and this fact, together with the shortness of her upper
lip and the bewildering co-operation of her dimple, disposed me to
listen leniently to her dissertation. Happily, at that time Greek art
was still, if I may use the phrase, easily handled: it was as simple as
walking down a museum-gallery lined with pleasant familiar Venuses
and Apollos. All the later complications--the archaic and archaistic
conundrums; the influences of Assyria and Asia Minor; the conflicting
attributions and the wrangles of the erudite--still slumbered in the
bosom of the future “scientific critic.” Greek art in those days began
with Phidias and ended with the Apollo Belvedere; and a child could
travel from one to the other without danger of losing his way.

Mrs. Amyot had two fatal gifts: a capacious but inaccurate memory,
and an extraordinary fluency of speech. There was nothing she did not
remember--wrongly; but her halting facts were swathed in so many layers
of rhetoric that their infirmities were imperceptible to her friendly
critics. Besides, she had been taught Greek by the aunt who had
translated Euripides; and the mere sound of the [Greek: ais] and [Greek:
ois] that she now and then not unskilfully let slip (correcting herself,
of course, with a start, and indulgently mistranslating the phrase),
struck awe to the hearts of ladies whose only “accomplishment” was
French--if you didn’t speak too quickly.

I had then but a momentary glimpse of Mrs. Amyot, but a few months
later I came upon her again in the New England university town where the
celebrated Irene Astarte Pratt lived on the summit of a local Parnassus,
with lesser muses and college professors respectfully grouped on
the lower ledges of the sacred declivity. Mrs. Amyot, who, after her
husband’s death, had returned to the maternal roof (even during her
father’s lifetime the roof had been distinctively maternal), Mrs. Amyot,
thanks to her upper lip, her dimple and her Greek, was already esconced
in a snug hollow of the Parnassian slope.

After the lecture was over it happened that I walked home with Mrs.
Amyot. From the incensed glances of two or three learned gentlemen who
were hovering on the door-step when we emerged, I inferred that Mrs.
Amyot, at that period, did not often walk home alone; but I doubt
whether any of my discomfited rivals, whatever his claims to favor, was
ever treated to so ravishing a mixture of shyness and self-abandonment,
of sham erudition and real teeth and hair, as it was my privilege to
enjoy. Even at the opening of her public career Mrs. Amyot had a tender
eye for strangers, as possible links with successive centres of culture
to which in due course the torch of Greek art might be handed on.

She began by telling me that she had never been so frightened in her
life. She knew, of course, how dreadfully learned I was, and when, just
as she was going to begin, her hostess had whispered to her that I was
in the room, she had felt ready to sink through the floor. Then (with
a flying dimple) she had remembered Emerson’s line--wasn’t it
Emerson’s?--that beauty is its own excuse for _seeing_, and that had
made her feel a little more confident, since she was sure that no one
_saw_ beauty more vividly than she--as a child she used to sit for hours
gazing at an Etruscan vase on the bookcase in the library, while her
sisters played with their dolls--and if _seeing_ beauty was the only
excuse one needed for talking about it, why, she was sure I would make
allowances and not be _too_ critical and sarcastic, especially if, as
she thought probable, I had heard of her having lost her poor husband,
and how she had to do it for the baby.

Being abundantly assured of my sympathy on these points, she went on to
say that she had always wanted so much to consult me about her lectures.
Of course, one subject wasn’t enough (this view of the limitations of
Greek art as a “subject” gave me a startling idea of the rate at which
a successful lecturer might exhaust the universe); she must find
others; she had not ventured on any as yet, but she had thought of
Tennyson--didn’t I _love_ Tennyson? She _worshipped_ him so that she was
sure she could help others to understand him; or what did I think of a
“course” on Raphael or Michelangelo--or on the heroines of Shakespeare?
There were some fine steel-engravings of Raphael’s Madonnas and of the
Sistine ceiling in her mother’s library, and she had seen Miss Cushman
in several Shakespearian _rôles_, so that on these subjects also she
felt qualified to speak with authority.

When we reached her mother’s door she begged me to come in and talk the
matter over; she wanted me to see the baby--she felt as though I should
understand her better if I saw the baby--and the dimple flashed through
a tear.

The fear of encountering the author of “The Fall of Man,” combined with
the opportune recollection of a dinner engagement, made me evade this
appeal with the promise of returning on the morrow. On the morrow, I
left too early to redeem my promise; and for several years afterwards I
saw no more of Mrs. Amyot.

My calling at that time took me at irregular intervals from one to
another of our larger cities, and as Mrs. Amyot was also peripatetic it
was inevitable that sooner or later we should cross each other’s path.
It was therefore without surprise that, one snowy afternoon in Boston,
I learned from the lady with whom I chanced to be lunching that, as soon
as the meal was over, I was to be taken to hear Mrs. Amyot lecture.

“On Greek art?” I suggested.

“Oh, you’ve heard her then? No, this is one of the series called ‘Homes
and Haunts of the Poets.’ Last week we had Wordsworth and the Lake
Poets, to-day we are to have Goethe and Weimar. She is a wonderful
creature--all the women of her family are geniuses. You know, of course,
that her mother was Irene Astarte Pratt, who wrote a poem on ‘The Fall
of Man’; N.P. Willis called her the female Milton of America. One of
Mrs. Amyot’s aunts has translated Eurip--”

“And is she as pretty as ever?” I irrelevantly interposed.

My hostess looked shocked. “She is excessively modest and retiring. She
says it is actual suffering for her to speak in public. You know she
only does it for the baby.”

Punctually at the hour appointed, we took our seats in a lecture-hall
full of strenuous females in ulsters. Mrs. Amyot was evidently a
favorite with these austere sisters, for every corner was crowded, and
as we entered a pale usher with an educated mispronunciation was setting
forth to several dejected applicants the impossibility of supplying them
with seats.

Our own were happily so near the front that when the curtains at the
back of the platform parted, and Mrs. Amyot appeared, I was at once
able to establish a comparison between the lady placidly dimpling to
the applause of her public and the shrinking drawing-room orator of my
earlier recollections.

Mrs. Amyot was as pretty as ever, and there was the same curious
discrepancy between the freshness of her aspect and the stateness of her
theme, but something was gone of the blushing unsteadiness with which
she had fired her first random shots at Greek art. It was not that the
shots were less uncertain, but that she now had an air of assuming that,
for her purpose, the bull’s-eye was everywhere, so that there was no
need to be flustered in taking aim. This assurance had so facilitated
the flow of her eloquence that she seemed to be performing a trick
analogous to that of the conjuror who pulls hundreds of yards of white
paper out of his mouth. From a large assortment of stock adjectives
she chose, with unerring deftness and rapidity, the one that taste and
discrimination would most surely have rejected, fitting out her subject
with a whole wardrobe of slop-shop epithets irrelevant in cut and size.
To the invaluable knack of not disturbing the association of ideas in
her audience, she added the gift of what may be called a confidential
manner--so that her fluent generalizations about Goethe and his place
in literature (the lecture was, of course, manufactured out of Lewes’s
book) had the flavor of personal experience, of views sympathetically
exchanged with her audience on the best way of knitting children’s
socks, or of putting up preserves for the winter. It was, I am sure,
to this personal accent--the moral equivalent of her dimple--that Mrs.
Amyot owed her prodigious, her irrational success. It was her art of
transposing second-hand ideas into first-hand emotions that so endeared
her to her feminine listeners.

To any one not in search of “documents” Mrs. Amyot’s success was hardly
of a kind to make her more interesting, and my curiosity flagged with
the growing conviction that the “suffering” entailed on her by public
speaking was at most a retrospective pang. I was sure that she had
reached the point of measuring and enjoying her effects, of deliberately
manipulating her public; and there must indeed have been a certain
exhilaration in attaining results so considerable by means involving
so little conscious effort. Mrs. Amyot’s art was simply an extension of
coquetry: she flirted with her audience.

In this mood of enlightened skepticism I responded but languidly to my
hostess’s suggestion that I should go with her that evening to see Mrs.
Amyot. The aunt who had translated Euripides was at home on Saturday
evenings, and one met “thoughtful” people there, my hostess explained:
it was one of the intellectual centres of Boston. My mood remained
distinctly resentful of any connection between Mrs. Amyot and
intellectuality, and I declined to go; but the next day I met Mrs. Amyot
in the street.

She stopped me reproachfully. She had heard I was in Boston; why had I
not come last night? She had been told that I was at her lecture, and
it had frightened her--yes, really, almost as much as years ago in
Hillbridge. She never _could_ get over that stupid shyness, and the
whole business was as distasteful to her as ever; but what could she do?
There was the baby--he was a big boy now, and boys were _so_ expensive!
But did I really think she had improved the least little bit? And why
wouldn’t I come home with her now, and see the boy, and tell her frankly
what I had thought of the lecture? She had plenty of flattery--people
were _so_ kind, and every one knew that she did it for the baby--but
what she felt the need of was criticism, severe, discriminating
criticism like mine--oh, she knew that I was dreadfully discriminating!

I went home with her and saw the boy. In the early heat of her
Tennyson-worship Mrs. Amyot had christened him Lancelot, and he looked
it. Perhaps, however, it was his black velvet dress and the exasperating
length of his yellow curls, together with the fact of his having been
taught to recite Browning to visitors, that raised to fever-heat the
itching of my palms in his Infant-Samuel-like presence. I have since had
reason to think that he would have preferred to be called Billy, and
to hunt cats with the other boys in the block: his curls and his poetry
were simply another outlet for Mrs. Amyot’s irrepressible coquetry.

But if Lancelot was not genuine, his mother’s love for him was. It
justified everything--the lectures _were_ for the baby, after all. I had
not been ten minutes in the room before I was pledged to help Mrs. Amyot
carry out her triumphant fraud. If she wanted to lecture on Plato she
should--Plato must take his chance like the rest of us! There was no
use, of course, in being “discriminating.” I preserved sufficient reason
to avoid that pitfall, but I suggested “subjects” and made lists of
books for her with a fatuity that became more obvious as time attenuated
the remembrance of her smile; I even remember thinking that some men
might have cut the knot by marrying her, but I handed over Plato as a
hostage and escaped by the afternoon train.

The next time I saw her was in New York, when she had become so
fashionable that it was a part of the whole duty of woman to be seen at
her lectures. The lady who suggested that of course I ought to go and
hear Mrs. Amyot, was not very clear about anything except that she was
perfectly lovely, and had had a horrid husband, and was doing it to
support her boy. The subject of the discourse (I think it was on Ruskin)
was clearly of minor importance, not only to my friend, but to the
throng of well-dressed and absent-minded ladies who rustled in late,
dropped their muffs and pocket-books, and undisguisedly lost themselves
in the study of each other’s apparel. They received Mrs. Amyot with
warmth, but she evidently represented a social obligation like going to
church, rather than any more personal interest; in fact, I suspect that
every one of the ladies would have remained away, had they been sure
that none of the others were coming.

Whether Mrs. Amyot was disheartened by the lack of sympathy between
herself and her hearers, or whether the sport of arousing it had become
a task, she certainly imparted her platitudes with less convincing
warmth than of old. Her voice had the same confidential inflections, but
it was like a voice reproduced by a gramophone: the real woman seemed
far away. She had grown stouter without losing her dewy freshness, and
her smart gown might have been taken to show either the potentialities
of a settled income, or a politic concession to the taste of her
hearers. As I listened I reproached myself for ever having suspected her
of self-deception in saying that she took no pleasure in her work. I was
sure now that she did it only for Lancelot, and judging from the size of
her audience and the price of the tickets I concluded that Lancelot must
be receiving a liberal education.

I was living in New York that winter, and in the rotation of dinners I
found myself one evening at Mrs. Amyot’s side. The dimple came out at my
greeting as punctually as a cuckoo in a Swiss clock, and I detected the
same automatic quality in the tone in which she made her usual pretty
demand for advice. She was like a musical-box charged with popular airs.
They succeeded one another with breathless rapidity, but there was a
moment after each when the cylinders scraped and whizzed.

Mrs. Amyot, as I found when I called on her, was living in a sunny flat,
with a sitting-room full of flowers and a tea-table that had the air of
expecting visitors. She owned that she had been ridiculously successful.
It was delightful, of course, on Lancelot’s account. Lancelot had been
sent to the best school in the country, and if things went well
and people didn’t tire of his silly mother he was to go to Harvard
afterwards. During the next two or three years Mrs. Amyot kept her flat
in New York, and radiated art and literature upon the suburbs. I saw her
now and then, always stouter, better dressed, more successful and more
automatic: she had become a lecturing-machine.

I went abroad for a year or two and when I came back she had
disappeared. I asked several people about her, but life had closed over
her. She had been last heard of as lecturing--still lecturing--but no
one seemed to know when or where.

It was in Boston that I found her at last, forlornly swaying to the
oscillations of an overhead strap in a crowded trolley-car. Her face had
so changed that I lost myself in a startled reckoning of the time that
had elapsed since our parting. She spoke to me shyly, as though aware of
my hurried calculation, and conscious that in five years she ought not
to have altered so much as to upset my notion of time. Then she seemed
to set it down to her dress, for she nervously gathered her cloak over a
gown that asked only to be concealed, and shrank into a seat behind the
line of prehensile bipeds blocking the aisle of the car.

It was perhaps because she so obviously avoided me that I felt for the
first time that I might be of use to her; and when she left the car I
made no excuse for following her.

She said nothing of needing advice and did not ask me to walk home with
her, concealing, as we talked, her transparent preoccupations under the
guise of a sudden interest in all I had been doing since she had last
seen me. Of what concerned her, I learned only that Lancelot was well
and that for the present she was not lecturing--she was tired and her
doctor had ordered her to rest. On the doorstep of a shabby house she
paused and held out her hand. She had been so glad to see me and perhaps
if I were in Boston again--the tired dimple, as it were, bowed me out
and closed the door on the conclusion of the phrase.

Two or three weeks later, at my club in New York, I found a letter from
her. In it she owned that she was troubled, that of late she had been
unsuccessful, and that, if I chanced to be coming back to Boston, and
could spare her a little of that invaluable advice which--. A few days
later the advice was at her disposal. She told me frankly what had
happened. Her public had grown tired of her. She had seen it coming on
for some time, and was shrewd enough in detecting the causes. She had
more rivals than formerly--younger women, she admitted, with a smile
that could still afford to be generous--and then her audiences had
grown more critical and consequently more exacting. Lecturing--as she
understood it--used to be simple enough. You chose your topic--Raphael,
Shakespeare, Gothic Architecture, or some such big familiar
“subject”--and read up about it for a week or so at the Athenaeum or the
Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it
appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired
of familiar “subjects”; it was the fashion to be interested in things
that one hadn’t always known about--natural selection, animal magnetism,
sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the
demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold
had introduced the habit of studying the “influence” of one author on
another. She had tried lecturing on influences, and had done very well
as long as the public was satisfied with the tracing of such obvious
influences as that of Turner on Ruskin, of Schiller on Goethe, of
Shakespeare on English literature; but such investigations had soon lost
all charm for her too-sophisticated audiences, who now demanded either
that the influence or the influenced should be quite unknown, or that
there should be no perceptible connection between the two. The zest of
the performance lay in the measure of ingenuity with which the lecturer
established a relation between two people who had probably never heard
of each other, much less read each other’s works. A pretty Miss Williams
with red hair had, for instance, been lecturing with great success
on the influence of the Rosicrucians upon the poetry of Keats, while
somebody else had given a “course” on the influence of St. Thomas
Aquinas upon Professor Huxley.

Mrs. Amyot, warmed by my participation in her distress, went on to say
that the growing demand for evolution was what most troubled her. Her
grandfather had been a pillar of the Presbyterian ministry, and the idea
of her lecturing on Darwin or Herbert Spencer was deeply shocking to
her mother and aunts. In one sense the family had staked its literary as
well as its spiritual hopes on the literal inspiration of Genesis: what
became of “The Fall of Man” in the light of modern exegesis?

The upshot of it was that she had ceased to lecture because she could no
longer sell tickets enough to pay for the hire of a lecture-hall; and as
for the managers, they wouldn’t look at her. She had tried her luck all
through the Eastern States and as far south as Washington; but it was of
no use, and unless she could get hold of some new subjects--or, better
still, of some new audiences--she must simply go out of the business.
That would mean the failure of all she had worked for, since Lancelot
would have to leave Harvard. She paused, and wept some of the unbecoming
tears that spring from real grief. Lancelot, it appeared, was to be
a genius. He had passed his opening examinations brilliantly; he had
“literary gifts”; he had written beautiful poetry, much of which his
mother had copied out, in reverentially slanting characters, in a
velvet-bound volume which she drew from a locked drawer.

Lancelot’s verse struck me as nothing more alarming than growing-pains;
but it was not to learn this that she had summoned me. What she wanted
was to be assured that he was worth working for, an assurance which I
managed to convey by the simple stratagem of remarking that the poems
reminded me of Swinburne--and so they did, as well as of Browning,
Tennyson, Rossetti, and all the other poets who supply young authors
with original inspirations.

This point being established, it remained to be decided by what means
his mother was, in the French phrase, to pay herself the luxury of
a poet. It was clear that this indulgence could be bought only with
counterfeit coin, and that the one way of helping Mrs. Amyot was
to become a party to the circulation of such currency. My fetish of
intellectual integrity went down like a ninepin before the appeal of
a woman no longer young and distinctly foolish, but full of those dear
contradictions and irrelevancies that will always make flesh and blood
prevail against a syllogism. When I took leave of Mrs. Amyot I had
promised her a dozen letters to Western universities and had half
pledged myself to sketch out a lecture on the reconciliation of science
and religion.

In the West she achieved a success which for a year or more embittered
my perusal of the morning papers. The fascination that lures the
murderer back to the scene of his crime drew my eye to every paragraph
celebrating Mrs. Amyot’s last brilliant lecture on the influence of
something upon somebody; and her own letters--she overwhelmed me with
them--spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by
the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of
Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured
me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I
winced at the adjective, which cast a sudden light on the vast machinery
of fraud that I had set in motion. All over my native land, men of
hitherto unblemished integrity were conniving with me in urging their
friends to go and hear Mrs. Amyot lecture on the reconciliation of
science and religion! My only hope was that, somewhere among the number
of my accomplices, Mrs. Amyot might find one who would marry her in the
defense of his convictions.

None, apparently, resorted to such heroic measures; for about two years
later I was startled by the announcement that Mrs. Amyot was lecturing
in Trenton, New Jersey, on modern theosophy in the light of the Vedas.
The following week she was at Newark, discussing Schopenhauer in the
light of recent psychology. The week after that I was on the deck of an
ocean steamer, reconsidering my share in Mrs. Amyot’s triumphs with the
impartiality with which one views an episode that is being left behind
at the rate of twenty knots an hour. After all, I had been helping a
mother to educate her son.

The next ten years of my life were spent in Europe, and when I came home
the recollection of Mrs. Amyot had become as inoffensive as one of
those pathetic ghosts who are said to strive in vain to make themselves
visible to the living. I did not even notice the fact that I no longer
heard her spoken of; she had dropped like a dead leaf from the bough of
memory.

A year or two after my return I was condemned to one of the worst
punishments a worker can undergo--an enforced holiday. The doctors who
pronounced the inhuman sentence decreed that it should be worked out in
the South, and for a whole winter I carried my cough, my thermometer and
my idleness from one fashionable orange-grove to another. In the vast
and melancholy sea of my disoccupation I clutched like a drowning man
at any human driftwood within reach. I took a critical and depreciatory
interest in the coughs, the thermometers and the idleness of my
fellow-sufferers; but to the healthy, the occupied, the transient I
clung with undiscriminating enthusiasm.

In no other way can I explain, as I look back on it, the importance
I attached to the leisurely confidences of a new arrival with a brown
beard who, tilted back at my side on a hotel veranda hung with roses,
imparted to me one afternoon the simple annals of his past. There was
nothing in the tale to kindle the most inflammable imagination, and
though the man had a pleasant frank face and a voice differing agreeably
from the shrill inflections of our fellow-lodgers, it is probable that
under different conditions his discursive history of successful business
ventures in a Western city would have affected me somewhat in the manner
of a lullaby.

Even at the tune I was not sure I liked his agreeable voice: it had a
self-importance out of keeping with the humdrum nature of his story, as
though a breeze engaged in shaking out a table-cloth should have fancied
itself inflating a banner. But this criticism may have been a mere mark
of my own fastidiousness, for the man seemed a simple fellow, satisfied
with his middling fortunes, and already (he was not much past thirty)
deep-sunk in conjugal content.

He had just started on an anecdote connected with the cutting of his
eldest boy’s teeth, when a lady I knew, returning from her late drive,
paused before us for a moment in the twilight, with the smile which is
the feminine equivalent of beads to savages.

“Won’t you take a ticket?” she said sweetly.

Of course I would take a ticket--but for what? I ventured to inquire.

“Oh, that’s _so_ good of you--for the lecture this evening. You needn’t
go, you know; we’re none of us going; most of us have been through it
already at Aiken and at Saint Augustine and at Palm Beach. I’ve given
away my tickets to some new people who’ve just come from the North, and
some of us are going to send our maids, just to fill up the room.”

“And may I ask to whom you are going to pay this delicate attention?”

“Oh, I thought you knew--to poor Mrs. Amyot. She’s been lecturing all
over the South this winter; she’s simply _haunted_ me ever since I left
New York--and we had six weeks of her at Bar Harbor last summer! One
has to take tickets, you know, because she’s a widow and does it for her
son--to pay for his education. She’s so plucky and nice about it, and
talks about him in such a touching unaffected way, that everybody is
sorry for her, and we all simply ruin ourselves in tickets. I do hope
that boy’s nearly educated!”

“Mrs. Amyot? Mrs. Amyot?” I repeated. “Is she _still_ educating her
son?”

“Oh, do you know about her? Has she been at it long? There’s some
comfort in that, for I suppose when the boy’s provided for the poor
thing will be able to take a rest--and give us one!”

She laughed and held out her hand.

“Here’s your ticket. Did you say _tickets_--two? Oh, thanks. Of course
you needn’t go.”

“But I mean to go. Mrs. Amyot is an old friend of mine.”

“Do you really? That’s awfully good of you. Perhaps I’ll go too if I
can persuade Charlie and the others to come. And I wonder”--in a
well-directed aside--“if your friend--?”

I telegraphed her under cover of the dusk that my friend was of too
recent standing to be drawn into her charitable toils, and she masked
her mistake under a rattle of friendly adjurations not to be late, and
to be sure to keep a seat for her, as she had quite made up her mind to
go even if Charlie and the others wouldn’t.

The flutter of her skirts subsided in the distance, and my neighbor,
who had half turned away to light a cigar, made no effort to reopen the
conversation. At length, fearing he might have overheard the allusion to
himself, I ventured to ask if he were going to the lecture that evening.

“Much obliged--I have a ticket,” he said abruptly.

This struck me as in such bad taste that I made no answer; and it was he
who spoke next.

“Did I understand you to say that you were an old friend of Mrs.
Amyot’s?”

“I think I may claim to be, if it is the same Mrs. Amyot I had the
pleasure of knowing many years ago. My Mrs. Amyot used to lecture too--”

“To pay for her son’s education?”

“I believe so.”

“Well--see you later.”

He got up and walked into the house.

In the hotel drawing-room that evening there was but a meagre sprinkling
of guests, among whom I saw my brown-bearded friend sitting alone on a
sofa, with his head against the wall. It could not have been curiosity
to see Mrs. Amyot that had impelled him to attend the performance, for
it would have been impossible for him, without changing his place, to
command the improvised platform at the end of the room. When I looked at
him he seemed lost in contemplation of the chandelier.

The lady from whom I had bought my tickets fluttered in late, unattended
by Charlie and the others, and assuring me that she would _scream_ if
we had the lecture on Ibsen--she had heard it three times already that
winter. A glance at the programme reassured her: it informed us (in
the lecturer’s own slanting hand) that Mrs. Amyot was to lecture on the
Cosmogony.

After a long pause, during which the small audience coughed and moved
its chairs and showed signs of regretting that it had come, the door
opened, and Mrs. Amyot stepped upon the platform. Ah, poor lady!

Some one said “Hush!”, the coughing and chair-shifting subsided, and she
began.

It was like looking at one’s self early in the morning in a cracked
mirror. I had no idea I had grown so old. As for Lancelot, he must have
a beard. A beard? The word struck me, and without knowing why I glanced
across the room at my bearded friend on the sofa. Oddly enough he was
looking at me, with a half-defiant, half-sullen expression; and as our
glances crossed, and his fell, the conviction came to me that _he was
Lancelot_.

I don’t remember a word of the lecture; and yet there were enough of
them to have filled a good-sized dictionary. The stream of Mrs. Amyot’s
eloquence had become a flood: one had the despairing sense that she had
sprung a leak, and that until the plumber came there was nothing to be
done about it.

The plumber came at length, in the shape of a clock striking ten; my
companion, with a sigh of relief, drifted away in search of Charlie and
the others; the audience scattered with the precipitation of people who
had discharged a duty; and, without surprise, I found the brown-bearded
stranger at my elbow.

We stood alone in the bare-floored room, under the flaring chandelier.

“I think you told me this afternoon that you were an old friend of Mrs.
Amyot’s?” he began awkwardly.

I assented.

“Will you come in and see her?”

“Now? I shall be very glad to, if--”

“She’s ready; she’s expecting you,” he interposed.

He offered no further explanation, and I followed him in silence. He led
me down the long corridor, and pushed open the door of a sitting-room.

“Mother,” he said, closing the door after we had entered, “here’s the
gentleman who says he used to know you.”

Mrs. Amyot, who sat in an easy-chair stirring a cup of bouillon, looked
up with a start. She had evidently not seen me in the audience, and her
son’s description had failed to convey my identity. I saw a frightened
look in her eyes; then, like a frost flower on a window-pane, the dimple
expanded on her wrinkled cheek, and she held out her hand.

“I’m so glad,” she said, “so glad!”

She turned to her son, who stood watching us. “You must have told
Lancelot all about me--you’ve known me so long!”

“I haven’t had time to talk to your son--since I knew he was your son,”
 I explained.

Her brow cleared. “Then you haven’t had time to say anything very
dreadful?” she said with a laugh.

“It is he who has been saying dreadful things,” I returned, trying to
fall in with her tone.

I saw my mistake. “What things?” she faltered.

“Making me feel how old I am by telling me about his children.”

“My grandchildren!” she exclaimed with a blush.

“Well, if you choose to put it so.”

She laughed again, vaguely, and was silent. I hesitated a moment and
then put out my hand.

“I see you are tired. I shouldn’t have ventured to come in at this hour
if your son--”

The son stepped between us. “Yes, I asked him to come,” he said to
his mother, in his clear self-assertive voice. “_I_ haven’t told him
anything yet; but you’ve got to--now. That’s what I brought him for.”

His mother straightened herself, but I saw her eye waver.

“Lancelot--” she began.

“Mr. Amyot,” I said, turning to the young man, “if your mother will let
me come back to-morrow, I shall be very glad--”

He struck his hand hard against the table on which he was leaning.

“No, sir! It won’t take long, but it’s got to be said now.”

He moved nearer to his mother, and I saw his lip twitch under his beard.
After all, he was younger and less sure of himself than I had fancied.

“See here, mother,” he went on, “there’s something here that’s got to be
cleared up, and as you say this gentleman is an old friend of yours
it had better be cleared up in his presence. Maybe he can help explain
it--and if he can’t, it’s got to be explained to _him.”_

Mrs. Amyot’s lips moved, but she made no sound. She glanced at me
helplessly and sat down. My early inclination to thrash Lancelot was
beginning to reassert itself. I took up my hat and moved toward the
door.

“Mrs. Amyot is under no obligation to explain anything whatever to me,”
 I said curtly.

“Well! She’s under an obligation to me, then--to explain something in
your presence.” He turned to her again. “Do you know what the people in
this hotel are saying? Do you know what he thinks--what they all think?
That you’re doing this lecturing to support me--to pay for my education!
They say you go round telling them so. That’s what they buy the tickets
for--they do it out of charity. Ask him if it isn’t what they say--ask
him if they weren’t joking about it on the piazza before dinner. The
others think I’m a little boy, but he’s known you for years, and he must
have known how old I was. _He_ must have known it wasn’t to pay for my
education!”

He stood before her with his hands clenched, the veins beating in his
temples. She had grown very pale, and her cheeks looked hollow. When she
spoke her voice had an odd click in it.

“If--if these ladies and gentlemen have been coming to my lectures out
of charity, I see nothing to be ashamed of in that--” she faltered.

“If they’ve been coming out of charity to _me_,” he retorted, “don’t you
see you’ve been making me a party to a fraud? Isn’t there any shame
in that?” His forehead reddened. “Mother! Can’t you see the shame of
letting people think I was a d--beat, who sponged on you for my keep?
Let alone making us both the laughing-stock of every place you go to!”

“I never did that, Lancelot!”

“Did what?”

“Made you a laughing-stock--”

He stepped close to her and caught her wrist.

“Will you look me in the face and swear you never told people you were
doing this lecturing business to support me?”

There was a long silence. He dropped her wrist and she lifted a limp
handkerchief to her frightened eyes. “I did do it--to support you--to
educate you”--she sobbed.

“We’re not talking about what you did when I was a boy. Everybody who
knows me knows I’ve been a grateful son. Have I ever taken a penny from
you since I left college ten years ago?”

“I never said you had! How can you accuse your mother of such
wickedness, Lancelot?”

“Have you never told anybody in this hotel--or anywhere else in the last
ten years--that you were lecturing to support me? Answer me that!”

“How can you,” she wept, “before a stranger?”

“Haven’t you said such things about _me_ to strangers?” he retorted.

“Lancelot!”

“Well--answer me, then. Say you haven’t, mother!” His voice broke
unexpectedly and he took her hand with a gentler touch. “I’ll believe
anything you tell me,” he said almost humbly.

She mistook his tone and raised her head with a rash clutch at dignity.

“I think you’d better ask this gentleman to excuse you first.”

“No, by God, I won’t!” he cried. “This gentleman says he knows all about
you and I mean him to know all about me too. I don’t mean that he
or anybody else under this roof shall go on thinking for another
twenty-four hours that a cent of their money has ever gone into my
pockets since I was old enough to shift for myself. And he sha’n’t leave
this room till you’ve made that clear to him.”

He stepped back as he spoke and put his shoulders against the door.

“My dear young gentleman,” I said politely, “I shall leave this room
exactly when I see fit to do so--and that is now. I have already told
you that Mrs. Amyot owes me no explanation of her conduct.”

“But I owe you an explanation of mine--you and every one who has bought
a single one of her lecture tickets. Do you suppose a man who’s been
through what I went through while that woman was talking to you in the
porch before dinner is going to hold his tongue, and not attempt to
justify himself? No decent man is going to sit down under that sort of
thing. It’s enough to ruin his character. If you’re my mother’s friend,
you owe it to me to hear what I’ve got to say.”

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

“Good God, mother!” he burst out suddenly, “what did you do it for?
Haven’t you had everything you wanted ever since I was able to pay for
it? Haven’t I paid you back every cent you spent on me when I was in
college? Have I ever gone back on you since I was big enough to
work?” He turned to me with a laugh. “I thought she did it to amuse
herself--and because there was such a demand for her lectures. _Such a
demand!_ That’s what she always told me. When we asked her to come out
and spend this winter with us in Minneapolis, she wrote back that she
couldn’t because she had engagements all through the south, and her
manager wouldn’t let her off. That’s the reason why I came all the way
on here to see her. We thought she was the most popular lecturer in the
United States, my wife and I did! We were awfully proud of it too, I can
tell you.” He dropped into a chair, still laughing.

“How can you, Lancelot, how can you!” His mother, forgetful of my
presence, was clinging to him with tentative caresses. “When you didn’t
need the money any longer I spent it all on the children--you know I
did.”

“Yes, on lace christening dresses and life-size rocking-horses with real
manes! The kind of thing children can’t do without.”

“Oh, Lancelot, Lancelot--I loved them so! How can you believe such
falsehoods about me?”

“What falsehoods about you?”

“That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?”

He put her back gently, keeping his eyes on hers. “Did you never tell
anybody in this house that you were lecturing to support your son?”

Her hands dropped from his shoulders and she flashed round on me in
sudden anger.

“I know what I think of people who call themselves friends and who come
between a mother and her son!”

“Oh, mother, mother!” he groaned.

I went up to him and laid my hand on his shoulder.

“My dear man,” I said, “don’t you see the uselessness of prolonging
this?”

“Yes, I do,” he answered abruptly; and before I could forestall his
movement he rose and walked out of the room.

There was a long silence, measured by the lessening reverberations of
his footsteps down the wooden floor of the corridor.

When they ceased I approached Mrs. Amyot, who had sunk into her chair.
I held out my hand and she took it without a trace of resentment on her
ravaged face.

“I sent his wife a seal-skin jacket at Christmas!” she said, with the
tears running down her cheeks.




SOULS BELATED


Their railway-carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at
the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion--a courtly
person who ate garlic out of a carpet-bag--had left his crumb-strewn
seat with a bow.

Lydia’s eye regretfully followed the shiny broadcloth of his retreating
back till it lost itself in the cloud of touts and cab-drivers hanging
about the station; then she glanced across at Gannett and caught the
same regret in his look. They were both sorry to be alone.

“_Par-ten-za!_” shouted the guard. The train vibrated to a sudden
slamming of doors; a waiter ran along the platform with a tray of
fossilized sandwiches; a belated porter flung a bundle of shawls and
band-boxes into a third-class carriage; the guard snapped out a brief
_Partensa!_ which indicated the purely ornamental nature of his first
shout; and the train swung out of the station.

The direction of the road had changed, and a shaft of sunlight struck
across the dusty red velvet seats into Lydia’s corner. Gannett did not
notice it. He had returned to his _Revue de Paris,_ and she had to rise
and lower the shade of the farther window. Against the vast horizon of
their leisure such incidents stood out sharply.

Having lowered the shade, Lydia sat down, leaving the length of the
carriage between herself and Gannett. At length he missed her and looked
up.

“I moved out of the sun,” she hastily explained.

He looked at her curiously: the sun was beating on her through the
shade.

“Very well,” he said pleasantly; adding, “You don’t mind?” as he drew a
cigarette-case from his pocket.

It was a refreshing touch, relieving the tension of her spirit with the
suggestion that, after all, if he could _smoke_--! The relief was
only momentary. Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had
disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men
sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the
masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after
a puff or two, returned to his review.

It was just as she had foreseen; he feared to speak as much as she did.
It was one of the misfortunes of their situation that they were never
busy enough to necessitate, or even to justify, the postponement of
unpleasant discussions. If they avoided a question it was obviously,
unconcealably because the question was disagreeable. They had unlimited
leisure and an accumulation of mental energy to devote to any subject
that presented itself; new topics were in fact at a premium. Lydia
sometimes had premonitions of a famine-stricken period when there would
be nothing left to talk about, and she had already caught herself doling
out piecemeal what, in the first prodigality of their confidences,
she would have flung to him in a breath. Their silence therefore
might simply mean that they had nothing to say; but it was another
disadvantage of their position that it allowed infinite opportunity
for the classification of minute differences. Lydia had learned to
distinguish between real and factitious silences; and under Gannett’s
she now detected a hum of speech to which her own thoughts made
breathless answer.

How could it be otherwise, with that thing between them? She glanced
up at the rack overhead. The _thing_ was there, in her dressing-bag,
symbolically suspended over her head and his. He was thinking of it now,
just as she was; they had been thinking of it in unison ever since they
had entered the train. While the carriage had held other travellers they
had screened her from his thoughts; but now that he and she were alone
she knew exactly what was passing through his mind; she could almost
hear him asking himself what he should say to her....

       *       *       *       *       *

The thing had come that morning, brought up to her in an
innocent-looking envelope with the rest of their letters, as they were
leaving the hotel at Bologna. As she tore it open, she and Gannett were
laughing over some ineptitude of the local guide-book--they had been
driven, of late, to make the most of such incidental humors of travel.
Even when she had unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant
business paper sent abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled
inattentively over the curly _Whereases_ of the preamble until a word
arrested her:--Divorce. There it stood, an impassable barrier, between
her husband’s name and hers.

She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to
be prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without
in the least expecting that it will. She had known from the first
that Tillotson meant to divorce her--but what did it matter? Nothing
mattered, in those first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that
she was free; and not so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom
had released her from Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett.
This discovery had not been agreeable to her self-esteem. She had
preferred to think that Tillotson had himself embodied all her reasons
for leaving him; and those he represented had seemed cogent enough to
stand in no need of reinforcement. Yet she had not left him till she met
Gannett. It was her love for Gannett that had made life with Tillotson
so poor and incomplete a business. If she had never, from the first,
regarded her marriage as a full cancelling of her claims upon life,
she had at least, for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional
compensation,--she had made it “do.” Existence in the commodious
Tillotson mansion in Fifth Avenue--with Mrs. Tillotson senior commanding
the approaches from the second-story front windows--had been reduced to
a series of purely automatic acts. The moral atmosphere of the Tillotson
interior was as carefully screened and curtained as the house itself:
Mrs. Tillotson senior dreaded ideas as much as a draught in her back.
Prudent people liked an even temperature; and to do anything unexpected
was as foolish as going out in the rain. One of the chief advantages of
being rich was that one need not be exposed to unforeseen contingencies:
by the use of ordinary firmness and common sense one could make sure
of doing exactly the same thing every day at the same hour. These
doctrines, reverentially imbibed with his mother’s milk, Tillotson
(a model son who had never given his parents an hour’s anxiety)
complacently expounded to his wife, testifying to his sense of their
importance by the regularity with which he wore goloshes on damp days,
his punctuality at meals, and his elaborate precautions against burglars
and contagious diseases. Lydia, coming from a smaller town, and
entering New York life through the portals of the Tillotson mansion, had
mechanically accepted this point of view as inseparable from having a
front pew in church and a parterre box at the opera. All the people who
came to the house revolved in the same small circle of prejudices. It
was the kind of society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the
exorbitant charges of their children’s teachers, and agreed that, even
with the new duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get
everything from Worth; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented
municipal corruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were
those who had no private interests at stake.

To Lydia this view of life had become a matter of course, just as
lumbering about in her mother-in-law’s landau had come to seem the
only possible means of locomotion, and listening every Sunday to a
fashionable Presbyterian divine the inevitable atonement for having
thought oneself bored on the other six days of the week. Before she met
Gannett her life had seemed merely dull: his coming made it appear like
one of those dismal Cruikshank prints in which the people are all ugly
and all engaged in occupations that are either vulgar or stupid.

It was natural that Tillotson should be the chief sufferer from
this readjustment of focus. Gannett’s nearness had made her husband
ridiculous, and a part of the ridicule had been reflected on herself.
Her tolerance laid her open to a suspicion of obtuseness from which she
must, at all costs, clear herself in Gannett’s eyes.

She did not understand this until afterwards. At the time she fancied
that she had merely reached the limits of endurance. In so large a
charter of liberties as the mere act of leaving Tillotson seemed to
confer, the small question of divorce or no divorce did not count. It
was when she saw that she had left her husband only to be with Gannett
that she perceived the significance of anything affecting their
relations. Her husband, in casting her off, had virtually flung her at
Gannett: it was thus that the world viewed it. The measure of alacrity
with which Gannett would receive her would be the subject of curious
speculation over afternoon-tea tables and in club corners. She knew what
would be said--she had heard it so often of others! The recollection
bathed her in misery. The men would probably back Gannett to “do
the decent thing”; but the ladies’ eye-brows would emphasize the
worthlessness of such enforced fidelity; and after all, they would
be right. She had put herself in a position where Gannett “owed” her
something; where, as a gentleman, he was bound to “stand the damage.”
 The idea of accepting such compensation had never crossed her mind; the
so-called rehabilitation of such a marriage had always seemed to her
the only real disgrace. What she dreaded was the necessity of having to
explain herself; of having to combat his arguments; of calculating, in
spite of herself, the exact measure of insistence with which he pressed
them. She knew not whether she most shrank from his insisting too much
or too little. In such a case the nicest sense of proportion might be at
fault; and how easy to fall into the error of taking her resistance
for a test of his sincerity! Whichever way she turned, an ironical
implication confronted her: she had the exasperated sense of having
walked into the trap of some stupid practical joke.

Beneath all these preoccupations lurked the dread of what he was
thinking. Sooner or later, of course, he would have to speak; but that,
in the meantime, he should think, even for a moment, that there was any
use in speaking, seemed to her simply unendurable. Her sensitiveness on
this point was aggravated by another fear, as yet barely on the level of
consciousness; the fear of unwillingly involving Gannett in the trammels
of her dependence. To look upon him as the instrument of her liberation;
to resist in herself the least tendency to a wifely taking possession of
his future; had seemed to Lydia the one way of maintaining the dignity
of their relation. Her view had not changed, but she was aware of a
growing inability to keep her thoughts fixed on the essential point--the
point of parting with Gannett. It was easy to face as long as she kept
it sufficiently far off: but what was this act of mental postponement
but a gradual encroachment on his future? What was needful was the
courage to recognize the moment when, by some word or look, their
voluntary fellowship should be transformed into a bondage the more
wearing that it was based on none of those common obligations which make
the most imperfect marriage in some sort a centre of gravity.

When the porter, at the next station, threw the door open, Lydia drew
back, making way for the hoped-for intruder; but none came, and the
train took up its leisurely progress through the spring wheat-fields and
budding copses. She now began to hope that Gannett would speak before
the next station. She watched him furtively, half-disposed to return
to the seat opposite his, but there was an artificiality about his
absorption that restrained her. She had never before seen him read with
so conspicuous an air of warding off interruption. What could he be
thinking of? Why should he be afraid to speak? Or was it her answer that
he dreaded?

The train paused for the passing of an express, and he put down his book
and leaned out of the window. Presently he turned to her with a smile.
“There’s a jolly old villa out here,” he said.

His easy tone relieved her, and she smiled back at him as she crossed
over to his corner.

Beyond the embankment, through the opening in a mossy wall, she caught
sight of the villa, with its broken balustrades, its stagnant fountains,
and the stone satyr closing the perspective of a dusky grass-walk.

“How should you like to live there?” he asked as the train moved on.

“There?”

“In some such place, I mean. One might do worse, don’t you think so?
There must be at least two centuries of solitude under those yew-trees.
Shouldn’t you like it?”

“I--I don’t know,” she faltered. She knew now that he meant to speak.

He lit another cigarette. “We shall have to live somewhere, you know,”
 he said as he bent above the match.

Lydia tried to speak carelessly. “_Je n’en vois pas la nécessité!_ Why
not live everywhere, as we have been doing?”

“But we can’t travel forever, can we?”

“Oh, forever’s a long word,” she objected, picking up the review he had
thrown aside.

“For the rest of our lives then,” he said, moving nearer.

She made a slight gesture which caused his hand to slip from hers.

“Why should we make plans? I thought you agreed with me that it’s
pleasanter to drift.”

He looked at her hesitatingly. “It’s been pleasant, certainly; but
I suppose I shall have to get at my work again some day. You know I
haven’t written a line since--all this time,” he hastily emended.

She flamed with sympathy and self-reproach. “Oh, if you mean _that_--if
you want to write--of course we must settle down. How stupid of me not
to have thought of it sooner! Where shall we go? Where do you think you
could work best? We oughtn’t to lose any more time.”

He hesitated again. “I had thought of a villa in these parts. It’s
quiet; we shouldn’t be bothered. Should you like it?”

“Of course I should like it.” She paused and looked away. “But I
thought--I remember your telling me once that your best work had been
done in a crowd--in big cities. Why should you shut yourself up in a
desert?”

Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her
eye as carefully as she avoided his: “It might be different now; I can’t
tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not to be dependent on his
_milieu_; it’s a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought
that just at first you might prefer to be--”

She faced him. “To be what?”

“Well--quiet. I mean--”

“What do you mean by ‘at first’?” she interrupted.

He paused again. “I mean after we are married.”

She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window. “Thank you!” she
tossed back at him.

“Lydia!” he exclaimed blankly; and she felt in every fibre of her
averted person that he had made the inconceivable, the unpardonable
mistake of anticipating her acquiescence.

The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained
silent.

“I haven’t offended you?” he ventured at length, in the tone of a man
who feels his way.

She shook her head with a sigh. “I thought you understood,” she moaned.
Their eyes met and she moved back to his side.

“Do you want to know how not to offend me? By taking it for granted,
once for all, that you’ve said your say on this odious question and that
I’ve said mine, and that we stand just where we did this morning before
that--that hateful paper came to spoil everything between us!”

“To spoil everything between us? What on earth do you mean? Aren’t you
glad to be free?”

“I was free before.”

“Not to marry me,” he suggested.

“But I don’t _want_ to marry you!” she cried.

She saw that he turned pale. “I’m obtuse, I suppose,” he said slowly. “I
confess I don’t see what you’re driving at. Are you tired of the whole
business? Or was _I_ simply a--an excuse for getting away? Perhaps you
didn’t care to travel alone? Was that it? And now you want to chuck
me?” His voice had grown harsh. “You owe me a straight answer, you know;
don’t be tender-hearted!”

Her eyes swam as she leaned to him. “Don’t you see it’s because I
care--because I care so much? Oh, Ralph! Can’t you see how it would
humiliate me? Try to feel it as a woman would! Don’t you see the misery
of being made your wife in this way? If I’d known you as a girl--that
would have been a real marriage! But now--this vulgar fraud upon
society--and upon a society we despised and laughed at--this sneaking
back into a position that we’ve voluntarily forfeited: don’t you see
what a cheap compromise it is? We neither of us believe in the abstract
‘sacredness’ of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to
consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying,
except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret
longing to work our way back gradually--oh, very gradually--into
the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always
ridiculed and hated? And the very fact that, after a decent interval,
these same people would come and dine with us--the women who talk about
the indissolubility of marriage, and who would let me die in a gutter
to-day because I am ‘leading a life of sin’--doesn’t that disgust you
more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by
them, but I couldn’t stand their coming to call and asking what I meant
to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!”

She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.

“You judge things too theoretically,” he said at length, slowly. “Life
is made up of compromises.”

“The life we ran away from--yes! If we had been willing to accept
them”--she flushed--“we might have gone on meeting each other at Mrs.
Tillotson’s dinners.”

He smiled slightly. “I didn’t know that we ran away to found a new
system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other.”

“Life is complex, of course; isn’t it the very recognition of that fact
that separates us from the people who see it _tout d’une pièce?_ If
_they_ are right--if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual
must always be sacrificed to the family--then there can be no real
marriage between us, since our--our being together is a protest against
the sacrifice of the individual to the family.” She interrupted
herself with a laugh. “You’ll say now that I’m giving you a lecture on
sociology! Of course one acts as one can--as one must, perhaps--pulled
by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn’t pretend, for
social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity
of human motives--that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it
in everybody’s reach to be on Mrs. Tillotson’s visiting-list. It may
be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions--but if we
believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don’t believe
in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?”

Gannett hesitated. “One may believe in them or not; but as long as they
do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection
that one can find a _modus vivendi.”_

“Do outlaws need a _modus vivendi?”_

He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the
mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions.

She thought she had scored a point and followed it up passionately.
“You do understand, don’t you? You see how the very thought of the thing
humiliates me! We are together to-day because we choose to be--don’t
let us look any farther than that!” She caught his hands. “_Promise_ me
you’ll never speak of it again; promise me you’ll never _think_ of it
even,” she implored, with a tearful prodigality of italics.

Through what followed--his protests, his arguments, his final
unconvinced submission to her wishes--she had a sense of his but
half-discerning all that, for her, had made the moment so tumultuous.
They had reached that memorable point in every heart-history when, for
the first time, the man seems obtuse and the woman irrational. It was
the abundance of his intentions that consoled her, on reflection,
for what they lacked in quality. After all, it would have been worse,
incalculably worse, to have detected any over-readiness to understand
her.


II

When the train at night-fall brought them to their journey’s end at the
edge of one of the lakes, Lydia was glad that they were not, as usual,
to pass from one solitude to another. Their wanderings during the year
had indeed been like the flight of outlaws: through Sicily, Dalmatia,
Transylvania and Southern Italy they had persisted in their tacit
avoidance of their kind. Isolation, at first, had deepened the flavor of
their happiness, as night intensifies the scent of certain flowers; but
in the new phase on which they were entering, Lydia’s chief wish was
that they should be less abnormally exposed to the action of each
other’s thoughts.

She shrank, nevertheless, as the brightly-looming bulk of the
fashionable Anglo-American hotel on the water’s brink began to radiate
toward their advancing boat its vivid suggestion of social order,
visitors’ lists, Church services, and the bland inquisition of the
_table-d’hôte_. The mere fact that in a moment or two she must take her
place on the hotel register as Mrs. Gannett seemed to weaken the springs
of her resistance.

They had meant to stay for a night only, on their way to a lofty village
among the glaciers of Monte Rosa; but after the first plunge into
publicity, when they entered the dining-room, Lydia felt the relief
of being lost in a crowd, of ceasing for a moment to be the centre of
Gannett’s scrutiny; and in his face she caught the reflection of her
feeling. After dinner, when she went upstairs, he strolled into the
smoking-room, and an hour or two later, sitting in the darkness of her
window, she heard his voice below and saw him walking up and down the
terrace with a companion cigar at his side. When he came up he told her
he had been talking to the hotel chaplain--a very good sort of fellow.

“Queer little microcosms, these hotels! Most of these people live here
all summer and then migrate to Italy or the Riviera. The English are
the only people who can lead that kind of life with dignity--those
soft-voiced old ladies in Shetland shawls somehow carry the British
Empire under their caps. _Civis Romanus sum_. It’s a curious
study--there might be some good things to work up here.”

He stood before her with the vivid preoccupied stare of the novelist
on the trail of a “subject.” With a relief that was half painful she
noticed that, for the first time since they had been together, he was
hardly aware of her presence. “Do you think you could write here?”

“Here? I don’t know.” His stare dropped. “After being out of things so
long one’s first impressions are bound to be tremendously vivid, you
know. I see a dozen threads already that one might follow--”

He broke off with a touch of embarrassment.

“Then follow them. We’ll stay,” she said with sudden decision.

“Stay here?” He glanced at her in surprise, and then, walking to the
window, looked out upon the dusky slumber of the garden.

“Why not?” she said at length, in a tone of veiled irritation.

“The place is full of old cats in caps who gossip with the chaplain.
Shall you like--I mean, it would be different if--”

She flamed up.

“Do you suppose I care? It’s none of their business.”

“Of course not; but you won’t get them to think so.”

“They may think what they please.”

He looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s for you to decide.”

“We’ll stay,” she repeated.

Gannett, before they met, had made himself known as a successful writer
of short stories and of a novel which had achieved the distinction of
being widely discussed. The reviewers called him “promising,” and Lydia
now accused herself of having too long interfered with the fulfilment of
his promise. There was a special irony in the fact, since his passionate
assurances that only the stimulus of her companionship could bring out
his latent faculty had almost given the dignity of a “vocation” to
her course: there had been moments when she had felt unable to assume,
before posterity, the responsibility of thwarting his career. And, after
all, he had not written a line since they had been together: his first
desire to write had come from renewed contact with the world! Was it all
a mistake then? Must the most intelligent choice work more disastrously
than the blundering combinations of chance? Or was there a still more
humiliating answer to her perplexities? His sudden impulse of activity
so exactly coincided with her own wish to withdraw, for a time, from the
range of his observation, that she wondered if he too were not seeking
sanctuary from intolerable problems.

“You must begin to-morrow!” she cried, hiding a tremor under the laugh
with which she added, “I wonder if there’s any ink in the inkstand?”

       *       *       *       *       *

Whatever else they had at the Hotel Bellosguardo, they had, as Miss
Pinsent said, “a certain tone.” It was to Lady Susan Condit that they
owed this inestimable benefit; an advantage ranking in Miss Pinsent’s
opinion above even the lawn tennis courts and the resident chaplain. It
was the fact of Lady Susan’s annual visit that made the hotel what
it was. Miss Pinsent was certainly the last to underrate such a
privilege:--“It’s so important, my dear, forming as we do a little
family, that there should be some one to give _the tone_; and no one
could do it better than Lady Susan--an earl’s daughter and a person of
such determination. Dear Mrs. Ainger now--who really _ought_, you know,
when Lady Susan’s away--absolutely refuses to assert herself.” Miss
Pinsent sniffed derisively. “A bishop’s niece!--my dear, I saw her once
actually give in to some South Americans--and before us all. She gave
up her seat at table to oblige them--such a lack of dignity! Lady Susan
spoke to her very plainly about it afterwards.”

Miss Pinsent glanced across the lake and adjusted her auburn front.

“But of course I don’t deny that the stand Lady Susan takes is not
always easy to live up to--for the rest of us, I mean. Monsieur
Grossart, our good proprietor, finds it trying at times, I know--he has
said as much, privately, to Mrs. Ainger and me. After all, the poor man
is not to blame for wanting to fill his hotel, is he? And Lady Susan is
so difficult--so very difficult--about new people. One might almost say
that she disapproves of them beforehand, on principle. And yet she’s had
warnings--she very nearly made a dreadful mistake once with the Duchess
of Levens, who dyed her hair and--well, swore and smoked. One would
have thought that might have been a lesson to Lady Susan.” Miss Pinsent
resumed her knitting with a sigh. “There are exceptions, of course. She
took at once to you and Mr. Gannett--it was quite remarkable,
really. Oh, I don’t mean that either--of course not! It was perfectly
natural--we _all_ thought you so charming and interesting from the first
day--we knew at once that Mr. Gannett was intellectual, by the magazines
you took in; but you know what I mean. Lady Susan is so very--well, I
won’t say prejudiced, as Mrs. Ainger does--but so prepared _not_ to like
new people, that her taking to you in that way was a surprise to us all,
I confess.”

Miss Pinsent sent a significant glance down the long laurustinus alley
from the other end of which two people--a lady and gentleman--were
strolling toward them through the smiling neglect of the garden.

“In this case, of course, it’s very different; that I’m willing to
admit. Their looks are against them; but, as Mrs. Ainger says, one can’t
exactly tell them so.”

“She’s very handsome,” Lydia ventured, with her eyes on the lady, who
showed, under the dome of a vivid sunshade, the hour-glass figure and
superlative coloring of a Christmas chromo.

“That’s the worst of it. She’s too handsome.”

“Well, after all, she can’t help that.”

“Other people manage to,” said Miss Pinsent skeptically.

“But isn’t it rather unfair of Lady Susan--considering that nothing is
known about them?”

“But, my dear, that’s the very thing that’s against them. It’s
infinitely worse than any actual knowledge.”

Lydia mentally agreed that, in the case of Mrs. Linton, it possibly
might be.

“I wonder why they came here?” she mused.

“That’s against them too. It’s always a bad sign when loud people come
to a quiet place. And they’ve brought van-loads of boxes--her maid told
Mrs. Ainger’s that they meant to stop indefinitely.”

“And Lady Susan actually turned her back on her in the _salon?_”

“My dear, she said it was for our sakes: that makes it so unanswerable!
But poor Grossart _is_ in a way! The Lintons have taken his most
expensive _suite_, you know--the yellow damask drawing-room above the
portico--and they have champagne with every meal!”

They were silent as Mr. and Mrs. Linton sauntered by; the lady
with tempestuous brows and challenging chin; the gentleman, a blond
stripling, trailing after her, head downward, like a reluctant child
dragged by his nurse.

“What does your husband think of them, my dear?” Miss Pinsent whispered
as they passed out of earshot.

Lydia stooped to pick a violet in the border.

“He hasn’t told me.”

“Of your speaking to them, I mean. Would he approve of that? I know how
very particular nice Americans are. I think your action might make a
difference; it would certainly carry weight with Lady Susan.”

“Dear Miss Pinsent, you flatter me!”

Lydia rose and gathered up her book and sunshade.

“Well, if you’re asked for an opinion--if Lady Susan asks you for one--I
think you ought to be prepared,” Miss Pinsent admonished her as she
moved away.


III

Lady Susan held her own. She ignored the Lintons, and her little family,
as Miss Pinsent phrased it, followed suit. Even Mrs. Ainger agreed that
it was obligatory. If Lady Susan owed it to the others not to speak to
the Lintons, the others clearly owed it to Lady Susan to back her up. It
was generally found expedient, at the Hotel Bellosguardo, to adopt this
form of reasoning.

Whatever effect this combined action may have had upon the Lintons,
it did not at least have that of driving them away. Monsieur Grossart,
after a few days of suspense, had the satisfaction of seeing them settle
down in his yellow damask _premier_ with what looked like a permanent
installation of palm-trees and silk sofa-cushions, and a gratifying
continuance in the consumption of champagne. Mrs. Linton trailed her
Doucet draperies up and down the garden with the same challenging air,
while her husband, smoking innumerable cigarettes, dragged himself
dejectedly in her wake; but neither of them, after the first encounter
with Lady Susan, made any attempt to extend their acquaintance. They
simply ignored their ignorers. As Miss Pinsent resentfully observed,
they behaved exactly as though the hotel were empty.

It was therefore a matter of surprise, as well as of displeasure, to
Lydia, to find, on glancing up one day from her seat in the garden, that
the shadow which had fallen across her book was that of the enigmatic
Mrs. Linton.

“I want to speak to you,” that lady said, in a rich hard voice that
seemed the audible expression of her gown and her complexion.

Lydia started. She certainly did not want to speak to Mrs. Linton.

“Shall I sit down here?” the latter continued, fixing her
intensely-shaded eyes on Lydia’s face, “or are you afraid of being seen
with me?”

“Afraid?” Lydia colored. “Sit down, please. What is it that you wish to
say?”

Mrs. Linton, with a smile, drew up a garden-chair and crossed one
open-work ankle above the other.

“I want you to tell me what my husband said to your husband last night.”

Lydia turned pale.

“My husband--to yours?” she faltered, staring at the other.

“Didn’t you know they were closeted together for hours in the
smoking-room after you went upstairs? My man didn’t get to bed until
nearly two o’clock and when he did I couldn’t get a word out of him.
When he wants to be aggravating I’ll back him against anybody living!”
 Her teeth and eyes flashed persuasively upon Lydia. “But you’ll tell
me what they were talking about, won’t you? I know I can trust you--you
look so awfully kind. And it’s for his own good. He’s such a precious
donkey and I’m so afraid he’s got into some beastly scrape or other. If
he’d only trust his own old woman! But they’re always writing to him and
setting him against me. And I’ve got nobody to turn to.” She laid her
hand on Lydia’s with a rattle of bracelets. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

Lydia drew back from the smiling fierceness of her brows.

“I’m sorry--but I don’t think I understand. My husband has said nothing
to me of--of yours.”

The great black crescents above Mrs. Linton’s eyes met angrily.

“I say--is that true?” she demanded.

Lydia rose from her seat.

“Oh, look here, I didn’t mean that, you know--you mustn’t take one up
so! Can’t you see how rattled I am?”

Lydia saw that, in fact, her beautiful mouth was quivering beneath
softened eyes.

“I’m beside myself!” the splendid creature wailed, dropping into her
seat.

“I’m so sorry,” Lydia repeated, forcing herself to speak kindly; “but
how can I help you?”

Mrs. Linton raised her head sharply.

“By finding out--there’s a darling!”

“Finding what out?”

“What Trevenna told him.”

“Trevenna--?” Lydia echoed in bewilderment.

Mrs. Linton clapped her hand to her mouth.

“Oh, Lord--there, it’s out! What a fool I am! But I supposed of course
you knew; I supposed everybody knew.” She dried her eyes and bridled.
“Didn’t you know that he’s Lord Trevenna? I’m Mrs. Cope.”

Lydia recognized the names. They had figured in a flamboyant elopement
which had thrilled fashionable London some six months earlier.

“Now you see how it is--you understand, don’t you?” Mrs. Cope continued
on a note of appeal. “I knew you would--that’s the reason I came to you.
I suppose _he_ felt the same thing about your husband; he’s not spoken
to another soul in the place.” Her face grew anxious again. “He’s
awfully sensitive, generally--he feels our position, he says--as if it
wasn’t _my_ place to feel that! But when he does get talking there’s no
knowing what he’ll say. I know he’s been brooding over something lately,
and I _must_ find out what it is--it’s to his interest that I should.
I always tell him that I think only of his interest; if he’d only trust
me! But he’s been so odd lately--I can’t think what he’s plotting. You
will help me, dear?”

Lydia, who had remained standing, looked away uncomfortably.

“If you mean by finding out what Lord Trevenna has told my husband, I’m
afraid it’s impossible.”

“Why impossible?”

“Because I infer that it was told in confidence.”

Mrs. Cope stared incredulously.

“Well, what of that? Your husband looks such a dear--any one can see
he’s awfully gone on you. What’s to prevent your getting it out of him?”

Lydia flushed.

“I’m not a spy!” she exclaimed.

“A spy--a spy? How dare you?” Mrs. Cope flamed out. “Oh, I don’t mean
that either! Don’t be angry with me--I’m so miserable.” She essayed
a softer note. “Do you call that spying--for one woman to help out
another? I do need help so dreadfully! I’m at my wits’ end with
Trevenna, I am indeed. He’s such a boy--a mere baby, you know; he’s only
two-and-twenty.” She dropped her orbed lids. “He’s younger than me--only
fancy! a few months younger. I tell him he ought to listen to me as if I
was his mother; oughtn’t he now? But he won’t, he won’t! All his people
are at him, you see--oh, I know _their_ little game! Trying to get him
away from me before I can get my divorce--that’s what they’re up to. At
first he wouldn’t listen to them; he used to toss their letters over to
me to read; but now he reads them himself, and answers ‘em too, I fancy;
he’s always shut up in his room, writing. If I only knew what his
plan is I could stop him fast enough--he’s such a simpleton. But he’s
dreadfully deep too--at times I can’t make him out. But I know he’s told
your husband everything--I knew that last night the minute I laid eyes
on him. And I _must_ find out--you must help me--I’ve got no one else to
turn to!”

She caught Lydia’s fingers in a stormy pressure.

“Say you’ll help me--you and your husband.”

Lydia tried to free herself.

“What you ask is impossible; you must see that it is. No one could
interfere in--in the way you ask.”

Mrs. Cope’s clutch tightened.

“You won’t, then? You won’t?”

“Certainly not. Let me go, please.”

Mrs. Cope released her with a laugh.

“Oh, go by all means--pray don’t let me detain you! Shall you go and
tell Lady Susan Condit that there’s a pair of us--or shall I save you
the trouble of enlightening her?”

Lydia stood still in the middle of the path, seeing her antagonist
through a mist of terror. Mrs. Cope was still laughing.

“Oh, I’m not spiteful by nature, my dear; but you’re a little more than
flesh and blood can stand! It’s impossible, is it? Let you go, indeed!
You’re too good to be mixed up in my affairs, are you? Why, you little
fool, the first day I laid eyes on you I saw that you and I were both in
the same box--that’s the reason I spoke to you.”

She stepped nearer, her smile dilating on Lydia like a lamp through a
fog.

“You can take your choice, you know; I always play fair. If you’ll tell
I’ll promise not to. Now then, which is it to be?”

Lydia, involuntarily, had begun to move away from the pelting storm of
words; but at this she turned and sat down again.

“You may go,” she said simply. “I shall stay here.”


IV

She stayed there for a long time, in the hypnotized contemplation,
not of Mrs. Cope’s present, but of her own past. Gannett, early that
morning, had gone off on a long walk--he had fallen into the habit of
taking these mountain-tramps with various fellow-lodgers; but even had
he been within reach she could not have gone to him just then. She had
to deal with herself first. She was surprised to find how, in the last
months, she had lost the habit of introspection. Since their coming to
the Hotel Bellosguardo she and Gannett had tacitly avoided themselves
and each other.

She was aroused by the whistle of the three o’clock steamboat as it
neared the landing just beyond the hotel gates. Three o’clock! Then
Gannett would soon be back--he had told her to expect him before four.
She rose hurriedly, her face averted from the inquisitorial facade of
the hotel. She could not see him just yet; she could not go indoors. She
slipped through one of the overgrown garden-alleys and climbed a steep
path to the hills.

It was dark when she opened their sitting-room door. Gannett was sitting
on the window-ledge smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were now his chief
resource: he had not written a line during the two months they had spent
at the Hotel Bellosguardo. In that respect, it had turned out not to be
the right _milieu_ after all.

He started up at Lydia’s entrance.

“Where have you been? I was getting anxious.”

She sat down in a chair near the door.

“Up the mountain,” she said wearily.

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

Gannett threw away his cigarette: the sound of her voice made him want
to see her face.

“Shall we have a little light?” he suggested.

She made no answer and he lifted the globe from the lamp and put a match
to the wick. Then he looked at her.

“Anything wrong? You look done up.”

She sat glancing vaguely about the little sitting-room, dimly lit by
the pallid-globed lamp, which left in twilight the outlines of the
furniture, of his writing-table heaped with books and papers, of the
tea-roses and jasmine drooping on the mantel-piece. How like home it had
all grown--how like home!

“Lydia, what is wrong?” he repeated.

She moved away from him, feeling for her hatpins and turning to lay her
hat and sunshade on the table.

Suddenly she said: “That woman has been talking to me.”

Gannett stared.

“That woman? What woman?”

“Mrs. Linton--Mrs. Cope.”

He gave a start of annoyance, still, as she perceived, not grasping the
full import of her words.

“The deuce! She told you--?”

“She told me everything.”

Gannett looked at her anxiously.

“What impudence! I’m so sorry that you should have been exposed to this,
dear.”

“Exposed!” Lydia laughed.

Gannett’s brow clouded and they looked away from each other.

“Do you know _why_ she told me? She had the best of reasons. The first
time she laid eyes on me she saw that we were both in the same box.”

“Lydia!”

“So it was natural, of course, that she should turn to me in a
difficulty.”

“What difficulty?”

“It seems she has reason to think that Lord Trevenna’s people are trying
to get him away from her before she gets her divorce--”

“Well?”

“And she fancied he had been consulting with you last night as to--as to
the best way of escaping from her.”

Gannett stood up with an angry forehead.

“Well--what concern of yours was all this dirty business? Why should she
go to you?”

“Don’t you see? It’s so simple. I was to wheedle his secret out of you.”

“To oblige that woman?”

“Yes; or, if I was unwilling to oblige her, then to protect myself.”

“To protect yourself? Against whom?”

“Against her telling every one in the hotel that she and I are in the
same box.”

“She threatened that?”

“She left me the choice of telling it myself or of doing it for me.”

“The beast!”

There was a long silence. Lydia had seated herself on the sofa, beyond
the radius of the lamp, and he leaned against the window. His next
question surprised her.

“When did this happen? At what time, I mean?” She looked at him vaguely.

“I don’t know--after luncheon, I think. Yes, I remember; it must have
been at about three o’clock.”

He stepped into the middle of the room and as he approached the light
she saw that his brow had cleared.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“Because when I came in, at about half-past three, the mail was just
being distributed, and Mrs. Cope was waiting as usual to pounce on
her letters; you know she was always watching for the postman. She
was standing so close to me that I couldn’t help seeing a big
official-looking envelope that was handed to her. She tore it open, gave
one look at the inside, and rushed off upstairs like a whirlwind, with
the director shouting after her that she had left all her other letters
behind. I don’t believe she ever thought of you again after that paper
was put into her hand.”

“Why?”

“Because she was too busy. I was sitting in the window, watching for
you, when the five o’clock boat left, and who should go on board, bag
and baggage, valet and maid, dressing-bags and poodle, but Mrs. Cope
and Trevenna. Just an hour and a half to pack up in! And you should
have seen her when they started. She was radiant--shaking hands with
everybody--waving her handkerchief from the deck--distributing bows and
smiles like an empress. If ever a woman got what she wanted just in the
nick of time that woman did. She’ll be Lady Trevenna within a week, I’ll
wager.”

“You think she has her divorce?”

“I’m sure of it. And she must have got it just after her talk with you.”

Lydia was silent.

At length she said, with a kind of reluctance, “She was horribly
angry when she left me. It wouldn’t have taken long to tell Lady Susan
Condit.”

“Lady Susan Condit has not been told.”

“How do you know?”

“Because when I went downstairs half an hour ago I met Lady Susan on the
way--”

He stopped, half smiling.

“Well?”

“And she stopped to ask if I thought you would act as patroness to a
charity concert she is getting up.”

In spite of themselves they both broke into a laugh. Lydia’s ended in
sobs and she sank down with her face hidden. Gannett bent over her,
seeking her hands.

“That vile woman--I ought to have warned you to keep away from her;
I can’t forgive myself! But he spoke to me in confidence; and I never
dreamed--well, it’s all over now.”

Lydia lifted her head.

“Not for me. It’s only just beginning.”

“What do you mean?”

She put him gently aside and moved in her turn to the window. Then she
went on, with her face turned toward the shimmering blackness of the
lake, “You see of course that it might happen again at any moment.”

“What?”

“This--this risk of being found out. And we could hardly count again on
such a lucky combination of chances, could we?”

He sat down with a groan.

Still keeping her face toward the darkness, she said, “I want you to go
and tell Lady Susan--and the others.”

Gannett, who had moved towards her, paused a few feet off.

“Why do you wish me to do this?” he said at length, with less surprise
in his voice than she had been prepared for.

“Because I’ve behaved basely, abominably, since we came here: letting
these people believe we were married--lying with every breath I drew--”

“Yes, I’ve felt that too,” Gannett exclaimed with sudden energy.

The words shook her like a tempest: all her thoughts seemed to fall
about her in ruins.

“You--you’ve felt so?”

“Of course I have.” He spoke with low-voiced vehemence. “Do you suppose
I like playing the sneak any better than you do? It’s damnable.”

He had dropped on the arm of a chair, and they stared at each other like
blind people who suddenly see.

“But you have liked it here,” she faltered.

“Oh, I’ve liked it--I’ve liked it.” He moved impatiently. “Haven’t you?”

“Yes,” she burst out; “that’s the worst of it--that’s what I can’t bear.
I fancied it was for your sake that I insisted on staying--because you
thought you could write here; and perhaps just at first that really was
the reason. But afterwards I wanted to stay myself--I loved it.” She
broke into a laugh. “Oh, do you see the full derision of it? These
people--the very prototypes of the bores you took me away from, with the
same fenced--in view of life, the same keep-off-the-grass morality, the
same little cautious virtues and the same little frightened vices--well,
I’ve clung to them, I’ve delighted in them, I’ve done my best to please
them. I’ve toadied Lady Susan, I’ve gossiped with Miss Pinsent, I’ve
pretended to be shocked with Mrs. Ainger. Respectability! It was the
one thing in life that I was sure I didn’t care about, and it’s grown
so precious to me that I’ve stolen it because I couldn’t get it in any
other way.”

She moved across the room and returned to his side with another laugh.

“I who used to fancy myself unconventional! I must have been born with
a card-case in my hand. You should have seen me with that poor woman in
the garden. She came to me for help, poor creature, because she fancied
that, having ‘sinned,’ as they call it, I might feel some pity for
others who had been tempted in the same way. Not I! She didn’t know me.
Lady Susan would have been kinder, because Lady Susan wouldn’t have been
afraid. I hated the woman--my one thought was not to be seen with
her--I could have killed her for guessing my secret. The one thing that
mattered to me at that moment was my standing with Lady Susan!”

Gannett did not speak.

“And you--you’ve felt it too!” she broke out accusingly. “You’ve enjoyed
being with these people as much as I have; you’ve let the chaplain talk
to you by the hour about ‘The Reign of Law’ and Professor Drummond.
When they asked you to hand the plate in church I was watching you--_you
wanted to accept.”_

She stepped close, laying her hand on his arm.

“Do you know, I begin to see what marriage is for. It’s to keep people
away from each other. Sometimes I think that two people who love each
other can be saved from madness only by the things that come between
them--children, duties, visits, bores, relations--the things
that protect married people from each other. We’ve been too close
together--that has been our sin. We’ve seen the nakedness of each
other’s souls.”

She sank again on the sofa, hiding her face in her hands.

Gannett stood above her perplexedly: he felt as though she were being
swept away by some implacable current while he stood helpless on its
bank.

At length he said, “Lydia, don’t think me a brute--but don’t you see
yourself that it won’t do?”

“Yes, I see it won’t do,” she said without raising her head.

His face cleared.

“Then we’ll go to-morrow.”

“Go--where?”

“To Paris; to be married.”

For a long time she made no answer; then she asked slowly, “Would they
have us here if we were married?”

“Have us here?”

“I mean Lady Susan--and the others.”

“Have us here? Of course they would.”

“Not if they knew--at least, not unless they could pretend not to know.”

He made an impatient gesture.

“We shouldn’t come back here, of course; and other people needn’t
know--no one need know.”

She sighed. “Then it’s only another form of deception and a meaner one.
Don’t you see that?”

“I see that we’re not accountable to any Lady Susans on earth!”

“Then why are you ashamed of what we are doing here?”

“Because I’m sick of pretending that you’re my wife when you’re
not--when you won’t be.”

She looked at him sadly.

“If I were your wife you’d have to go on pretending. You’d have to
pretend that I’d never been--anything else. And our friends would have
to pretend that they believed what you pretended.”

Gannett pulled off the sofa-tassel and flung it away.

“You’re impossible,” he groaned.

“It’s not I--it’s our being together that’s impossible. I only want you
to see that marriage won’t help it.”

“What will help it then?”

She raised her head.

“My leaving you.”

“Your leaving me?” He sat motionless, staring at the tassel which lay at
the other end of the room. At length some impulse of retaliation for the
pain she was inflicting made him say deliberately:

“And where would you go if you left me?”

“Oh!” she cried.

He was at her side in an instant.

“Lydia--Lydia--you know I didn’t mean it; I couldn’t mean it! But you’ve
driven me out of my senses; I don’t know what I’m saying. Can’t you get
out of this labyrinth of self-torture? It’s destroying us both.”

“That’s why I must leave you.”

“How easily you say it!” He drew her hands down and made her face him.
“You’re very scrupulous about yourself--and others. But have you thought
of me? You have no right to leave me unless you’ve ceased to care--”

“It’s because I care--”

“Then I have a right to be heard. If you love me you can’t leave me.”

Her eyes defied him.

“Why not?”

He dropped her hands and rose from her side.

“Can you?” he said sadly.

The hour was late and the lamp flickered and sank. She stood up with a
shiver and turned toward the door of her room.


V

At daylight a sound in Lydia’s room woke Gannett from a troubled sleep.
He sat up and listened. She was moving about softly, as though fearful
of disturbing him. He heard her push back one of the creaking shutters;
then there was a moment’s silence, which seemed to indicate that she was
waiting to see if the noise had roused him.

Presently she began to move again. She had spent a sleepless night,
probably, and was dressing to go down to the garden for a breath of air.
Gannett rose also; but some undefinable instinct made his movements
as cautious as hers. He stole to his window and looked out through the
slats of the shutter.

It had rained in the night and the dawn was gray and lifeless. The
cloud-muffled hills across the lake were reflected in its surface as in
a tarnished mirror. In the garden, the birds were beginning to shake the
drops from the motionless laurustinus-boughs.

An immense pity for Lydia filled Gannett’s soul. Her seeming
intellectual independence had blinded him for a time to the feminine
cast of her mind. He had never thought of her as a woman who wept and
clung: there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to
be the result of reasoning. Now he saw the cruelty he had committed
in detaching her from the normal conditions of life; he felt, too, the
insight with which she had hit upon the real cause of their suffering.
Their life was “impossible,” as she had said--and its worst penalty was
that it had made any other life impossible for them. Even had his
love lessened, he was bound to her now by a hundred ties of pity and
self-reproach; and she, poor child! must turn back to him as Latude
returned to his cell....

A new sound startled him: it was the stealthy closing of Lydia’s door.
He crept to his own and heard her footsteps passing down the corridor.
Then he went back to the window and looked out.

A minute or two later he saw her go down the steps of the porch and
enter the garden. From his post of observation her face was invisible,
but something about her appearance struck him. She wore a long
travelling cloak and under its folds he detected the outline of a bag or
bundle. He drew a deep breath and stood watching her.

She walked quickly down the laurustinus alley toward the gate; there
she paused a moment, glancing about the little shady square. The stone
benches under the trees were empty, and she seemed to gather resolution
from the solitude about her, for she crossed the square to the
steam-boat landing, and he saw her pause before the ticket-office at
the head of the wharf. Now she was buying her ticket. Gannett turned his
head a moment to look at the clock: the boat was due in five minutes. He
had time to jump into his clothes and overtake her--

He made no attempt to move; an obscure reluctance restrained him. If any
thought emerged from the tumult of his sensations, it was that he must
let her go if she wished it. He had spoken last night of his rights:
what were they? At the last issue, he and she were two separate beings,
not made one by the miracle of common forbearances, duties, abnegations,
but bound together in a _noyade_ of passion that left them resisting yet
clinging as they went down.

After buying her ticket, Lydia had stood for a moment looking out across
the lake; then he saw her seat herself on one of the benches near the
landing. He and she, at that moment, were both listening for the same
sound: the whistle of the boat as it rounded the nearest promontory.
Gannett turned again to glance at the clock: the boat was due now.

Where would she go? What would her life be when she had left him? She
had no near relations and few friends. There was money enough ... but
she asked so much of life, in ways so complex and immaterial. He thought
of her as walking bare-footed through a stony waste. No one would
understand her--no one would pity her--and he, who did both, was
powerless to come to her aid....

He saw that she had risen from the bench and walked toward the edge of
the lake. She stood looking in the direction from which the steamboat
was to come; then she turned to the ticket-office, doubtless to ask the
cause of the delay. After that she went back to the bench and sat down
with bent head. What was she thinking of?

The whistle sounded; she started up, and Gannett involuntarily made a
movement toward the door. But he turned back and continued to watch her.
She stood motionless, her eyes on the trail of smoke that preceded
the appearance of the boat. Then the little craft rounded the point, a
dead-white object on the leaden water: a minute later it was puffing and
backing at the wharf.

The few passengers who were waiting--two or three peasants and a snuffy
priest--were clustered near the ticket-office. Lydia stood apart under
the trees.

The boat lay alongside now; the gang-plank was run out and the peasants
went on board with their baskets of vegetables, followed by the priest.
Still Lydia did not move. A bell began to ring querulously; there was a
shriek of steam, and some one must have called to her that she would
be late, for she started forward, as though in answer to a summons. She
moved waveringly, and at the edge of the wharf she paused. Gannett saw
a sailor beckon to her; the bell rang again and she stepped upon the
gang-plank.

Half-way down the short incline to the deck she stopped again; then she
turned and ran back to the land. The gang-plank was drawn in, the bell
ceased to ring, and the boat backed out into the lake. Lydia, with slow
steps, was walking toward the garden....

As she approached the hotel she looked up furtively and Gannett drew
back into the room. He sat down beside a table; a Bradshaw lay at his
elbow, and mechanically, without knowing what he did, he began looking
out the trains to Paris....




A COWARD


“My daughter Irene,” said Mrs. Carstyle (she made it rhyme with
_tureen_), “has had no social advantages; but if Mr. Carstyle had
chosen--” she paused significantly and looked at the shabby sofa on
the opposite side of the fire-place as though it had been Mr. Carstyle.
Vibart was glad that it was not.

Mrs. Carstyle was one of the women who make refinement vulgar. She
invariably spoke of her husband as _Mr. Carstyle_ and, though she had
but one daughter, was always careful to designate the young lady by
name. At luncheon she had talked a great deal of elevating influences
and ideals, and had fluctuated between apologies for the overdone mutton
and affected surprise that the bewildered maid-servant should have
forgotten to serve the coffee and liqueurs _as usual_.

Vibart was almost sorry that he had come. Miss Carstyle was still
beautiful--almost as beautiful as when, two days earlier, against the
leafy background of a June garden-party, he had seen her for the first
time--but her mother’s expositions and elucidations cheapened her beauty
as sign-posts vulgarize a woodland solitude. Mrs. Carstyle’s eye was
perpetually plying between her daughter and Vibart, like an empty cab in
quest of a fare. Miss Carstyle, the young man decided, was the kind
of girl whose surroundings rub off on her; or was it rather that Mrs.
Carstyle’s idiosyncrasies were of a nature to color every one within
reach? Vibart, looking across the table as this consolatory alternative
occurred to him, was sure that they had not colored Mr. Carstyle; but
that, perhaps, was only because they had bleached him instead. Mr.
Carstyle was quite colorless; it would have been impossible to guess his
native tint. His wife’s qualities, if they had affected him at all, had
acted negatively. He did not apologize for the mutton, and he wandered
off after luncheon without pretending to wait for the diurnal coffee
and liqueurs; while the few remarks that he had contributed to the
conversation during the meal had not been in the direction of abstract
conceptions of life. As he strayed away, with his vague oblique step,
and the stoop that suggested the habit of dodging missiles, Vibart,
who was still in the age of formulas, found himself wondering what life
could be worth to a man who had evidently resigned himself to travelling
with his back to the wind; so that Mrs. Carstyle’s allusion to her
daughter’s lack of advantages (imparted while Irene searched the house
for an undiscoverable cigarette) had an appositeness unintended by the
speaker.

“If Mr. Carstyle had chosen,” that lady repeated, “we might have had
our city home” (she never used so small a word as town) “and Ireen could
have mixed in the society to which I myself was accustomed at her age.”
 Her sigh pointed unmistakably to a past when young men had come to
luncheon to see _her_.

The sigh led Vibart to look at her, and the look led him to the
unwelcome conclusion that Irene “took after” her mother. It was
certainly not from the sapless paternal stock that the girl had drawn
her warm bloom: Mrs. Carstyle had contributed the high lights to the
picture.

Mrs. Carstyle caught his look and appropriated it with the complacency
of a vicarious beauty. She was quite aware of the value of her
appearance as guaranteeing Irene’s development into a fine woman.

“But perhaps,” she continued, taking up the thread of her explanation,
“you have heard of Mr. Carstyle’s extraordinary hallucination. Mr.
Carstyle knows that I call it so--as I tell him, it is the most
charitable view to take.”

She looked coldly at the threadbare sofa and indulgently at the young
man who filled a corner of it.

“You may think it odd, Mr. Vibart, that I should take you into my
confidence in this way after so short an acquaintance, but somehow
I can’t help regarding you as a friend already. I believe in those
intuitive sympathies, don’t you? They have never misled me--” her lids
drooped retrospectively--“and besides, I always tell Mr. Carstyle that
on this point I will have no false pretences. Where truth is concerned
I am inexorable, and I consider it my duty to let our friends know
that our restricted way of living is due entirely to choice--to
Mr. Carstyle’s choice. When I married Mr. Carstyle it was with the
expectation of living in New York and of keeping my carriage; and there
is no reason for our not doing so--there is no reason, Mr. Vibart, why
my daughter Ireen should have been denied the intellectual advantages
of foreign travel. I wish that to be understood. It is owing to her
father’s deliberate choice that Ireen and I have been imprisoned in the
narrow limits of Millbrook society. For myself I do not complain. If Mr.
Carstyle chooses to place others before his wife it is not for his wife
to repine. His course may be noble--Quixotic; I do not allow myself to
pronounce judgment on it, though others have thought that in sacrificing
his own family to strangers he was violating the most sacred obligations
of domestic life. This is the opinion of my pastor and of other valued
friends; but, as I have always told them, for myself I make no claims.
Where my daughter Ireen is concerned it is different--”

It was a relief to Vibart when, at this point, Mrs. Carstyle’s discharge
of her duty was cut short by her daughter’s reappearance. Irene had been
unable to find a cigarette for Mr. Vibart, and her mother, with beaming
irrelevance, suggested that in that case she had better show him the
garden.

The Carstyle house stood but a few yards back from the brick-paved
Millbrook street, and the garden was a very small place, unless
measured, as Mrs. Carstyle probably intended that it should be, by the
extent of her daughter’s charms. These were so considerable that Vibart
walked back and forward half a dozen times between the porch and the
gate, before he discovered the limitations of the Carstyle domain. It
was not till Irene had accused him of being sarcastic and had confided
in him that “the girls” were furious with her for letting him talk to
her so long at his aunt’s garden-party, that he awoke to the exiguity
of his surroundings; and then it was with a touch of irritation that he
noticed Mr. Carstyle’s inconspicuous profile bent above a newspaper in
one of the lower windows. Vibart had an idea that Mr. Carstyle, while
ostensibly reading the paper, had kept count of the number of times
that his daughter had led her companion up and down between the
syringa-bushes; and for some undefinable reason he resented Mr.
Carstyle’s unperturbed observation more than his wife’s zealous
self-effacement. To a man who is trying to please a pretty girl there
are moments when the proximity of an impartial spectator is more
disconcerting than the most obvious connivance; and something about Mr.
Carstyle’s expression conveyed his good-humored indifference to Irene’s
processes.

When the garden-gate closed behind Vibart he had become aware that
his preoccupation with the Carstyles had shifted its centre from
the daughter to the father; but he was accustomed to such emotional
surprises, and skilled in seizing any compensations they might offer.



II

The Carstyles belonged to the all-the-year-round Millbrook of
paper-mills, cable-cars, brick pavements and church sociables, while
Mrs. Vance, the aunt with whom Vibart lived, was an ornament of the
summer colony whose big country-houses dotted the surrounding hills.
Mrs. Vance had, however, no difficulty in appeasing the curiosity which
Mrs. Carstyle’s enigmatic utterances had aroused in the young man.
Mrs. Carstyle’s relentless veracity vented itself mainly on the “summer
people,” as they were called: she did not propose that any one within
ten miles of Millbrook should keep a carriage without knowing that she
was entitled to keep one too. Mrs. Vance remarked with a sigh that Mrs.
Carstyle’s annual demand to have her position understood came in as
punctually as the taxes and the water-rates.

“My dear, it’s simply this: when Andrew Carstyle married her years
ago--Heaven knows why he did; he’s one of the Albany Carstyles, you
know, and she was a daughter of old Deacon Ash of South Millbrook--well,
when he married her he had a tidy little income, and I suppose the bride
expected to set up an establishment in New York and be hand-in-glove
with the whole Carstyle clan. But whether he was ashamed of her from the
first, or for some other unexplained reason, he bought a country-place
and settled down here for life. For a few years they lived comfortably
enough, and she had plenty of smart clothes, and drove about in a
victoria calling on the summer people. Then, when the beautiful Irene
was about ten years old, Mr. Carstyle’s only brother died, and it turned
out that he had made away with a lot of trust-property. It was a horrid
business: over three hundred thousand dollars were gone, and of course
most of it had belonged to widows and orphans. As soon as the facts were
made known, Andrew Carstyle announced that he would pay back what his
brother had stolen. He sold his country-place and his wife’s carriage,
and they moved to the little house they live in now. Mr. Carstyle’s
income is probably not as large as his wife would like to have it
thought, and though I’m told he puts aside, a good part of it every
year to pay off his brother’s obligations, I fancy the debt won’t be
discharged for some time to come. To help things along he opened a law
office--he had studied law in his youth--but though he is said to be
clever I hear that he has very little to do. People are afraid of him:
he’s too dry and quiet. Nobody believes in a man who doesn’t believe in
himself, and Mr. Carstyle always seems to be winking at you through a
slit in his professional manner. People don’t like it--his wife
doesn’t like it. I believe she would have accepted the sacrifice of the
country-place and the carriage if he had struck an attitude and talked
about doing his duty. It was his regarding the whole thing as a matter
of course that exasperated her. What is the use of doing something
difficult in a way that makes it look perfectly easy? I feel sorry for
Mrs. Carstyle. She’s lost her house and her carriage, and she hasn’t
been allowed to be heroic.”

Vibart had listened attentively.

“I wonder what Miss Carstyle thinks of it?” he mused.

Mrs. Vance looked at him with a tentative smile. “I wonder what _you_
think of Miss Carstyle?” she returned,

His answer reassured her.

“I think she takes after her mother,” he said.

“Ah,” cried his aunt cheerfully, “then I needn’t write to _your_ mother,
and I can have Irene at all my parties!”

Miss Carstyle was an important factor in the restricted social
combinations of a Millbrook hostess. A local beauty is always a useful
addition to a Saturday-to-Monday house-party, and the beautiful Irene
was served up as a perennial novelty to the jaded guests of the summer
colony. As Vibart’s aunt remarked, she was perfect till she became
playful, and she never became playful till the third day.

Under these conditions, it was natural that Vibart should see a good
deal of the young lady, and before he was aware of it he had drifted
into the anomalous position of paying court to the daughter in order to
ingratiate himself with the father. Miss Carstyle was beautiful,
Vibart was young, and the days were long in his aunt’s spacious and
distinguished house; but it was really the desire to know something
more of Mr. Carstyle that led the young man to partake so often of that
gentleman’s overdone mutton. Vibart’s imagination had been touched by
the discovery that this little huddled-up man, instead of travelling
with the wind, was persistently facing a domestic gale of considerable
velocity. That he should have paid off his brother’s debt at one stroke
was to the young man a conceivable feat; but that he should go on
methodically and uninterruptedly accumulating the needed amount,
under the perpetual accusation of Irene’s inadequate frocks and
Mrs. Carstyle’s apologies for the mutton, seemed to Vibart proof of
unexampled heroism. Mr. Carstyle was as inaccessible as the average
American parent, and led a life so detached from the preoccupations of
his womankind that Vibart had some difficulty in fixing his attention.
To Mr. Carstyle, Vibart was simply the inevitable young man who had been
hanging about the house ever since Irene had left school; and Vibart’s
efforts to differentiate himself from this enamored abstraction were
hampered by Mrs. Carstyle’s cheerful assumption that he _was_ the young
man, and by Irene’s frank appropriation of his visits.

In this extremity he suddenly observed a slight but significant change
in the manner of the two ladies. Irene, instead of charging him with
being sarcastic and horrid, and declaring herself unable to believe a
word he said, began to receive his remarks with the impersonal
smile which he had seen her accord to the married men of his aunt’s
house-parties; while Mrs. Carstyle, talking over his head to an
invisible but evidently sympathetic and intelligent listener, debated
the propriety of Irene’s accepting an invitation to spend the month of
August at Narragansett. When Vibart, rashly trespassing on the rights of
this unseen oracle, remarked that a few weeks at the seashore would make
a delightful change for Miss Carstyle, the ladies looked at him and then
laughed.

It was at this point that Vibart, for the first time, found himself
observed by Mr. Carstyle. They were grouped about the debris of a
luncheon which had ended precipitously with veal stew (Mrs. Carstyle
explaining that poor cooks _always_ failed with their sweet dish when
there was company) and Mr. Carstyle, his hands thrust in his pockets,
his lean baggy-coated shoulders pressed against his chair-back, sat
contemplating his guest with a smile of unmistakable approval. When
Vibart caught his eye the smile vanished, and Mr. Carstyle, dropping his
glasses from the bridge of his thin nose, looked out of the window with
the expression of a man determined to prove an alibi. But Vibart was
sure of the smile: it had established, between his host and himself,
a complicity which Mr. Carstyle’s attempted evasion served only to
confirm.

On the strength of this incident Vibart, a few days later, called at
Mr. Carstyle’s office. Ostensibly, the young man had come to ask, on his
aunt’s behalf, some question on a point at issue between herself and the
Millbrook telephone company; but his purpose in offering to perform the
errand had been the hope of taking up his intercourse with Mr. Carstyle
where that gentleman’s smile had left it. Vibart was not disappointed.
In a dingy office, with a single window looking out on a blank wall, he
found Mr. Carstyle, in an alpaca coat, reading Montaigne.

It evidently did not occur to him that Vibart had come on business, and
the warmth of his welcome gave the young man a sense of furnishing the
last word in a conjugal argument in which, for once, Mr. Carstyle had
come off triumphant.

The legal question disposed of, Vibart reverted to Montaigne: had Mr.
Carstyle seen young So-and-so’s volume of essays? There was one on
Montaigne that had a decided flavor: the point of view was curious.
Vibart was surprised to find that Mr. Carstyle had heard of young
So-and-so. Clever young men are given to thinking that their elders have
never got beyond Macaulay; but Mr. Carstyle seemed sufficiently familiar
with recent literature not to take it too seriously. He accepted
Vibart’s offer of young So-and-so’s volume, admitting that his own
library was not exactly up-to-date.

Vibart went away musing. The next day he came back with the volume of
essays. It seemed to be tacitly understood that he was to call at the
office when he wished to see Mr. Carstyle, whose legal engagements did
not seriously interfere with the pursuit of literature.

For a week or ten days Mrs. Carstyle, in Vibart’s presence, continued
to take counsel with her unseen adviser on the subject of her daughter’s
visit to Narragansett. Once or twice Irene dropped her impersonal smile
to tax Vibart with not caring whether she went or not; and Mrs. Carstyle
seized a moment of _tête-à-tête_ to confide in him that the dear child
hated the idea of leaving, and was going only because her friend Mrs.
Higby would not let her off. Of course, if it had not been for Mr.
Carstyle’s peculiarities they would have had their own seaside home--at
Newport, probably: Mrs. Carstyle preferred the tone of Newport--and
Irene would not have been dependent on the _charity_ of her friends; but
as it was, they must be thankful for small mercies, and Mrs. Higby was
certainly very kind in her way, and had a charming social position--for
Narragansett.

These confidences, however, were soon superseded by an exchange, between
mother and daughter, of increasingly frequent allusions to the delights
of Narragansett, the popularity of Mrs. Higby, and the jolliness of
her house; with an occasional reference on Mrs. Carstyle’s part to the
probability of Hewlett Bain’s being there as usual--hadn’t Irene heard
from Mrs. Higby that he was to be there? Upon this note Miss Carstyle
at length departed, leaving Vibart to the undisputed enjoyment of her
father’s company.

Vibart had at no time a keen taste for the summer joys of Millbrook, and
the family obligation which, for several months of the year, kept him
at his aunt’s side (Mrs. Vance was a childless widow and he filled the
onerous post of favorite nephew) gave a sense of compulsion to the light
occupations that chequered his leisure. Mrs. Vance, who fancied herself
lonely when he was away, was too much engaged with notes, telegrams and
arriving and departing guests, to do more than breathlessly smile upon
his presence, or implore him to take the dullest girl of the party for a
drive (and would he go by way of Millbrook, like a dear, and stop at the
market to ask why the lobsters hadn’t come?); and the house itself,
and the guests who came and went in it like people rushing through
a railway-station, offered no points of repose to his thoughts. Some
houses are companions in themselves: the walls, the book-shelves, the
very chairs and tables, have the qualities of a sympathetic mind; but
Mrs. Vance’s interior was as impersonal as the setting of a classic
drama.

These conditions made Vibart cultivate an assiduous exchange of books
between himself and Mr. Carstyle. The young man went down almost daily
to the little house in the town, where Mrs. Carstyle, who had now an
air of receiving him in curl-papers, and of not always immediately
distinguishing him from the piano-tuner, made no effort to detain him on
his way to her husband’s study.


III

Now and then, at the close of one of Vibart’s visits, Mr. Carstyle put
on a mildewed Panama hat and accompanied the young man for a mile or two
on his way home. The road to Mrs. Vance’s lay through one of the most
amiable suburbs of Millbrook, and Mr. Carstyle, walking with his slow
uneager step, his hat pushed back, and his stick dragging behind him,
seemed to take a philosophic pleasure in the aspect of the trim lawns
and opulent gardens.

Vibart could never induce his companion to prolong his walk as far as
Mrs. Vance’s drawing-room; but one afternoon, when the distant hills lay
blue beyond the twilight of overarching elms, the two men strolled on
into the country past that lady’s hospitable gateposts.

It was a still day, the road was deserted, and every sound came sharply
through the air. Mr. Carstyle was in the midst of a disquisition on
Diderot, when he raised his head and stood still.

“What’s that?” he said. “Listen!”

Vibart listened and heard a distant storm of hoof-beats. A moment later,
a buggy drawn by a pair of trotters swung round the turn of the road.
It was about thirty yards off, coming toward them at full speed. The man
who drove was leaning forward with outstretched arms; beside him sat a
girl.

Suddenly Vibart saw Mr. Carstyle jump into the middle of the road, in
front of the buggy. He stood there immovable, his arms extended, his
legs apart, in an attitude of indomitable resistance. Almost at the same
moment Vibart realized that the man in the buggy had his horses in hand.

“They’re not running!” Vibart shouted, springing into the road and
catching Mr. Carstyle’s alpaca sleeve. The older man looked around
vaguely: he seemed dazed.

“Come away, sir, come away!” cried Vibart, gripping his arm. The buggy
swept past them, and Mr. Carstyle stood in the dust gazing after it.

At length he drew out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He was
very pale and Vibart noticed that his hand shook.

“That was a close call, sir, wasn’t it? I suppose you thought they were
running.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Carstyle slowly, “I thought they were running.”

“It certainly looked like it for a minute. Let’s sit down, shall we? I
feel rather breathless myself.”

Vibart saw that his friend could hardly stand. They seated themselves
on a tree-trunk by the roadside, and Mr. Carstyle continued to wipe his
forehead in silence.

At length he turned to Vibart and said abruptly:

“I made straight for the middle of the road, didn’t I? If there _had_
been a runaway I should have stopped it?”

Vibart looked at him in surprise.

“You would have tried to, undoubtedly, unless I’d had time to drag you
away.”

Mr. Carstyle straightened his narrow shoulders.

“There was no hesitation, at all events? I--I showed no signs
of--avoiding it?”

“I should say not, sir; it was I who funked it for you.”

Mr. Carstyle was silent: his head had dropped forward and he looked like
an old man.

“It was just my cursed luck again!” he exclaimed suddenly in a loud
voice.

For a moment Vibart thought that he was wandering; but he raised his
head and went on speaking in more natural tones.

“I daresay I appeared ridiculous enough to you just now, eh? Perhaps
you saw all along that the horses weren’t running? Your eyes are younger
than mine; and then you’re not always looking out for runaways, as I am.
Do you know that in thirty years I’ve never seen a runaway?”

“You’re fortunate,” said Vibart, still bewildered.

“Fortunate? Good God, man, I’ve _prayed_ to see one: not a runaway
especially, but any bad accident; anything that endangered people’s
lives. There are accidents happening all the time all over the world;
why shouldn’t I ever come across one? It’s not for want of trying! At
one time I used to haunt the theatres in the hope of a fire: fires in
theatres are so apt to be fatal. Well, will you believe it? I was in the
Brooklyn theatre the night before it burned down; I left the old Madison
Square Garden half an hour before the walls fell in. And it’s the same
way with street accidents--I always miss them; I’m always just too late.
Last year there was a boy knocked down by a cable-car at our corner; I
got to my gate just as they were carrying him off on a stretcher. And so
it goes. If anybody else had been walking along this road, those horses
would have been running away. And there was a girl in the buggy, too--a
mere child!”

Mr. Carstyle’s head sank again.

“You’re wondering what this means,” he began after another pause. “I was
a little confused for a moment--must have seemed incoherent.” His voice
cleared and he made an effort to straighten himself. “Well, I was a
damned coward once and I’ve been trying to live it down ever since.”

Vibart looked at him incredulously and Mr. Carstyle caught the look with
a smile.

“Why not? Do I look like a Hercules?” He held up his loose-skinned hand
and shrunken wrist. “Not built for the part, certainly; but that doesn’t
count, of course. Man’s unconquerable soul, and all the rest of it ...
well, I was a coward every inch of me, body and soul.”

He paused and glanced up and down the road. There was no one in sight.

“It happened when I was a young chap just out of college. I was
travelling round the world with another youngster of my own age and an
older man--Charles Meriton--who has since made a name for himself. You
may have heard of him.”

“Meriton, the archaeologist? The man who discovered those ruined African
cities the other day?”

“That’s the man. He was a college tutor then, and my father, who had
known him since he was a boy, and who had a very high opinion of him,
had asked him to make the tour with us. We both--my friend Collis and
I--had an immense admiration for Meriton. He was just the fellow to
excite a boy’s enthusiasm: cool, quick, imperturbable--the kind of man
whose hand is always on the hilt of action. His explorations had led
him into all sorts of tight places, and he’d shown an extraordinary
combination of calculating patience and reckless courage. He never
talked about his doings; we picked them up from various people on our
journey. He’d been everywhere, he knew everybody, and everybody had
something stirring to tell about him. I daresay this account of the man
sounds exaggerated; perhaps it is; I’ve never seen him since; but at
that time he seemed to me a tremendous fellow--a kind of scientific
Ajax. He was a capital travelling-companion, at any rate: good-tempered,
cheerful, easily amused, with none of the been-there-before superiority
so irritating to youngsters. He made us feel as though it were all as
new to him as to us: he never chilled our enthusiasms or took the bloom
off our surprises. There was nobody else whose good opinion I cared as
much about: he was the biggest thing in sight.

“On the way home Collis broke down with diphtheria. We were in the
Mediterranean, cruising about the Sporades in a felucca. He was taken
ill at Chios. The attack came on suddenly and we were afraid to run
the risk of taking him back to Athens in the felucca. We established
ourselves in the inn at Chios and there the poor fellow lay for weeks.
Luckily there was a fairly good doctor on the island and we sent
to Athens for a sister to help with the nursing. Poor Collis was
desperately bad: the diphtheria was followed by partial paralysis. The
doctor assured us that the danger was past; he would gradually regain
the use of his limbs; but his recovery would be slow. The sister
encouraged us too--she had seen such cases before; and he certainly did
improve a shade each day. Meriton and I had taken turns with the sister
in nursing him, but after the paralysis had set in there wasn’t much to
do, and there was nothing to prevent Meriton’s leaving us for a day or
two. He had received word from some place on the coast of Asia Minor
that a remarkable tomb had been discovered somewhere in the interior;
he had not been willing to take us there, as the journey was not a
particularly safe one; but now that we were tied up at Chios there
seemed no reason why he shouldn’t go and take a look at the place. The
expedition would not take more than three days; Collis was convalescent;
the doctor and nurse assured us that there was no cause for uneasiness;
and so Meriton started off one evening at sunset. I walked down to the
quay with him and saw him rowed off to the felucca. I would have given a
good deal to be going with him; the prospect of danger allured me.

“‘You’ll see that Collis is never left alone, won’t you?’ he shouted
back to me as the boat pulled out into the harbor; I remembered I rather
resented the suggestion.

“I walked back to the inn and went to bed: the nurse sat up with Collis
at night. The next morning I relieved her at the usual hour. It was a
sultry day with a queer coppery-looking sky; the air was stifling. In
the middle of the day the nurse came to take my place while I dined;
when I went back to Collis’s room she said she would go out for a breath
of air.

“I sat down by Collis’s bed and began to fan him with the fan the sister
had been using. The heat made him uneasy and I turned him over in
bed, for he was still helpless: the whole of his right side was numb.
Presently he fell asleep and I went to the window and sat looking down
on the hot deserted square, with a bunch of donkeys and their drivers
asleep in the shade of the convent-wall across the way. I remember
noticing the blue beads about the donkeys’ necks.... Were you ever in
an earthquake? No? I’d never been in one either. It’s an indescribable
sensation ... there’s a Day of Judgment feeling in the air. It began
with the donkeys waking up and trembling; I noticed that and thought it
queer. Then the drivers jumped up--I saw the terror in their faces. Then
a roar.... I remember noticing a big black crack in the convent-wall
opposite--a zig-zag crack, like a flash of lightning in a wood-cut.... I
thought of that, too, at the time; then all the bells in the place began
to ring--it made a fearful discord.... I saw people rushing across the
square ... the air was full of crashing noises. The floor went down
under me in a sickening way and then jumped back and pitched me to the
ceiling ... but where _was_ the ceiling? And the door? I said to myself:
_We’re two stories up--the stairs are just wide enough for one_....
I gave one glance at Collis: he was lying in bed, wide awake, looking
straight at me. I ran. Something struck me on the head as I bolted
downstairs--I kept on running. I suppose the knock I got dazed me, for I
don’t remember much of anything till I found myself in a vineyard a mile
from the town. I was roused by the warm blood running down my nose and
heard myself explaining to Meriton exactly how it had happened....

“When I crawled back to the town they told me that all the houses near
the inn were in ruins and that a dozen people had been killed. Collis
was among them, of course. The ceiling had come down on him.”

Mr. Carstyle wiped his forehead. Vibart sat looking away from him.

“Two days later Meriton came back. I began to tell him the story, but he
interrupted me.

“‘There was no one with him at the time, then? You’d left him alone?’

“‘No, he wasn’t alone.’

“‘Who was with him? You said the sister was out.’

“‘I was with him.’

“‘_You were with him?_’

“I shall never forget Meriton’s look. I believe I had meant to
explain, to accuse myself, to shout out my agony of soul; but I saw the
uselessness of it. A door had been shut between us. Neither of us spoke
another word. He was very kind to me on the way home; he looked after
me in a motherly way that was a good deal harder to stand than his open
contempt. I saw the man was honestly trying to pity me; but it was no
good--he simply couldn’t.”

Mr. Carstyle rose slowly, with a certain stiffness.

“Shall we turn toward home? Perhaps I’m keeping you.”

They walked on a few steps in silence; then he spoke again.

“That business altered my whole life. Of course I oughtn’t to have
allowed it to--that was another form of cowardice. But I saw myself only
with Meriton’s eyes--it is one of the worst miseries of youth that one
is always trying to be somebody else. I had meant to be a Meriton--I saw
I’d better go home and study law....

“It’s a childish fancy, a survival of the primitive savage, if you like;
but from that hour to this I’ve hankered day and night for a chance to
retrieve myself, to set myself right with the man I meant to be. I
want to prove to that man that it was all an accident--an unaccountable
deviation from my normal instincts; that having once been a coward
doesn’t mean that a man’s cowardly... and I can’t, I can’t!”

Mr. Carstyle’s tone had passed insensibly from agitation to irony. He
had got back to his usual objective stand-point.

“Why, I’m a perfect olive-branch,” he concluded, with his dry indulgent
laugh; “the very babies stop crying at my approach--I carry a sort of
millennium about with me--I’d make my fortune as an agent of the Peace
Society. I shall go to the grave leaving that other man unconvinced!”

Vibart walked back with him to Millbrook. On her doorstep they met Mrs.
Carstyle, flushed and feathered, with a card-case and dusty boots.

“I don’t ask you in,” she said plaintively, to Vibart, “because I can’t
answer for the food this evening. My maid-of-all-work tells me that
she’s going to a ball--which is more than I’ve done in years! And
besides, it would be cruel to ask you to spend such a hot evening in our
stuffy little house--the air is so much cooler at Mrs. Vance’s. Remember
me to Mrs. Vance, please, and tell her how sorry I am that I can no
longer include her in my round of visits. When I had my carriage I saw
the people I liked, but now that I have to walk, my social opportunities
are more limited. I was not obliged to do my visiting on foot when I was
younger, and my doctor tells me that to persons accustomed to a carriage
no exercise is more injurious than walking.”

She glanced at her husband with a smile of unforgiving sweetness.

“Fortunately,” she concluded, “it agrees with Mr. Carstyle.”




THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD


I

_A Newport drawing-room. Tapestries, flowers, bric-a-brac. Through the
windows, a geranium-edged lawn, the cliffs and the sea_. Isabel Warland
_sits reading_. Lucius Warland _enters in flannels and a yachting-cap_.

_Isabel_. Back already?

_Warland_. The wind dropped--it turned into a drifting race. Langham
took me off the yacht on his launch. What time is it? Two o’clock?
Where’s Mrs. Raynor?

_Isabel_. On her way to New York.

_Warland_. To New York?

_Isabel_. Precisely. The boat must be just leaving; she started an hour
ago and took Laura with her. In fact I’m alone in the house--that is,
until this evening. Some people are coming then.

_Warland_. But what in the world--

_Isabel_. Her aunt, Mrs. Griscom, has had a fit. She has them
constantly. They’re not serious--at least they wouldn’t be, if
Mrs. Griscom were not so rich--and childless. Naturally, under the
circumstances, Marian feels a peculiar sympathy for her; her position is
such a sad one; there’s positively no one to care whether she lives or
dies--except her heirs. Of course they all rush to Newburgh whenever she
has a fit. It’s hard on Marian, for she lives the farthest away; but she
has come to an understanding with the housekeeper, who always telegraphs
her first, so that she gets a start of several hours. She will be at
Newburgh to-night at ten, and she has calculated that the others can’t
possibly arrive before midnight.

_Warland_. You have a delightful way of putting things. I suppose you’d
talk of me like that.

_Isabel_. Oh, no. It’s too humiliating to doubt one’s husband’s
disinterestedness.

_Warland_. I wish I had a rich aunt who had fits.

_Isabel_. If I were wishing I should choose heart-disease.

_Warland_. There’s no doing anything without money or influence.

_Isabel (picking up her book)_. Have you heard from Washington?

_Warland_. Yes. That’s what I was going to speak of when I asked for
Mrs. Raynor. I wanted to bid her good-bye.

_Isabel_. You’re going?

_Warland_. By the five train. Fagott has just wired me that the
Ambassador will be in Washington on Monday. He hasn’t named his
secretaries yet, but there isn’t much hope for me. He has a nephew--

_Isabel_. They always have. Like the Popes.

_Warland_. Well, I’m going all the same. You’ll explain to Mrs. Raynor
if she gets back before I do? Are there to be people at dinner? I don’t
suppose it matters. You can always pick up an extra man on a Saturday.

_Isabel_. By the way, that reminds me that Marian left me a list of the
people who are arriving this afternoon. My novel is so absorbing that
I forgot to look at it. Where can it be? Ah, here--Let me see: the Jack
Merringtons, Adelaide Clinton, Ned Lender--all from New York, by seven
P.M. train. Lewis Darley to-night, by Fall River boat. John Oberville,
from Boston at five P.M. Why, I didn’t know--

_Warland (excitedly)_. John Oberville? John Oberville? Here? To-day at
five o’clock? Let me see--let me look at the list. Are you sure you’re
not mistaken? Why, she never said a word! Why the deuce didn’t you tell
me?

_Isabel_. I didn’t know.

_Warland_. Oberville--Oberville--!

_Isabel_. Why, what difference does it make?

_Warland_. What difference? What difference? Don’t look at me as if you
didn’t understand English! Why, if Oberville’s coming--(a pause) Look
here, Isabel, didn’t you know him very well at one time?

_Isabel_. Very well--yes.

_Warland_. I thought so--of course--I remember now; I heard all about it
before I met you. Let me see--didn’t you and your mother spend a winter
in Washington when he was Under-secretary of State?

_Isabel_. That was before the deluge.

_Warland_. I remember--it all comes back to me. I used to hear it said
that he admired you tremendously; there was a report that you were
engaged. Don’t you remember? Why, it was in all the papers. By Jove,
Isabel, what a match that would have been!

_Isabel_. You _are_ disinterested!

_Warland_. Well, I can’t help thinking--

_Isabel_. That I paid you a handsome compliment?

_Warland (preoccupied)_. Eh?--Ah, yes--exactly. What was I saying?
Oh--about the report of your engagement. _(Playfully.)_ He was awfully
gone on you, wasn’t he?

_Isabel_. It’s not for me to diminish your triumph.

_Warland_. By Jove, I can’t think why Mrs. Raynor didn’t tell me he
was coming. A man like that--one doesn’t take him for granted, like the
piano-tuner! I wonder I didn’t see it in the papers.

_Isabel_. Is he grown such a great man?

_Warland_. Oberville? Great? John Oberville? I’ll tell you what he
is--the power behind the throne, the black Pope, the King-maker and all
the rest of it. Don’t you read the papers? Of course I’ll never get on
if you won’t interest yourself in politics. And to think you might have
married that man!

_Isabel_. And got you your secretaryship!

_Warland_. Oberville has them all in the hollow of his hand.

_Isabel_. Well, you’ll see him at five o’clock.

_Warland_. I don’t suppose he’s ever heard of _me_, worse luck! (_A
silence_.) Isabel, look here. I never ask questions, do I? But it was so
long ago--and Oberville almost belongs to history--he will one of these
days at any rate. Just tell me--did he want to marry you?

_Isabel_. Since you answer for his immortality--(_after a pause_) I was
very much in love with him.

_Warland_. Then of course he did. (_Another pause_.) But what in the
world--

_Isabel (musing)_. As you say, it was so long ago; I don’t see why
I shouldn’t tell you. There was a married woman who had--what is
the correct expression?--made sacrifices for him. There was only one
sacrifice she objected to making--and he didn’t consider himself free.
It sounds rather _rococo_, doesn’t it? It was odd that she died the year
after we were married.

_Warland_. Whew!

_Isabel (following her own thoughts)_. I’ve never seen him since;
it must be ten years ago. I’m certainly thirty-two, and I was just
twenty-two then. It’s curious to talk of it. I had put it away so
carefully. How it smells of camphor! And what an old-fashioned cut it
has! _(Rising.)_ Where’s the list, Lucius? You wanted to know if there
were to be people at dinner tonight--

_Warland_. Here it is--but never mind. Isabel--(_silence_) Isabel--

_Isabel_. Well?

_Warland_. It’s odd he never married.

_Isabel_. The comparison is to my disadvantage. But then I met you.

_Warland_. Don’t be so confoundedly sarcastic. I wonder how he’ll feel
about seeing you. Oh, I don’t mean any sentimental rot, of course... but
you’re an uncommonly agreeable woman. I daresay he’ll be pleased to see
you again; you’re fifty times more attractive than when I married you.

_Isabel_. I wish your other investments had appreciated at the same
rate. Unfortunately my charms won’t pay the butcher.

_Warland_. Damn the butcher!

_Isabel_. I happened to mention him because he’s just written again;
but I might as well have said the baker or the candlestick-maker. The
candlestick-maker--I wonder what he is, by the way? He must have more
faith in human nature than the others, for I haven’t heard from him yet.
I wonder if there is a Creditor’s Polite Letter-writer which they all
consult; their style is so exactly alike. I advise you to pass through
New York incognito on your way to Washington; their attentions might be
oppressive.

_Warland_. Confoundedly oppressive. What a dog’s life it is! My poor
Isabel--

_Isabel_. Don’t pity me. I didn’t marry you for a home.

_Warland (after a pause_). What _did_ you marry me for, if you cared for
Oberville? _(Another pause_.) Eh?

_Isabel_, Don’t make me regret my confidence.

_Warland_. I beg your pardon.

_Isabel_. Oh, it was only a subterfuge to conceal the fact that I have
no distinct recollection of my reasons. The fact is, a girl’s motives in
marrying are like a passport--apt to get mislaid. One is so seldom asked
for either. But mine certainly couldn’t have been mercenary: I never
heard a mother praise you to her daughters.

_Warland_. No, I never was much of a match.

_Isabel_. You impugn my judgment.

_Warland_. If I only had a head for business, now, I might have done
something by this time. But I’d sooner break stones in the road.

_Isabel_. It must be very hard to get an opening in that profession. So
many of my friends have aspired to it, and yet I never knew any one who
actually did it.

_Warland_. If I could only get the secretaryship. How that kind of life
would suit you! It’s as much for you that I want it--

_Isabel_. And almost as much for the butcher. Don’t belittle the circle
of your benevolence. (_She walks across the room_.) Three o’clock
already--and Marian asked me to give orders about the carriages. Let me
see--Mr. Oberville is the first arrival; if you’ll ring I will send word
to the stable. I suppose you’ll stay now?

_Warland_. Stay?

_Isabel_. Not go to Washington. I thought you spoke as if he could help
you.

_Warland_. He could settle the whole thing in five minutes. The
President can’t refuse him anything. But he doesn’t know me; he may
have a candidate of his own. It’s a pity you haven’t seen him for so
long--and yet I don’t know; perhaps it’s just as well. The others don’t
arrive till seven? It seems as if--How long is he going to be here? Till
to-morrow night, I suppose? I wonder what he’s come for. The Merringtons
will bore him to death, and Adelaide, of course, will be philandering
with Lender. I wonder (_a pause_) if Darley likes boating. (_Rings the
bell_.)

_Isabel_. Boating?

_Warland_. Oh, I was only thinking--Where are the matches? One may smoke
here, I suppose? _(He looks at his wife.)_ If I were you I’d put on that
black gown of yours to-night--the one with the spangles.--It’s only that
Fred Langham asked me to go over to Narragansett in his launch to-morrow
morning, and I was thinking that I might take Darley; I always liked
Darley.

_Isabel (to the footman who enters)_. Mrs. Raynor wishes the dog-cart
sent to the station at five o’clock to meet Mr. Oberville.

_Footman_. Very good, m’m. Shall I serve tea at the usual time, m’m?

_Isabel_. Yes. That is, when Mr. Oberville arrives.

_Footman (going out)_. Very good, m’m.

_Warland (to Isabel, who is moving toward the door)_. Where are you
going?

_Isabel_. To my room now--for a walk later.

_Warland_. Later? It’s past three already.

_Isabel_. I’ve no engagement this afternoon.

_Warland_. Oh, I didn’t know. (_As she reaches the door_.) You’ll be
back, I suppose?

_Isabel_. I have no intention of eloping.

_Warland_. For tea, I mean?

_Isabel_. I never take tea. (_Warland shrugs his shoulders_.)


II

_The same drawing-room. _Isabel_ enters from the lawn in hat and gloves.
The tea-table is set out, and the footman just lighting the lamp under
the kettle_.

_Isabel_. You may take the tea-things away. I never take tea.

_Footman_. Very good, m’m. (_He hesitates_.) I understood, m’m, that Mr.
Oberville was to have tea?

_Isabel_. Mr. Oberville? But he was to arrive long ago! What time is it?

_Footman_. Only a quarter past five, m’m.

_Isabel_. A quarter past five? (_She goes up to the clock_.) Surely
you’re mistaken? I thought it was long after six. (_To herself_.) I
walked and walked--I must have walked too fast ... (_To the Footman_.)
I’m going out again. When Mr. Oberville arrives please give him his tea
without waiting for me. I shall not be back till dinner-time.

_Footman_. Very good, m’m. Here are some letters, m’m.

_Isabel (glancing at them with a movement of disgust)_. You may send
them up to my room.

_Footman_. I beg pardon, m’m, but one is a note from Mme. Fanfreluche,
and the man who brought it is waiting for an answer.

_Isabel_. Didn’t you tell him I was out?

_Footman_. Yes, m’m. But he said he had orders to wait till you came in.

_Isabel_. Ah--let me see. (_She opens the note_.) Ah, yes. (_A pause_.)
Please say that I am on my way now to Mme Fanfreluche’s to give her the
answer in person. You may tell the man that I have already started. Do
you understand? Already started.

_Footman_. Yes, m’m.

_Isabel_. And--wait. (_With an effort_.) You may tell me when the man
has started. I shall wait here till then. Be sure you let me know.

_Footman_. Yes, m’m. (_He goes out_.)

_Isabel (sinking into a chair and hiding her face)_. Ah! (_After a
moment she rises, taking up her gloves and sunshade, and walks toward
the window which opens on the lawn_.) I’m so tired. (_She hesitates and
turns back into the room_.) Where can I go to? (_She sits down again by
the tea-table, and bends over the kettle. The clock strikes half-past
five_.)

_Isabel (picking up her sunshade, walks back to the window)_. If I
_must_ meet one of them...

_Oberville (speaking in the hall)_. Thanks. I’ll take tea first. (_He
enters the room, and pauses doubtfully on seeing Isabel_.)

_Isabel (stepping towards him with a smile)_. It’s not that I’ve
changed, of course, but only that I happened to have my back to the
light. Isn’t that what you are going to say?

_Oberville_. Mrs. Warland!

_Isabel_. So you really _have_ become a great man! They always remember
people’s names.

_Oberville_. Were you afraid I was going to call you Isabel?

_Isabel_. Bravo! _Crescendo!_

_Oberville_. But you have changed, all the same.

_Isabel_. You must indeed have reached a dizzy eminence, since you can
indulge yourself by speaking the truth!

_Oberville_. It’s your voice. I knew it at once, and yet it’s different.

_Isabel_. I hope it can still convey the pleasure I feel in seeing
an old friend. (_She holds out her hand. He takes it_.) You know, I
suppose, that Mrs. Raynor is not here to receive you? She was called
away this morning very suddenly by her aunt’s illness.

_Oberville_. Yes. She left a note for me. (_Absently_.) I’m sorry to
hear of Mrs. Griscom’s illness.

_Isabel_. Oh, Mrs. Griscom’s illnesses are less alarming than her
recoveries. But I am forgetting to offer you any tea. (_She hands him a
cup_.) I remember you liked it very strong.

_Oberville_. What else do you remember?

_Isabel_. A number of equally useless things. My mind is a store-room of
obsolete information.

_Oberville_. Why obsolete, since I am providing you with a use for it?

_Isabel_. At any rate, it’s open to question whether it was worth
storing for that length of time. Especially as there must have been
others more fitted--by opportunity--to undertake the duty.

_Oberville_. The duty?

_Isabel_. Of remembering how you like your tea.

_Oberville (with a change of tone)_. Since you call it a duty--I may
remind you that it’s one I have never asked any one else to perform.

_Isabel_. As a duty! But as a pleasure?

_Oberville_. Do you really want to know?

_Isabel_. Oh, I don’t require and charge you.

_Oberville_. You dislike as much as ever having the _i_‘s dotted?

_Isabel_. With a handwriting I know as well as yours!

_Oberville (recovering his lightness of manner)_. Accomplished woman!
(_He examines her approvingly_.) I’d no idea that you were here. I never
was more surprised.

_Isabel_. I hope you like being surprised. To my mind it’s an overrated
pleasure.

_Oberville_. Is it? I’m sorry to hear that.

_Isabel_. Why? Have you a surprise to dispose of?

_Oberville_. I’m not sure that I haven’t.

_Isabel_. Don’t part with it too hastily. It may improve by being kept.

_Oberville (tentatively)_. Does that mean that you don’t want it?

_Isabel_. Heaven forbid! I want everything I can get.

_Oberville_. And you get everything you want. At least you used to.

_Isabel_. Let us talk of your surprise.

_Oberville_. It’s to be yours, you know. (_A pause. He speaks gravely_.)
I find that I’ve never got over having lost you.

_Isabel (also gravely)_. And is that a surprise--to you too?

_Oberville_. Honestly--yes. I thought I’d crammed my life full. I didn’t
know there was a cranny left anywhere. At first, you know, I stuffed in
everything I could lay my hands on--there was such a big void to fill.
And after all I haven’t filled it. I felt that the moment I saw you. (_A
pause_.) I’m talking stupidly.

_Isabel_. It would be odious if you were eloquent.

_Oberville_. What do you mean?

_Isabel_. That’s a question you never used to ask me.

_Oberville_. Be merciful. Remember how little practise I’ve had lately.

_Isabel_. In what?

_Oberville_. Never mind! (_He rises and walks away; then comes back and
stands in front of her_.) What a fool I was to give you up!

_Isabel_. Oh, don’t say that! I’ve lived on it!

_Oberville_. On my letting you go?

_Isabel_. On your letting everything go--but the right.

_Oberville_. Oh, hang the right! What is truth? We had the right to be
happy!

_Isabel (with rising emotion)_. I used to think so sometimes.

_Oberville_. Did you? Triple fool that I was!

_Isabel_. But you showed me--

_Oberville_. Why, good God, we belonged to each other--and I let you go!
It’s fabulous. I’ve fought for things since that weren’t worth a crooked
sixpence; fought as well as other men. And you--you--I lost you because
I couldn’t face a scene! Hang it, suppose there’d been a dozen
scenes--I might have survived them. Men have been known to. They’re not
necessarily fatal.

_Isabel_. A scene?

_Oberville_. It’s a form of fear that women don’t understand. How you
must have despised me!

_Isabel_. You were--afraid--of a scene?

_Oberville_. I was a damned coward, Isabel. That’s about the size of it.

_Isabel_. Ah--I had thought it so much larger!

_Oberville_. What did you say?

_Isabel_. I said that you have forgotten to drink your tea. It must be
quite cold.

_Oberville_. Ah--

_Isabel_. Let me give you another cup.

_Oberville (collecting himself)_. No--no. This is perfect.

_Isabel_. You haven’t tasted it.

_Oberville (falling into her mood) _. You always made it to perfection.
Only you never gave me enough sugar.

_Isabel_. I know better now. (_She puts another lump in his cup_.)

_Oberville (drinks his tea, and then says, with an air of reproach)_.
Isn’t all this chaff rather a waste of time between two old friends who
haven’t met for so many years?

_Isabel (lightly)_. Oh, it’s only a _hors d’oeuvre_--the tuning of the
instruments. I’m out of practise too.

_Oberville_. Let us come to the grand air, then. (_Sits down near her_.)
Tell me about yourself. What are you doing?

_Isabel_. At this moment? You’ll never guess. I’m trying to remember
you.

_Oberville_. To remember me?

_Isabel_. Until you came into the room just now my recollection of you
was so vivid; you were a living whole in my thoughts. Now I am engaged
in gathering up the fragments--in laboriously reconstructing you....

_Oberville_. I have changed so much, then?

_Isabel_. No, I don’t believe that you’ve changed. It’s only that I
see you differently. Don’t you know how hard it is to convince elderly
people that the type of the evening paper is no smaller than when they
were young?

_Oberville_. I’ve shrunk then?

_Isabel_. You couldn’t have grown bigger. Oh, I’m serious now; you
needn’t prepare a smile. For years you were the tallest object on my
horizon. I used to climb to the thought of you, as people who live in
a flat country mount the church steeple for a view. It’s wonderful how
much I used to see from there! And the air was so strong and pure!

_Oberville_. And now?

_Isabel_. Now I can fancy how delightful it must be to sit next to you
at dinner.

_Oberville_. You’re unmerciful. Have I said anything to offend you?

_Isabel_. Of course not. How absurd!

_Oberville_. I lost my head a little--I forgot how long it is since we
have met. When I saw you I forgot everything except what you had once
been to me. (_She is silent_.) I thought you too generous to resent
that. Perhaps I have overtaxed your generosity. (_A pause_.) Shall I
confess it? When I first saw you I thought for a moment that you
had remembered--as I had. You see I can only excuse myself by saying
something inexcusable.

_Isabel (deliberately)_. Not inexcusable.

_Oberville_. Not--?

_Isabel_. I had remembered.

_Oberville_. Isabel!

_Isabel_. But now--

_Oberville_. Ah, give me a moment before you unsay it!

_Isabel_. I don’t mean to unsay it. There’s no use in repealing an
obsolete law. That’s the pity of it! You say you lost me ten years ago.
(_A pause_.) I never lost you till now.

_Oberville_. Now?

_Isabel_. Only this morning you were my supreme court of justice; there
was no appeal from your verdict. Not an hour ago you decided a case
for me--against myself! And now--. And the worst of it is that it’s not
because you’ve changed. How do I know if you’ve changed? You haven’t
said a hundred words to me. You haven’t been an hour in the room. And
the years must have enriched you--I daresay you’ve doubled your capital.
You’ve been in the thick of life, and the metal you’re made of brightens
with use. Success on some men looks like a borrowed coat; it sits on you
as though it had been made to order. I see all this; I know it; but
I don’t _feel_ it. I don’t feel anything... anywhere... I’m numb. (_A
pause_.) Don’t laugh, but I really don’t think I should know now if you
came into the room--unless I actually saw you. (_They are both silent_.)

_Oberville (at length)_. Then, to put the most merciful interpretation
upon your epigrams, your feeling for me was made out of poorer stuff
than mine for you.

_Isabel_. Perhaps it has had harder wear.

_Oberville_. Or been less cared for?

_Isabel_. If one has only one cloak one must wear it in all weathers.

_Oberville_. Unless it is so beautiful and precious that one prefers to
go cold and keep it under lock and key.

_Isabel_. In the cedar-chest of indifference--the key of which is
usually lost.

_Oberville_. Ah, Isabel, you’re too pat! How much I preferred your
hesitations.

_Isabel_. My hesitations? That reminds me how much your coming has
simplified things. I feel as if I’d had an auction sale of fallacies.

_Oberville_. You speak in enigmas, and I have a notion that your riddles
are the reverse of the sphinx’s--more dangerous to guess than to give
up. And yet I used to find your thoughts such good reading.

_Isabel_. One cares so little for the style in which one’s praises are
written.

_Oberville_. You’ve been praising me for the last ten minutes and I find
your style detestable. I would rather have you find fault with me like a
friend than approve me like a _dilettante_.

_Isabel_. A _dilettante_! The very word I wanted!

_Oberville_. I am proud to have enriched so full a vocabulary. But I am
still waiting for the word _I_ want. (_He grows serious_.) Isabel, look
in your heart--give me the first word you find there. You’ve no idea how
much a beggar can buy with a penny!

_Isabel_. It’s empty, my poor friend, it’s empty.

_Oberville_. Beggars never say that to each other.

_Isabel_. No; never, unless it’s true.

_Oberville (after another silence)_. Why do you look at me so curiously?

_Isabel_. I’m--what was it you said? Approving you as a _dilettante_.
Don’t be alarmed; you can bear examination; I don’t see a crack
anywhere. After all, it’s a satisfaction to find that one’s idol makes a
handsome _bibelot_.

_Oberville (with an attempt at lightness)_. I was right then--you’re a
collector?

_Isabel (modestly)_. One must make a beginning. I think I shall begin
with you. (_She smiles at him_.) Positively, I must have you on my
mantel-shelf! (_She rises and looks at the clock_.) But it’s time to
dress for dinner. (_She holds out her hand to him and he kisses it. They
look at each other, and it is clear that he does not quite understand,
but is watching eagerly for his cue_.)

_Warland (coming in)_. Hullo, Isabel--you’re here after all?

_Isabel_. And so is Mr. Oberville. (_She looks straight at Warland_.) I
stayed in on purpose to meet him. My husband--(_The two men bow_.)

_Warland (effusively)_. So glad to meet you. My wife talks of you so
often. She’s been looking forward tremendously to your visit.

_Oberville_. It’s a long time since I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Mrs.
Warland.

_Isabel_. But now we are going to make up for lost time. (_As he goes to
the door_.) I claim you to-morrow for the whole day.

_Oberville bows and goes out_.

_Isabel_. Lucius... I think you’d better go to Washington, after all.
(_Musing_.) Narragansett might do for the others, though.... Couldn’t
you get Fred Langham to ask all the rest of the party to go over there
with him to-morrow morning? I shall have a headache and stay at home.
(_He looks at her doubtfully_.) Mr. Oberville is a bad sailor.

_Warland advances demonstratively_.

_Isabel (drawing back)_. It’s time to go and dress. I think you said the
black gown with spangles?




A CUP OF COLD WATER


It was three o’clock in the morning, and the cotillion was at its
height, when Woburn left the over-heated splendor of the Gildermere
ballroom, and after a delay caused by the determination of the drowsy
footman to give him a ready-made overcoat with an imitation astrachan
collar in place of his own unimpeachable Poole garment, found himself
breasting the icy solitude of the Fifth Avenue. He was still smiling,
as he emerged from the awning, at his insistence in claiming his own
overcoat: it illustrated, humorously enough, the invincible force of
habit. As he faced the wind, however, he discerned a providence in his
persistency, for his coat was fur-lined, and he had a cold voyage before
him on the morrow.

It had rained hard during the earlier part of the night, and the
carriages waiting in triple line before the Gildermeres’ door were still
domed by shining umbrellas, while the electric lamps extending down the
avenue blinked Narcissus-like at their watery images in the hollows
of the sidewalk. A dry blast had come out of the north, with pledge of
frost before daylight, and to Woburn’s shivering fancy the pools in
the pavement seemed already stiffening into ice. He turned up his
coat-collar and stepped out rapidly, his hands deep in his coat-pockets.

As he walked he glanced curiously up at the ladder-like door-steps which
may well suggest to the future archaeologist that all the streets of New
York were once canals; at the spectral tracery of the trees about St.
Luke’s, the fretted mass of the Cathedral, and the mean vista of the
long side-streets. The knowledge that he was perhaps looking at it all
for the last time caused every detail to start out like a challenge
to memory, and lit the brown-stone house-fronts with the glamor of
sword-barred Edens.

It was an odd impulse that had led him that night to the Gildermere
ball; but the same change in his condition which made him stare
wonderingly at the houses in the Fifth Avenue gave the thrill of an
exploit to the tame business of ball-going. Who would have imagined,
Woburn mused, that such a situation as his would possess the priceless
quality of sharpening the blunt edge of habit?

It was certainly curious to reflect, as he leaned against the doorway
of Mrs. Gildermere’s ball-room, enveloped in the warm atmosphere of the
accustomed, that twenty-four hours later the people brushing by him with
looks of friendly recognition would start at the thought of having seen
him and slur over the recollection of having taken his hand!

And the girl he had gone there to see: what would she think of him? He
knew well enough that her trenchant classifications of life admitted no
overlapping of good and evil, made no allowance for that incalculable
interplay of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of
compassion. Miss Talcott was too young to distinguish the intermediate
tints of the moral spectrum; and her judgments were further simplified
by a peculiar concreteness of mind. Her bringing-up had fostered this
tendency and she was surrounded by people who focussed life in the same
way. To the girls in Miss Talcott’s set, the attentions of a clever man
who had to work for his living had the zest of a forbidden pleasure; but
to marry such a man would be as unpardonable as to have one’s carriage
seen at the door of a cheap dress-maker. Poverty might make a man
fascinating; but a settled income was the best evidence of stability
of character. If there were anything in heredity, how could a nice
girl trust a man whose parents had been careless enough to leave him
unprovided for?

Neither Miss Talcott nor any of her friends could be charged with
formulating these views; but they were implicit in the slope of every
white shoulder and in the ripple of every yard of imported tulle
dappling the foreground of Mrs. Gildermere’s ball-room. The advantages
of line and colour in veiling the crudities of a creed are obvious to
emotional minds; and besides, Woburn was conscious that it was to the
cheerful materialism of their parents that the young girls he admired
owed that fine distinction of outline in which their skilfully-rippled
hair and skilfully-hung draperies coöperated with the slimness and
erectness that came of participating in the most expensive sports,
eating the most expensive food and breathing the most expensive air.
Since the process which had produced them was so costly, how could they
help being costly themselves? Woburn was too logical to expect to give
no more for a piece of old Sèvres than for a bit of kitchen crockery;
he had no faith in wonderful bargains, and believed that one got in
life just what one was willing to pay for. He had no mind to dispute the
taste of those who preferred the rustic simplicity of the earthen crock;
but his own fancy inclined to the piece of _pâte tendre_ which must be
kept in a glass case and handled as delicately as a flower.

It was not merely by the external grace of these drawing-room ornaments
that Woburn’s sensibilities were charmed. His imagination was touched
by the curious exoticism of view resulting from such conditions; He had
always enjoyed listening to Miss Talcott even more than looking at her.
Her ideas had the brilliant bloom and audacious irrelevance of those
tropical orchids which strike root in air. Miss Talcott’s opinions had
no connection with the actual; her very materialism had the grace of
artificiality. Woburn had been enchanted once by seeing her helpless
before a smoking lamp: she had been obliged to ring for a servant
because she did not know how to put it out.

Her supreme charm was the simplicity that comes of taking it for
granted that people are born with carriages and country-places: it never
occurred to her that such congenital attributes could be matter for
self-consciousness, and she had none of the _nouveau riche_ prudery
which classes poverty with the nude in art and is not sure how to behave
in the presence of either.

The conditions of Woburn’s own life had made him peculiarly susceptible
to those forms of elegance which are the flower of ease. His father
had lost a comfortable property through sheer inability to go over his
agent’s accounts; and this disaster, coming at the outset of Woburn’s
school-days, had given a new bent to the family temperament. The father
characteristically died when the effort of living might have made it
possible to retrieve his fortunes; and Woburn’s mother and sister,
embittered by this final evasion, settled down to a vindictive war with
circumstances. They were the kind of women who think that it lightens
the burden of life to throw over the amenities, as a reduced housekeeper
puts away her knick-knacks to make the dusting easier. They fought mean
conditions meanly; but Woburn, in his resentment of their attitude, did
not allow for the suffering which had brought it about: his own tendency
was to overcome difficulties by conciliation rather than by conflict.
Such surroundings threw into vivid relief the charming figure of Miss
Talcott. Woburn instinctively associated poverty with bad food, ugly
furniture, complaints and recriminations: it was natural that he should
be drawn toward the luminous atmosphere where life was a series of
peaceful and good-humored acts, unimpeded by petty obstacles. To spend
one’s time in such society gave one the illusion of unlimited credit;
and also, unhappily, created the need for it.

It was here in fact that Woburn’s difficulties began. To marry Miss
Talcott it was necessary to be a rich man: even to dine out in her set
involved certain minor extravagances. Woburn had determined to marry
her sooner or later; and in the meanwhile to be with her as much as
possible.

As he stood leaning in the doorway of the Gildermere ball-room, watching
her pass him in the waltz, he tried to remember how it had begun. First
there had been the tailor’s bill; the fur-lined overcoat with cuffs
and collar of Alaska sable had alone cost more than he had spent on
his clothes for two or three years previously. Then there were
theatre-tickets; cab-fares; florist’s bills; tips to servants at the
country-houses where he went because he knew that she was invited; the
_Omar Khayyám_ bound by Sullivan that he sent her at Christmas; the
contributions to her pet charities; the reckless purchases at fairs
where she had a stall. His whole way of life had imperceptibly changed
and his year’s salary was gone before the second quarter was due.

He had invested the few thousand dollars which had been his portion of
his father’s shrunken estate: when his debts began to pile up, he took
a flyer in stocks and after a few months of varying luck his little
patrimony disappeared. Meanwhile his courtship was proceeding at an
inverse ratio to his financial ventures. Miss Talcott was growing tender
and he began to feel that the game was in his hands. The nearness of the
goal exasperated him. She was not the girl to wait and he knew that it
must be now or never. A friend lent him five thousand dollars on his
personal note and he bought railway stocks on margin. They went up and
he held them for a higher rise: they fluctuated, dragged, dropped
below the level at which he had bought, and slowly continued their
uninterrupted descent. His broker called for more margin; he could not
respond and was sold out.

What followed came about quite naturally. For several years he had been
cashier in a well-known banking-house. When the note he had given his
friend became due it was obviously necessary to pay it and he used
the firm’s money for the purpose. To repay the money thus taken, he
increased his debt to his employers and bought more stocks; and on these
operations he made a profit of ten thousand dollars. Miss Talcott rode
in the Park, and he bought a smart hack for seven hundred, paid off his
tradesmen, and went on speculating with the remainder of his profits. He
made a little more, but failed to take advantage of the market and lost
all that he had staked, including the amount taken from the firm. He
increased his over-draft by another ten thousand and lost that; he
over-drew a farther sum and lost again. Suddenly he woke to the fact
that he owed his employers fifty thousand dollars and that the partners
were to make their semi-annual inspection in two days. He realized then
that within forty-eight hours what he had called borrowing would become
theft.

There was no time to be lost: he must clear out and start life over
again somewhere else. The day that he reached this decision he was to
have met Miss Talcott at dinner. He went to the dinner, but she did not
appear: she had a headache, his hostess explained. Well, he was not to
have a last look at her, after all; better so, perhaps. He took leave
early and on his way home stopped at a florist’s and sent her a bunch of
violets. The next morning he got a little note from her: the violets had
done her head so much good--she would tell him all about it that evening
at the Gildermere ball. Woburn laughed and tossed the note into the
fire. That evening he would be on board ship: the examination of the
books was to take place the following morning at ten.

Woburn went down to the bank as usual; he did not want to do anything
that might excite suspicion as to his plans, and from one or two
questions which one of the partners had lately put to him he divined
that he was being observed. At the bank the day passed uneventfully. He
discharged his business with his accustomed care and went uptown at the
usual hour.

In the first flush of his successful speculations he had set up bachelor
lodgings, moved by the temptation to get away from the dismal atmosphere
of home, from his mother’s struggles with the cook and his sister’s
curiosity about his letters. He had been influenced also by the wish for
surroundings more adapted to his tastes. He wanted to be able to give
little teas, to which Miss Talcott might come with a married friend. She
came once or twice and pronounced it all delightful: she thought it _so_
nice to have only a few Whistler etchings on the walls and the simplest
crushed levant for all one’s books.

To these rooms Woburn returned on leaving the bank. His plans had taken
definite shape. He had engaged passage on a steamer sailing for Halifax
early the next morning; and there was nothing for him to do before going
on board but to pack his clothes and tear up a few letters. He threw his
clothes into a couple of portmanteaux, and when these had been called
for by an expressman he emptied his pockets and counted up his ready
money. He found that he possessed just fifty dollars and seventy-five
cents; but his passage to Halifax was paid, and once there he could
pawn his watch and rings. This calculation completed, he unlocked his
writing-table drawer and took out a handful of letters. They were notes
from Miss Talcott. He read them over and threw them into the fire.
On his table stood her photograph. He slipped it out of its frame and
tossed it on top of the blazing letters. Having performed this rite,
he got into his dress-clothes and went to a small French restaurant to
dine.

He had meant to go on board the steamer immediately after dinner; but a
sudden vision of introspective hours in a silent cabin made him call for
the evening paper and run his eye over the list of theatres. It would be
as easy to go on board at midnight as now.

He selected a new vaudeville and listened to it with surprising
freshness of interest; but toward eleven o’clock he again began to
dread the approaching necessity of going down to the steamer. There was
something peculiarly unnerving in the idea of spending the rest of the
night in a stifling cabin jammed against the side of a wharf.

He left the theatre and strolled across to the Fifth Avenue. It was now
nearly midnight and a stream of carriages poured up town from the
opera and the theatres. As he stood on the corner watching the familiar
spectacle it occurred to him that many of the people driving by him in
smart broughams and C-spring landaus were on their way to the Gildermere
ball. He remembered Miss Talcott’s note of the morning and wondered if
she were in one of the passing carriages; she had spoken so confidently
of meeting him at the ball. What if he should go and take a last look
at her? There was really nothing to prevent it. He was not likely to run
across any member of the firm: in Miss Talcott’s set his social standing
was good for another ten hours at least. He smiled in anticipation of
her surprise at seeing him, and then reflected with a start that she
would not be surprised at all.

His meditations were cut short by a fall of sleety rain, and hailing a
hansom he gave the driver Mrs. Gildermere’s address.

As he drove up the avenue he looked about him like a traveller in a
strange city. The buildings which had been so unobtrusively familiar
stood out with sudden distinctness: he noticed a hundred details which
had escaped his observation. The people on the sidewalks looked like
strangers: he wondered where they were going and tried to picture
the lives they led; but his own relation to life had been so suddenly
reversed that he found it impossible to recover his mental perspective.

At one corner he saw a shabby man lurking in the shadow of the side
street; as the hansom passed, a policeman ordered him to move on.
Farther on, Woburn noticed a woman crouching on the door-step of a
handsome house. She had drawn a shawl over her head and was sunk in the
apathy of despair or drink. A well-dressed couple paused to look at her.
The electric globe at the corner lit up their faces, and Woburn saw the
lady, who was young and pretty, turn away with a little grimace, drawing
her companion after her.

The desire to see Miss Talcott had driven Woburn to the Gildermeres’;
but once in the ball-room he made no effort to find her. The people
about him seemed more like strangers than those he had passed in the
street. He stood in the doorway, studying the petty manoeuvres of the
women and the resigned amenities of their partners. Was it possible
that these were his friends? These mincing women, all paint and dye and
whalebone, these apathetic men who looked as much alike as the figures
that children cut out of a folded sheet of paper? Was it to live among
such puppets that he had sold his soul? What had any of these people
done that was noble, exceptional, distinguished? Who knew them by name
even, except their tradesmen and the society reporters? Who were they,
that they should sit in judgment on him?

The bald man with the globular stomach, who stood at Mrs. Gildermere’s
elbow surveying the dancers, was old Boylston, who had made his pile in
wrecking railroads; the smooth chap with glazed eyes, at whom a pretty
girl smiled up so confidingly, was Collerton, the political lawyer, who
had been mixed up to his own advantage in an ugly lobbying transaction;
near him stood Brice Lyndham, whose recent failure had ruined his
friends and associates, but had not visibly affected the welfare of his
large and expensive family. The slim fellow dancing with Miss Gildermere
was Alec Vance, who lived on a salary of five thousand a year, but whose
wife was such a good manager that they kept a brougham and victoria and
always put in their season at Newport and their spring trip to Europe.
The little ferret-faced youth in the corner was Regie Colby, who wrote
the _Entre-Nous_ paragraphs in the _Social Searchlight_: the women were
charming to him and he got all the financial tips he wanted from their
husbands and fathers.

And the women? Well, the women knew all about the men, and flattered
them and married them and tried to catch them for their daughters. It
was a domino-party at which the guests were forbidden to unmask, though
they all saw through each other’s disguises.

And these were the people who, within twenty-four hours, would be
agreeing that they had always felt there was something wrong about
Woburn! They would be extremely sorry for him, of course, poor devil;
but there are certain standards, after all--what would society be
without standards? His new friends, his future associates, were the
suspicious-looking man whom the policeman had ordered to move on, and
the drunken woman asleep on the door-step. To these he was linked by the
freemasonry of failure.

Miss Talcott passed him on Collerton’s arm; she was giving him one of
the smiles of which Woburn had fancied himself sole owner. Collerton was
a sharp fellow; he must have made a lot in that last deal; probably she
would marry him. How much did she know about the transaction? She was
a shrewd girl and her father was in Wall Street. If Woburn’s luck had
turned the other way she might have married him instead; and if he had
confessed his sin to her one evening, as they drove home from the opera
in their new brougham, she would have said that really it was of no use
to tell her, for she never _could_ understand about business, but that
she did entreat him in future to be nicer to Regie Colby. Even now, if
he made a big strike somewhere, and came back in ten years with a beard
and a steam yacht, they would all deny that anything had been proved
against him, and Mrs. Collerton might blush and remind him of their
friendship. Well--why not? Was not all morality based on a convention?
What was the stanchest code of ethics but a trunk with a series of false
bottoms? Now and then one had the illusion of getting down to
absolute right or wrong, but it was only a false bottom--a removable
hypothesis--with another false bottom underneath. There was no getting
beyond the relative.

The cotillion had begun. Miss Talcott sat nearly opposite him: she was
dancing with young Boylston and giving him a Woburn-Collerton smile. So
young Boylston was in the syndicate too!

Presently Woburn was aware that she had forgotten young Boylston and
was glancing absently about the room. She was looking for some one, and
meant the some one to know it: he knew that _Lost-Chord_ look in her
eyes.

A new figure was being formed. The partners circled about the room and
Miss Talcott’s flying tulle drifted close to him as she passed. Then
the favors were distributed; white skirts wavered across the floor like
thistle-down on summer air; men rose from their seats and fresh couples
filled the shining _parquet_.

Miss Talcott, after taking from the basket a Legion of Honor in red
enamel, surveyed the room for a moment; then she made her way through
the dancers and held out the favor to Woburn. He fastened it in his
coat, and emerging from the crowd of men about the doorway, slipped his
arm about her. Their eyes met; hers were serious and a little sad. How
fine and slender she was! He noticed the little tendrils of hair about
the pink convolution of her ear. Her waist was firm and yet elastic;
she breathed calmly and regularly, as though dancing were her natural
motion. She did not look at him again and neither of them spoke.

When the music ceased they paused near her chair. Her partner was
waiting for her and Woburn left her with a bow.

He made his way down-stairs and out of the house. He was glad that he
had not spoken to Miss Talcott. There had been a healing power in their
silence. All bitterness had gone from him and he thought of her now
quite simply, as the girl he loved.

At Thirty-fifth Street he reflected that he had better jump into a car
and go down to his steamer. Again there rose before him the repulsive
vision of the dark cabin, with creaking noises overhead, and the cold
wash of water against the pier: he thought he would stop in a café and
take a drink. He turned into Broadway and entered a brightly-lit café;
but when he had taken his whisky and soda there seemed no reason
for lingering. He had never been the kind of man who could escape
difficulties in that way. Yet he was conscious that his will was
weakening; that he did not mean to go down to the steamer just yet. What
did he mean to do? He began to feel horribly tired and it occurred to
him that a few hours’ sleep in a decent bed would make a new man of him.
Why not go on board the next morning at daylight?

He could not go back to his rooms, for on leaving the house he had taken
the precaution of dropping his latch-key into his letter-box; but he was
in a neighborhood of discreet hotels and he wandered on till he came to
one which was known to offer a dispassionate hospitality to luggageless
travellers in dress-clothes.


II

He pushed open the swinging door and found himself in a long corridor
with a tessellated floor, at the end of which, in a brightly-lit
enclosure of plate-glass and mahogany, the night-clerk dozed over a
copy of the _Police Gazette_. The air in the corridor was rich in
reminiscences of yesterday’s dinners, and a bronzed radiator poured a
wave of dry heat into Woburn’s face.

The night-clerk, roused by the swinging of the door, sat watching
Woburn’s approach with the unexpectant eye of one who has full
confidence in his capacity for digesting surprises. Not that there
was anything surprising in Woburn’s appearance; but the night-clerk’s
callers were given to such imaginative flights in explaining their
luggageless arrival in the small hours of the morning, that he fared
habitually on fictions which would have staggered a less experienced
stomach. The night-clerk, whose unwrinkled bloom showed that he throve
on this high-seasoned diet, had a fancy for classifying his applicants
before they could frame their explanations.

“This one’s been locked out,” he said to himself as he mustered Woburn.

Having exercised his powers of divination with his accustomed accuracy
he listened without stirring an eye-lid to Woburn’s statement; merely
replying, when the latter asked the price of a room, “Two-fifty.”

“Very well,” said Woburn, pushing the money under the brass lattice,
“I’ll go up at once; and I want to be called at seven.”

To this the night-clerk proffered no reply, but stretching out his hand
to press an electric button, returned apathetically to the perusal of
the _Police Gazette_. His summons was answered by the appearance of a
man in shirt-sleeves, whose rumpled head indicated that he had recently
risen from some kind of makeshift repose; to him the night-clerk tossed
a key, with the brief comment, “Ninety-seven;” and the man, after a
sleepy glance at Woburn, turned on his heel and lounged toward the
staircase at the back of the corridor.

Woburn followed and they climbed three flights in silence. At each
landing Woburn glanced down, the long passage-way lit by a lowered
gas-jet, with a double line of boots before the doors, waiting, like
yesterday’s deeds, to carry their owners so many miles farther on the
morrow’s destined road. On the third landing the man paused, and after
examining the number on the key, turned to the left, and slouching past
three or four doors, finally unlocked one and preceded Woburn into a
room lit only by the upward gleam of the electric globes in the street
below.

The man felt in his pockets; then he turned to Woburn. “Got a match?” he
asked.

Woburn politely offered him one, and he applied it to the gas-fixture
which extended its jointed arm above an ash dressing-table with a
blurred mirror fixed between two standards. Having performed this office
with an air of detachment designed to make Woburn recognize it as an
act of supererogation, he turned without a word and vanished down the
passage-way.

Woburn, after an indifferent glance about the room, which seemed to
afford the amount of luxury generally obtainable for two dollars and a
half in a fashionable quarter of New York, locked the door and sat down
at the ink-stained writing-table in the window. Far below him lay the
pallidly-lit depths of the forsaken thoroughfare. Now and then he heard
the jingle of a horsecar and the ring of hoofs on the freezing pavement,
or saw the lonely figure of a policeman eclipsing the illumination of
the plate-glass windows on the opposite side of the street. He sat thus
for a long time, his elbows on the table, his chin between his hands,
till at length the contemplation of the abandoned sidewalks, above which
the electric globes kept Stylites-like vigil, became intolerable to him,
and he drew down the window-shade, and lit the gas-fixture beside the
dressing-table. Then he took a cigar from his case, and held it to the
flame.

The passage from the stinging freshness of the night to the stale
overheated atmosphere of the Haslemere Hotel had checked the
preternaturally rapid working of his mind, and he was now scarcely
conscious of thinking at all. His head was heavy, and he would have
thrown himself on the bed had he not feared to oversleep the hour fixed
for his departure. He thought it safest, instead, to seat himself once
more by the table, in the most uncomfortable chair that he could find,
and smoke one cigar after another till the first sign of dawn should
give an excuse for action.

He had laid his watch on the table before him, and was gazing at the
hour-hand, and trying to convince himself by so doing that he was still
wide awake, when a noise in the adjoining room suddenly straightened him
in his chair and banished all fear of sleep.

There was no mistaking the nature of the noise; it was that of a woman’s
sobs. The sobs were not loud, but the sound reached him distinctly
through the frail door between the two rooms; it expressed an utter
abandonment to grief; not the cloud-burst of some passing emotion, but
the slow down-pour of a whole heaven of sorrow.

Woburn sat listening. There was nothing else to be done; and at least
his listening was a mute tribute to the trouble he was powerless to
relieve. It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own grief: he was
touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great city
throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping
with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her
child to sleep: there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had
led him to such neighborhood.

Gradually the sobs subsided, with pauses betokening an effort at
self-control. At last they died off softly, like the intermittent drops
that end a day of rain.

“Poor soul,” Woburn mused, “she’s got the better of it for the time. I
wonder what it’s all about?”

At the same moment he heard another sound that made him jump to his
feet. It was a very low sound, but in that nocturnal silence which gives
distinctness to the faintest noises, Woburn knew at once that he had
heard the click of a pistol.

“What is she up to now?” he asked himself, with his eye on the door
between the two rooms; and the brightly-lit keyhole seemed to reply with
a glance of intelligence. He turned out the gas and crept to the door,
pressing his eye to the illuminated circle.

After a moment or two of adjustment, during which he seemed to himself
to be breathing like a steam-engine, he discerned a room like his own,
with the same dressing-table flanked by gas-fixtures, and the same table
in the window. This table was directly in his line of vision; and beside
it stood a woman with a small revolver in her hands. The lights
being behind her, Woburn could only infer her youth from her slender
silhouette and the nimbus of fair hair defining her head. Her dress
seemed dark and simple, and on a chair under one of the gas-jets lay a
jacket edged with cheap fur and a small travelling-bag. He could not see
the other end of the room, but something in her manner told him that she
was alone. At length she put the revolver down and took up a letter that
lay on the table. She drew the letter from its envelope and read it
over two or three times; then she put it back, sealing the envelope, and
placing it conspicuously against the mirror of the dressing-table.

There was so grave a significance in this dumb-show that Woburn felt
sure that her next act would be to return to the table and take up the
revolver; but he had not reckoned on the vanity of woman. After putting
the letter in place she still lingered at the mirror, standing a little
sideways, so that he could now see her face, which was distinctly
pretty, but of a small and unelastic mould, inadequate to the expression
of the larger emotions. For some moments she continued to study herself
with the expression of a child looking at a playmate who has been
scolded; then she turned to the table and lifted the revolver to her
forehead.

A sudden crash made her arm drop, and sent her darting backward to the
opposite side of the room. Woburn had broken down the door, and stood
torn and breathless in the breach.

“Oh!” she gasped, pressing closer to the wall.

“Don’t be frightened,” he said; “I saw what you were going to do and I
had to stop you.”

She looked at him for a moment in silence, and he saw the terrified
flutter of her breast; then she said, “No one can stop me for long. And
besides, what right have you--”

“Every one has the right to prevent a crime,” he returned, the sound of
the last word sending the blood to his forehead.

“I deny it,” she said passionately. “Every one who has tried to live and
failed has the right to die.”

“Failed in what?”

“In everything!” she replied. They stood looking at each other in
silence.

At length he advanced a few steps.

“You’ve no right to say you’ve failed,” he said, “while you have breath
to try again.” He drew the revolver from her hand.

“Try again--try again? I tell you I’ve tried seventy times seven!”

“What have you tried?”

She looked at him with a certain dignity.

“I don’t know,” she said, “that you’ve any right to question me--or to
be in this room at all--” and suddenly she burst into tears.

The discrepancy between her words and action struck the chord which, in
a man’s heart, always responds to the touch of feminine unreason. She
dropped into the nearest chair, hiding her face in her hands, while
Woburn watched the course of her weeping.

At last she lifted her head, looking up between drenched lashes.

“Please go away,” she said in childish entreaty.

“How can I?” he returned. “It’s impossible that I should leave you in
this state. Trust me--let me help you. Tell me what has gone wrong, and
let’s see if there’s no other way out of it.”

Woburn had a voice full of sensitive inflections, and it was now
trembling with profoundest pity. Its note seemed to reassure the girl,
for she said, with a beginning of confidence in her own tones, “But I
don’t even know who you are.”

Woburn was silent: the words startled him. He moved nearer to her and
went on in the same quieting tone.

“I am a man who has suffered enough to want to help others. I don’t want
to know any more about you than will enable me to do what I can for you.
I’ve probably seen more of life than you have, and if you’re willing to
tell me your troubles perhaps together we may find a way out of them.”

She dried her eyes and glanced at the revolver.

“That’s the only way out,” she said.

“How do you know? Are you sure you’ve tried every other?”

“Perfectly sure, I’ve written and written, and humbled myself like a
slave before him, and she won’t even let him answer my letters. Oh, but
you don’t understand”--she broke off with a renewal of weeping.

“I begin to understand--you’re sorry for something you’ve done?”

“Oh, I’ve never denied that--I’ve never denied that I was wicked.”

“And you want the forgiveness of some one you care about?”

“My husband,” she whispered.

“You’ve done something to displease your husband?”

“To displease him? I ran away with another man!” There was a dismal
exultation in her tone, as though she were paying Woburn off for having
underrated her offense.

She had certainly surprised him; at worst he had expected a quarrel over
a rival, with a possible complication of mother-in-law. He wondered
how such helpless little feet could have taken so bold a step; then he
remembered that there is no audacity like that of weakness.

He was wondering how to lead her to completer avowal when she added
forlornly, “You see there’s nothing else to do.”

Woburn took a turn in the room. It was certainly a narrower strait than
he had foreseen, and he hardly knew how to answer; but the first flow of
confession had eased her, and she went on without farther persuasion.

“I don’t know how I could ever have done it; I must have been downright
crazy. I didn’t care much for Joe when I married him--he wasn’t exactly
handsome, and girls think such a lot of that. But he just laid down and
worshipped me, and I _was_ getting fond of him in a way; only the life
was so dull. I’d been used to a big city--I come from Detroit--and
Hinksville is such a poky little place; that’s where we lived; Joe
is telegraph-operator on the railroad there. He’d have been in a much
bigger place now, if he hadn’t--well, after all, he behaved perfectly
splendidly about _that_.

“I really was getting fond of him, and I believe I should have realized
in time how good and noble and unselfish he was, if his mother hadn’t
been always sitting there and everlastingly telling me so. We learned in
school about the Athenians hating some man who was always called just,
and that’s the way I felt about Joe. Whenever I did anything that wasn’t
quite right his mother would say how differently Joe would have done it.
And she was forever telling me that Joe didn’t approve of this and that
and the other. When we were alone he approved of everything, but when
his mother was round he’d sit quiet and let her say he didn’t. I knew
he’d let me have my way afterwards, but somehow that didn’t prevent my
getting mad at the time.

“And then the evenings were so long, with Joe away, and Mrs. Glenn
(that’s his mother) sitting there like an image knitting socks for the
heathen. The only caller we ever had was the Baptist minister, and he
never took any more notice of me than if I’d been a piece of furniture.
I believe he was afraid to before Mrs. Glenn.”

She paused breathlessly, and the tears in her eyes were now of anger.

“Well?” said Woburn gently.

“Well--then Arthur Hackett came along; he was travelling for a big
publishing firm in Philadelphia. He was awfully handsome and as clever
and sarcastic as anything. He used to lend me lots of novels and
magazines, and tell me all about society life in New York. All the girls
were after him, and Alice Sprague, whose father is the richest man in
Hinksville, fell desperately in love with him and carried on like a
fool; but he wouldn’t take any notice of her. He never looked at anybody
but me.” Her face lit up with a reminiscent smile, and then clouded
again. “I hate him now,” she exclaimed, with a change of tone that
startled Woburn. “I’d like to kill him--but he’s killed me instead.

“Well, he bewitched me so I didn’t know what I was doing; I was like
somebody in a trance. When he wasn’t there I didn’t want to speak to
anybody; I used to lie in bed half the day just to get away from folks;
I hated Joe and Hinksville and everything else. When he came back the
days went like a flash; we were together nearly all the time. I knew
Joe’s mother was spying on us, but I didn’t care. And at last it seemed
as if I couldn’t let him go away again without me; so one evening he
stopped at the back gate in a buggy, and we drove off together and
caught the eastern express at River Bend. He promised to bring me to New
York.” She paused, and then added scornfully, “He didn’t even do that!”

Woburn had returned to his seat and was watching her attentively. It
was curious to note how her passion was spending itself in words; he saw
that she would never kill herself while she had any one to talk to.

“That was five months ago,” she continued, “and we travelled all through
the southern states, and stayed a little while near Philadelphia, where
his business is. He did things real stylishly at first. Then he was sent
to Albany, and we stayed a week at the Delavan House. One afternoon I
went out to do some shopping, and when I came back he was gone. He
had taken his trunk with him, and hadn’t left any address; but in my
travelling-bag I found a fifty-dollar bill, with a slip of paper on
which he had written, ‘No use coming after me; I’m married.’ We’d been
together less than four months, and I never saw him again.

“At first I couldn’t believe it. I stayed on, thinking it was a joke--or
that he’d feel sorry for me and come back. But he never came and never
wrote me a line. Then I began to hate him, and to see what a wicked fool
I’d been to leave Joe. I was so lonesome--I thought I’d go crazy. And I
kept thinking how good and patient Joe had been, and how badly I’d
used him, and how lovely it would be to be back in the little parlor
at Hinksville, even with Mrs. Glenn and the minister talking about
free-will and predestination. So at last I wrote to Joe. I wrote him the
humblest letters you ever read, one after another; but I never got any
answer.

“Finally I found I’d spent all my money, so I sold my watch and my
rings--Joe gave me a lovely turquoise ring when we were married--and
came to New York. I felt ashamed to stay alone any longer in Albany; I
was afraid that some of Arthur’s friends, who had met me with him on
the road, might come there and recognize me. After I got here I wrote
to Susy Price, a great friend of mine who lives at Hinksville, and she
answered at once, and told me just what I had expected--that Joe was
ready to forgive me and crazy to have me back, but that his mother
wouldn’t let him stir a step or write me a line, and that she and the
minister were at him all day long, telling him how bad I was and what
a sin it would be to forgive me. I got Susy’s letter two or three days
ago, and after that I saw it was no use writing to Joe. He’ll never
dare go against his mother and she watches him like a cat. I suppose I
deserve it--but he might have given me another chance! I know he would
if he could only see me.”

Her voice had dropped from anger to lamentation, and her tears again
overflowed.

Woburn looked at her with the pity one feels for a child who is suddenly
confronted with the result of some unpremeditated naughtiness.

“But why not go back to Hinksville,” he suggested, “if your husband is
ready to forgive you? You could go to your friend’s house, and once your
husband knows you are there you can easily persuade him to see you.”

“Perhaps I could--Susy thinks I could. But I can’t go back; I haven’t
got a cent left.”

“But surely you can borrow money? Can’t you ask your friend to forward
you the amount of your fare?”

She shook her head.

“Susy ain’t well off; she couldn’t raise five dollars, and it costs
twenty-five to get back to Hinksville. And besides, what would become of
me while I waited for the money? They’ll turn me out of here to-morrow;
I haven’t paid my last week’s board, and I haven’t got anything to give
them; my bag’s empty; I’ve pawned everything.”

“And don’t you know any one here who would lend you the money?”

“No; not a soul. At least I do know one gentleman; he’s a friend of
Arthur’s, a Mr. Devine; he was staying at Rochester when we were there.
I met him in the street the other day, and I didn’t mean to speak to
him, but he came up to me, and said he knew all about Arthur and how
meanly he had behaved, and he wanted to know if he couldn’t help me--I
suppose he saw I was in trouble. He tried to persuade me to go and stay
with his aunt, who has a lovely house right round here in Twenty-fourth
Street; he must be very rich, for he offered to lend me as much money as
I wanted.”

“You didn’t take it?”

“No,” she returned; “I daresay he meant to be kind, but I didn’t care to
be beholden to any friend of Arthur’s. He came here again yesterday, but
I wouldn’t see him, so he left a note giving me his aunt’s address and
saying she’d have a room ready for me at any time.”

There was a long silence; she had dried her tears and sat looking at
Woburn with eyes full of helpless reliance.

“Well,” he said at length, “you did right not to take that man’s
money; but this isn’t the only alternative,” he added, pointing to the
revolver.

“I don’t know any other,” she answered wearily. “I’m not smart enough to
get employment; I can’t make dresses or do type-writing, or any of the
useful things they teach girls now; and besides, even if I could get
work I couldn’t stand the loneliness. I can never hold my head up
again--I can’t bear the disgrace. If I can’t go back to Joe I’d rather
be dead.”

“And if you go back to Joe it will be all right?” Woburn suggested with
a smile.

“Oh,” she cried, her whole face alight, “if I could only go back to
Joe!”

They were both silent again; Woburn sat with his hands in his pockets
gazing at the floor. At length his silence seemed to rouse her to the
unwontedness of the situation, and she rose from her seat, saying in a
more constrained tone, “I don’t know why I’ve told you all this.”

“Because you believed that I would help you,” Woburn answered, rising
also; “and you were right; I’m going to send you home.”

She colored vividly. “You told me I was right not to take Mr. Devine’s
money,” she faltered.

“Yes,” he answered, “but did Mr. Devine want to send you home?”

“He wanted me to wait at his aunt’s a little while first and then write
to Joe again.”

“I don’t--I want you to start tomorrow morning; this morning, I mean.
I’ll take you to the station and buy your ticket, and your husband can
send me back the money.”

“Oh, I can’t--I can’t--you mustn’t--” she stammered, reddening and
paling. “Besides, they’ll never let me leave here without paying.”

“How much do you owe?”

“Fourteen dollars.”

“Very well; I’ll pay that for you; you can leave me your revolver as a
pledge. But you must start by the first train; have you any idea at what
time it leaves the Grand Central?”

“I think there’s one at eight.”

He glanced at his watch.

“In less than two hours, then; it’s after six now.”

She stood before him with fascinated eyes.

“You must have a very strong will,” she said. “When you talk like that
you make me feel as if I had to do everything you say.”

“Well, you must,” said Woburn lightly. “Man was made to be obeyed.”

“Oh, you’re not like other men,” she returned; “I never heard a voice
like yours; it’s so strong and kind. You must be a very good man; you
remind me of Joe; I’m sure you’ve got just such a nature; and Joe is the
best man I’ve ever seen.”

Woburn made no reply, and she rambled on, with little pauses and fresh
bursts of confidence.

“Joe’s a real hero, you know; he did the most splendid thing you ever
heard of. I think I began to tell you about it, but I didn’t finish.
I’ll tell you now. It happened just after we were married; I was mad
with him at the time, I’m afraid, but now I see how splendid he was.
He’d been telegraph operator at Hinksville for four years and was hoping
that he’d get promoted to a bigger place; but he was afraid to ask for
a raise. Well, I was very sick with a bad attack of pneumonia and one
night the doctor said he wasn’t sure whether he could pull me through.
When they sent word to Joe at the telegraph office he couldn’t stand
being away from me another minute. There was a poor consumptive boy
always hanging round the station; Joe had taught him how to operate,
just to help him along; so he left him in the office and tore home for
half an hour, knowing he could get back before the eastern express came
along.

“He hadn’t been gone five minutes when a freight-train ran off the rails
about a mile up the track. It was a very still night, and the boy heard
the smash and shouting, and knew something had happened. He couldn’t
tell what it was, but the minute he heard it he sent a message over
the wires like a flash, and caught the eastern express just as it was
pulling out of the station above Hinksville. If he’d hesitated a second,
or made any mistake, the express would have come on, and the loss of
life would have been fearful. The next day the Hinksville papers
were full of Operator Glenn’s presence of mind; they all said he’d be
promoted. That was early in November and Joe didn’t hear anything from
the company till the first of January. Meanwhile the boy had gone home
to his father’s farm out in the country, and before Christmas he was
dead. Well, on New Year’s day Joe got a notice from the company saying
that his pay was to be raised, and that he was to be promoted to a
big junction near Detroit, in recognition of his presence of mind in
stopping the eastern express. It was just what we’d both been pining for
and I was nearly wild with joy; but I noticed Joe didn’t say much. He
just telegraphed for leave, and the next day he went right up to Detroit
and told the directors there what had really happened. When he came back
he told us they’d suspended him; I cried every night for a week, and
even his mother said he was a fool. After that we just lived on at
Hinksville, and six months later the company took him back; but I don’t
suppose they’ll ever promote him now.”

Her voice again trembled with facile emotion.

“Wasn’t it beautiful of him? Ain’t he a real hero?” she said. “And I’m
sure you’d behave just like him; you’d be just as gentle about little
things, and you’d never move an inch about big ones. You’d never do a
mean action, but you’d be sorry for people who did; I can see it in your
face; that’s why I trusted you right off.”

Woburn’s eyes were fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At
length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric
lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart
rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the
Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day.

Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he
had thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and
handed her fifteen dollars.

“That will pay for your board, including your breakfast this morning,”
 he said. “We’ll breakfast together presently if you like; and meanwhile
suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I haven’t seen it for years.”

He pushed two chairs toward the window, and they sat down side by side.
The light came gradually, with the icy reluctance of winter; at last
a red disk pushed itself above the opposite house-tops and a long cold
gleam slanted across their window. They did not talk much; there was a
silencing awe in the spectacle.

Presently Woburn rose and looked again at his watch.

“I must go and cover up my dress-coat”, he said, “and you had better put
on your hat and jacket. We shall have to be starting in half an hour.”

As he turned away she laid her hand on his arm.

“You haven’t even told me your name,” she said.

“No,” he answered; “but if you get safely back to Joe you can call me
Providence.”

“But how am I to send you the money?”

“Oh--well, I’ll write you a line in a day or two and give you my
address; I don’t know myself what it will be; I’m a wanderer on the face
of the earth.”

“But you must have my name if you mean to write to me.”

“Well, what is your name?”

“Ruby Glenn. And I think--I almost think you might send the letter right
to Joe’s--send it to the Hinksville station.”

“Very well.”

“You promise?”

“Of course I promise.”

He went back into his room, thinking how appropriate it was that she
should have an absurd name like Ruby. As he re-entered the room, where
the gas sickened in the daylight, it seemed to him that he was returning
to some forgotten land; he had passed, with the last few hours, into a
wholly new phase of consciousness. He put on his fur coat, turning up
the collar and crossing the lapels to hide his white tie. Then he put
his cigar-case in his pocket, turned out the gas, and, picking up his
hat and stick, walked back through the open doorway.

Ruby Glenn had obediently prepared herself for departure and was
standing before the mirror, patting her curls into place. Her eyes were
still red, but she had the happy look of a child that has outslept its
grief. On the floor he noticed the tattered fragments of the letter
which, a few hours earlier, he had seen her place before the mirror.

“Shall we go down now?” he asked.

“Very well,” she assented; then, with a quick movement, she stepped
close to him, and putting her hands on his shoulders lifted her face to
his.

“I believe you’re the best man I ever knew,” she said, “the very
best--except Joe.”

She drew back blushing deeply, and unlocked the door which led into
the passage-way. Woburn picked up her bag, which she had forgotten,
and followed her out of the room. They passed a frowzy chambermaid,
who stared at them with a yawn. Before the doors the row of boots still
waited; there was a faint new aroma of coffee mingling with the smell of
vanished dinners, and a fresh blast of heat had begun to tingle through
the radiators.

In the unventilated coffee-room they found a waiter who had the
melancholy air of being the last survivor of an exterminated race, and
who reluctantly brought them some tea made with water which had not
boiled, and a supply of stale rolls and staler butter. On this meagre
diet they fared in silence, Woburn occasionally glancing at his watch;
at length he rose, telling his companion to go and pay her bill while
he called a hansom. After all, there was no use in economizing his
remaining dollars.

In a few moments she joined him under the portico of the hotel. The
hansom stood waiting and he sprang in after her, calling to the driver
to take them to the Forty-second Street station.

When they reached the station he found a seat for her and went to buy
her ticket. There were several people ahead of him at the window, and
when he had bought the ticket he found that it was time to put her in
the train. She rose in answer to his glance, and together they walked
down the long platform in the murky chill of the roofed-in air. He
followed her into the railway carriage, making sure that she had her
bag, and that the ticket was safe inside it; then he held out his hand,
in its pearl-coloured evening glove: he felt that the people in the
other seats were staring at them.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye,” she answered, flushing gratefully. “I’ll never
forget--never. And you _will_ write, won’t you? Promise!”

“Of course, of course,” he said, hastening from the carriage.

He retraced his way along the platform, passed through the dismal
waiting-room and stepped out into the early sunshine. On the sidewalk
outside the station he hesitated awhile; then he strolled slowly down
Forty-second Street and, skirting the melancholy flank of the Reservoir,
walked across Bryant Park. Finally he sat down on one of the benches
near the Sixth Avenue and lit a cigar. The signs of life were
multiplying around him; he watched the cars roll by with their
increasing freight of dingy toilers, the shop-girls hurrying to their
work, the children trudging schoolward, their small vague noses red with
cold, their satchels clasped in woollen-gloved hands. There is nothing
very imposing in the first stirring of a great city’s activities; it
is a slow reluctant process, like the waking of a heavy sleeper; but
to Woburn’s mood the sight of that obscure renewal of humble duties was
more moving than the spectacle of an army with banners.

He sat for a long time, smoking the last cigar in his case, and
murmuring to himself a line from Hamlet--the saddest, he thought, in the
play--

  _For every man hath business and desire_.

Suddenly an unpremeditated movement made him feel the pressure of Ruby
Glenn’s revolver in his pocket; it was like a devil’s touch on his
arm, and he sprang up hastily. In his other pocket there were just four
dollars and fifty cents; but that didn’t matter now. He had no thought
of flight.

For a few minutes he loitered vaguely about the park; then the cold
drove him on again, and with the rapidity born of a sudden resolve he
began to walk down the Fifth Avenue towards his lodgings. He brushed
past a maid-servant who was washing the vestibule and ran up stairs to
his room. A fire was burning in the grate and his books and photographs
greeted him cheerfully from the walls; the tranquil air of the whole
room seemed to take it for granted that he meant to have his bath and
breakfast and go down town as usual.

He threw off his coat and pulled the revolver out of his pocket; for
some moments he held it curiously in his hand, bending over to examine
it as Ruby Glenn had done; then he laid it in the top drawer of a small
cabinet, and locking the drawer threw the key into the fire.

After that he went quietly about the usual business of his toilet. In
taking off his dress-coat he noticed the Legion of Honor which Miss
Talcott had given him at the ball. He pulled it out of his buttonhole
and tossed it into the fire-place. When he had finished dressing he saw
with surprise that it was nearly ten o’clock. Ruby Glenn was already two
hours nearer home.

Woburn stood looking about the room of which he had thought to take
final leave the night before; among the ashes beneath the grate he
caught sight of a little white heap which symbolized to his fancy the
remains of his brief correspondence with Miss Talcott. He roused himself
from this unseasonable musing and with a final glance at the familiar
setting of his past, turned to face the future which the last hours had
prepared for him.

He went down stairs and stepped out of doors, hastening down the street
towards Broadway as though he were late for an appointment. Every now
and then he encountered an acquaintance, whom he greeted with a nod and
smile; he carried his head high, and shunned no man’s recognition.

At length he reached the doors of a tall granite building honey-combed
with windows. He mounted the steps of the portico, and passing through
the double doors of plate-glass, crossed a vestibule floored with mosaic
to another glass door on which was emblazoned the name of the firm.

This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted
subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of
clerks.

As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man emerged from an inner
office at the opposite end of the room.

At sight of Woburn he stopped short.

“Mr. Woburn!” he exclaimed; then he stepped nearer and added in a low
tone: “I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the
firm are waiting; will you step into the private office?”




THE PORTRAIT


It was at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were
talking over George Lillo’s portraits--a collection of them was being
shown at Durand-Ruel’s--and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:--

“Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!”

There was a chorus of interrogations.

“Oh, because--he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board
ship, or early in the morning, or when one’s hair is out of curl and one
knows it. I’d so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!”

Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels,
stroked his moustache to hide a conscious smile.

“Lillo is a genius--that we must all admit,” he said indulgently,
as though condoning a friend’s weakness; “but he has an unfortunate
temperament. He has been denied the gift--so precious to an artist--of
perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might
almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak
points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he
can’t help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything
but the most prosaic side of human nature--

  “‘_A primrose by the river’s brim
  A yellow primrose is to him,
  And it is nothing more._’”

Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose
sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her
uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics.
His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.

“Limitations? But, my dear man, it’s because he hasn’t any limitations,
because he doesn’t wear the portrait-painter’s conventional blinders,
that we’re all so afraid of being painted by him. It’s not because he
sees only one aspect of his sitters, it’s because he selects the real,
the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket
in a crowd. If there’s nothing to paint--no real person--he paints
nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy
Awdrey”--(“Why,” the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, “that’s the
only nice picture he ever did!”) “If there’s one positive trait in a
negative whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it isn’t a nice
trait, so much the worse for the sitter; it isn’t Lillo’s fault: he’s no
more to blame than a mirror. Your other painters do the surface--he does
the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom. He
makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits
of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked
cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a
poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera-box. But look at his
pictures of really great people--how great _they_ are! There’s plenty of
ideal there. Take his Professor Clyde; how clearly the man’s history is
written in those broad steady strokes of the brush: the hard work, the
endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great _savant_! Or the
picture of Mr. Domfrey--the man who has felt beauty without having the
power to create it. The very brush-work expresses the difference between
the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations
of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a
delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the
finest responsiveness.” Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the
echo of her own eloquence. “My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint
you if you don’t want to be found out--or to find yourself out. That’s
why I’ve never let him do _me_; I’m waiting for the day of judgment,”
 she ended with a laugh.

Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering
impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish.
Lillo’s presence in New York--he had come over from Paris for the first
time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures--gave to
the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been
furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not
unapt; for in Lillo’s curiously detached existence it is difficult to
figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In
this light, Mrs. Mellish’s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the
trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on
the argument by saying:--“But according to your theory--that the
significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter--his
portrait of Vard ought to be a master-piece; and it’s his biggest
failure.”

Alonzo Vard’s suicide--he killed himself, strangely enough, the day
that Lillo’s pictures were first shown--had made his portrait the chief
feature of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years
earlier, when the terrible “Boss” was at the height of his power; and if
ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo’s, that man
was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed;
the technique was dazzling; but the face had been--well, expurgated.
It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him--a common man trying
to look at ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been
exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappointment. It wasn’t
only the critics and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public,
which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, revelling in his genial villany,
and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a
spectacle, is next best to its successful defiance--even the public felt
itself defrauded. What had the painter done with their hero? Where
was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convincingly in
political cartoons and patent-medicine advertisements, on cigar-boxes
and electioneering posters? They had admired the man for looking his
part so boldly; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of
his coarse body and cruel face; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo’s picture
was a poor thing compared to the real Vard. It had been vaguely expected
that the great boss’s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating
document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it
was as insipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in
league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for
post-mortem “revelations” an impassable blank wall of negation. The
public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mellish had
to lay down her arms.

“Yes, the portrait of Vard _is_ a failure,” she admitted, “and I’ve
never known why. If he’d been an obscure elusive type of villain, one
could understand Lillo’s missing the mark for once; but with that face
from the pit--!”

She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had
drowned, and found herself shaking hands with Lillo.

The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls; Cumberton
dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing
degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she
had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo--

“I wish you’d explain it.”

Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea. Then, “Would there
be any failures,” he said, “if one could explain them?”

“Ah, in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type--or
to say why one has missed it. Some people are like daguerreotypes; in
certain lights one can’t see them at all. But surely Vard was obvious
enough. What I want to know is, what became of him? What did you do with
him? How did you manage to shuffle him out of sight?”

“It was much easier than you think. I simply missed an opportunity--”

“That a sign-painter would have seen!”

“Very likely. In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the
significant--”

“--And when I got back from Paris,” the pretty woman was heard to wail,
“I found all the women here were wearing the very models I’d brought
home with me!”

Mrs. Mellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her
guests; and the question of Yard’s portrait was dropped.

I left the house with Lillo; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one
of his long silences, he suddenly asked:

“Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard? I don’t mean in
the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?”

I said it was.

He drew a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “it’s good to know that when one
tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it.”

“Tries to fail?”

“Well, no; that’s not quite it, either; I didn’t want to make a failure
of Vard’s picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the
same. It was what one might call a lucid failure.”

“But why--?”

“The why of it is rather complicated. I’ll tell you some time--” He
hesitated. “Come and dine with me at the club by and by, and I’ll tell
you afterwards. It’s a nice morsel for a psychologist.”

At dinner he said little; but I didn’t mind that. I had known him for
years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his
long abstentions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was
bland as a natural hush; one felt one’s self included in it, not left
out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had
finished our coffee and liqueurs we strolled down to his studio.

At the studio--which was less draped, less posed, less consciously
“artistic” than those of the smaller men--he handed me a cigar, and fell
to smoking before the fire. When he began to talk it was of indifferent
matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Vard’s
portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture. I walked
across the room to look at it, and Lillo presently followed with a
light.

“It certainly is a complete disguise,” he muttered over my shoulder;
then he turned away and stooped to a big portfolio propped against the
wall.

“Did you ever know Miss Vard?” he asked, with his head in the portfolio;
and without waiting for my answer he handed me a crayon sketch of a
girl’s profile.

I had never seen a crayon of Lillo’s, and I lost sight of the sitter’s
personality in the interest aroused by this new aspect of the master’s
complex genius. The few lines--faint, yet how decisive!--flowered out of
the rough paper with the lightness of opening petals. It was a mere hint
of a picture, but vivid as some word that wakens long reverberations in
the memory.

I felt Lillo at my shoulder again.

“You knew her, I suppose?”

I had to stop and think. Why, of course I’d known her: a silent handsome
girl, showy yet ineffective, whom I had seen without seeing the winter
that society had capitulated to Vard. Still looking at the crayon, I
tried to trace some connection between the Miss Vard I recalled and the
grave young seraph of Lillo’s sketch. Had the Vards bewitched him? By
what masterstroke of suggestion had he been beguiled into drawing the
terrible father as a barber’s block, the commonplace daughter as this
memorable creature?

“You don’t remember much about her? No, I suppose not. She was a
quiet girl and nobody noticed her much, even when--” he paused with a
smile--“you were all asking Vard to dine.”

I winced. Yes, it was true--we had all asked Vard to dine. It was some
comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness.

Lillo put the sketch on the mantel-shelf and drew his arm-chair to the
fire.

“It’s cold to-night. Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey?
There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind
you... help yourself...”


II

About Vard’s portrait? (he began.) Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a queer
story, and most people wouldn’t see anything in it. My enemies might
say it was a roundabout way of explaining a failure; but you know better
than that. Mrs. Mellish was right. Between me and Vard there could be no
question of failure. The man was made for me--I felt that the first time
I clapped eyes on him. I could hardly keep from asking him to sit to me
on the spot; but somehow one couldn’t ask favors of the fellow. I
sat still and prayed he’d come to me, though; for I was looking for
something big for the next Salon. It was twelve years ago--the last
time I was out ere--and I was ravenous for an opportunity. I had the
feeling--do you writer-fellows have it too?--that there was something
tremendous in me if it could only be got out; and I felt Vard was the
Moses to strike the rock. There were vulgar reasons, too, that made
me hunger for a victim. I’d been grinding on obscurely for a good many
years, without gold or glory, and the first thing of mine that had made
a noise was my picture of Pepita, exhibited the year before. There’d
been a lot of talk about that, orders were beginning to come in, and I
wanted to follow it up with a rousing big thing at the next Salon. Then
the critics had been insinuating that I could do only Spanish things--I
suppose I _had_ overdone the castanet business; it’s a nursery-disease
we all go through--and I wanted to show that I had plenty more shot in
my locker. Don’t you get up every morning meaning to prove you’re equal
to Balzac or Thackeray? That’s the way I felt then; _only give me a
chance_, I wanted to shout out to them; and I saw at once that Vard was
my chance.

I had come over from Paris in the autumn to paint Mrs. Clingsborough,
and I met Vard and his daughter at one of the first dinners I went to.
After that I could think of nothing but that man’s head. What a type!
I raked up all the details of his scandalous history; and there were
enough to fill an encyclopaedia. The papers were full of him just then;
he was mud from head to foot; it was about the time of the big viaduct
steal, and irreproachable citizens were forming ineffectual leagues to
put him down. And all the time one kept meeting him at dinners--that was
the beauty of it! Once I remember seeing him next to the Bishop’s wife;
I’ve got a little sketch of that duet somewhere... Well, he was simply
magnificent, a born ruler; what a splendid condottiere he would have
made, in gold armor, with a griffin grinning on his casque! You remember
those drawings of Leonardo’s, where the knight’s face and the outline of
his helmet combine in one monstrous saurian profile? He always reminded
me of that...

But how was I to get at him?--One day it occurred to me to try talking
to Miss Vard. She was a monosyllabic person, who didn’t seem to see an
inch beyond the last remark one had made; but suddenly I found myself
blurting out, “I wonder if you know how extraordinarily paintable your
father is?” and you should have seen the change that came over her. Her
eyes lit up and she looked--well, as I’ve tried to make her look there.
(He glanced up at the sketch.) Yes, she said, _wasn’t_ her father
splendid, and didn’t I think him one of the handsomest men I’d ever
seen?

That rather staggered me, I confess; I couldn’t think her capable of
joking on such a subject, yet it seemed impossible that she should be
speaking seriously. But she was. I knew it by the way she looked at
Vard, who was sitting opposite, his wolfish profile thrown back,
the shaggy locks tossed off his narrow high white forehead. The girl
worshipped him.

She went on to say how glad she was that I saw him as she did. So many
artists admired only regular beauty, the stupid Greek type that was made
to be done in marble; but she’d always fancied from what she’d seen
of my work--she knew everything I’d done, it appeared--that I
looked deeper, cared more for the way in which faces are modelled
by temperament and circumstance; “and of course in that sense,” she
concluded, “my father’s face _is_ beautiful.”

This was even more staggering; but one couldn’t question her divine
sincerity. I’m afraid my one thought was to take advantage of it; and I
let her go on, perceiving that if I wanted to paint Vard all I had to do
was to listen.

She poured out her heart. It was a glorious thing for a girl, she said,
wasn’t it, to be associated with such a life as that? She felt it so
strongly, sometimes, that it oppressed her, made her shy and stupid. She
was so afraid people would expect her to live up to _him_. But that
was absurd, of course; brilliant men so seldom had clever children.
Still--did I know?--she would have been happier, much happier, if he
hadn’t been in public life; if he and she could have hidden themselves
away somewhere, with their books and music, and she could have had it
all to herself: his cleverness, his learning, his immense unbounded
goodness. For no one knew how good he was; no one but herself. Everybody
recognized his cleverness, his brilliant abilities; even his enemies had
to admit his extraordinary intellectual gifts, and hated him the worse,
of course, for the admission; but no one, no one could guess what he
was at home. She had heard of great men who were always giving gala
performances in public, but whose wives and daughters saw only the empty
theatre, with the footlights out and the scenery stacked in the wings;
but with him it was just the other way: wonderful as he was in public,
in society, she sometimes felt he wasn’t doing himself justice--he was
so much more wonderful at home. It was like carrying a guilty secret
about with her: his friends, his admirers, would never forgive her if
they found out that he kept all his best things for _her!_

I don’t quite know what I felt in listening to her. I was chiefly taken
up with leading her on to the point I had in view; but even through my
personal preoccupation I remember being struck by the fact that, though
she talked foolishly, she didn’t talk like a fool. She was not stupid;
she was not obtuse; one felt that her impassive surface was alive
with delicate points of perception; and this fact, coupled with her
crystalline frankness, flung me back on a startled revision of my
impressions of her father. He came out of the test more monstrous than
ever, as an ugly image reflected in clear water is made uglier by the
purity of the medium. Even then I felt a pang at the use to which fate
had put the mountain-pool of Miss Vard’s spirit, and an uneasy sense
that my own reflection there was not one to linger over. It was odd that
I should have scrupled to deceive, on one small point, a girl already
so hugely cheated; perhaps it was the completeness of her delusion that
gave it the sanctity of a religious belief. At any rate, a distinct
sense of discomfort tempered the satisfaction with which, a day or two
later, I heard from her that her father had consented to give me a few
sittings.

I’m afraid my scruples vanished when I got him before my easel. He was
immense, and he was unexplored. From my point of view he’d never
been done before--I was his Cortez. As he talked the wonder grew. His
daughter came with him, and I began to think she was right in saying
that he kept his best for her. It wasn’t that she drew him out, or
guided the conversation; but one had a sense of delicate vigilance,
hardly more perceptible than one of those atmospheric influences that
give the pulses a happier turn. She was a vivifying climate. I had meant
to turn the talk to public affairs, but it slipped toward books and art,
and I was faintly aware of its being kept there without undue pressure.
Before long I saw the value of the diversion. It was easy enough to get
at the political Vard: the other aspect was rarer and more instructive.
His daughter had described him as a scholar. He wasn’t that, of course,
in any intrinsic sense: like most men of his type he had gulped his
knowledge standing, as he had snatched his food from lunch-counters; the
wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation. It was
the strangest instance of a mind to which erudition had given force and
fluency without culture; his learning had not educated his perceptions:
it was an implement serving to slash others rather than to polish
himself. I have said that at first sight he was immense; but as I
studied him he began to lessen under my scrutiny. His depth was a false
perspective painted on a wall.

It was there that my difficulty lay: I had prepared too big a canvas
for him. Intellectually his scope was considerable, but it was like
the digital reach of a mediocre pianist--it didn’t make him a great
musician. And morally he wasn’t bad enough; his corruption wasn’t
sufficiently imaginative to be interesting. It was not so much a means
to an end as a kind of virtuosity practised for its own sake, like a
highly-developed skill in cannoning billiard balls. After all, the point
of view is what gives distinction to either vice or virtue: a morality
with ground-glass windows is no duller than a narrow cynicism.

His daughter’s presence--she always came with him--gave unintentional
emphasis to these conclusions; for where she was richest he was naked.
She had a deep-rooted delicacy that drew color and perfume from the very
centre of her being: his sentiments, good or bad, were as detachable
as his cuffs. Thus her nearness, planned, as I guessed, with the tender
intention of displaying, elucidating him, of making him accessible in
detail to my dazzled perceptions--this pious design in fact defeated
itself. She made him appear at his best, but she cheapened that best by
her proximity. For the man was vulgar to the core; vulgar in spite of
his force and magnitude; thin, hollow, spectacular; a lath-and-plaster
bogey--

Did she suspect it? I think not--then. He was wrapped in her impervious
faith... The papers? Oh, their charges were set down to political
rivalry; and the only people she saw were his hangers-on, or the
fashionable set who had taken him up for their amusement. Besides,
she would never have found out in that way: at a direct accusation her
resentment would have flamed up and smothered her judgment. If the
truth came to her, it would come through knowing intimately some
one--different; through--how shall I put it?--an imperceptible shifting
of her centre of gravity. My besetting fear was that I couldn’t count on
her obtuseness. She wasn’t what is called clever; she left that to
him; but she was exquisitely good; and now and then she had intuitive
felicities that frightened me. Do I make you see her? We fellows can
explain better with the brush; I don’t know how to mix my words or lay
them on. She wasn’t clever; but her heart thought--that’s all I can
say...

If she’d been stupid it would have been easy enough: I could have
painted him as he was. Could have? I did--brushed the face in one day
from memory; it was the very man! I painted it out before she came:
I couldn’t bear to have her see it. I had the feeling that I held her
faith in him in my hands, carrying it like a brittle object through a
jostling mob; a hair’s-breadth swerve and it was in splinters.

When she wasn’t there I tried to reason myself out of these subtleties.
My business was to paint Vard as he was--if his daughter didn’t mind his
looks, why should I? The opportunity was magnificent--I knew that by
the way his face had leapt out of the canvas at my first touch. It would
have been a big thing. Before every sitting I swore to myself I’d do it;
then she came, and sat near him, and I--didn’t.

I knew that before long she’d notice I was shirking the face. Vard
himself took little interest in the portrait, but she watched me
closely, and one day when the sitting was over she stayed behind and
asked me when I meant to begin what she called “the likeness.” I guessed
from her tone that the embarrassment was all on my side, or that if she
felt any it was at having to touch a vulnerable point in my pride. Thus
far the only doubt that troubled her was a distrust of my ability. Well,
I put her off with any rot you please: told her she must trust me, must
let me wait for the inspiration; that some day the face would come;
I should see it suddenly--feel it under my brush... The poor child
believed me: you can make a woman believe almost anything she doesn’t
quite understand. She was abashed at her philistinism, and begged me not
to tell her father--he would make such fun of her!

After that--well, the sittings went on. Not many, of course; Vard was
too busy to give me much time. Still, I could have done him ten times
over. Never had I found my formula with such ease, such assurance; there
were no hesitations, no obstructions--the face was _there_, waiting for
me; at times it almost shaped itself on the canvas. Unfortunately Miss
Vard was there too ...

All this time the papers were busy with the viaduct scandal. The outcry
was getting louder. You remember the circumstances? One of Vard’s
associates--Bardwell, wasn’t it?--threatened disclosures. The rival
machine got hold of him, the Independents took him to their bosom, and
the press shrieked for an investigation. It was not the first storm Vard
had weathered, and his face wore just the right shade of cool vigilance;
he wasn’t the man to fall into the mistake of appearing too easy. His
demeanor would have been superb if it had been inspired by a sense of
his own strength; but it struck me rather as based on contempt for
his antagonists. Success is an inverted telescope through which one’s
enemies are apt to look too small and too remote. As for Miss Vard,
her serenity was undiminished; but I half-detected a defiance in her
unruffled sweetness, and during the last sittings I had the factitious
vivacity of a hostess who hears her best china crashing.

One day it _did_ crash: the head-lines of the morning papers shouted the
catastrophe at me:--“The Monster forced to disgorge--Warrant out against
Vard--Bardwell the Boss’s Boomerang”--you know the kind of thing.

When I had read the papers I threw them down and went out. As it
happened, Vard was to have given me a sitting that morning; but there
would have been a certain irony in waiting for him. I wished I had
finished the picture--I wished I’d never thought of painting it. I
wanted to shake off the whole business, to put it out of my mind, if I
could: I had the feeling--I don’t know if I can describe it--that there
was a kind of disloyalty to the poor girl in my even acknowledging
to myself that I knew what all the papers were howling from the
housetops....

I had walked for an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that Miss Vard
might, after all, come to the studio at the appointed hour. Why should
she? I could conceive of no reason; but the mere thought of what, if
she _did_ come, my absence would imply to her, sent me bolting back to
Twelfth Street. It was a presentiment, if you like, for she was there.

As she rose to meet me a newspaper slipped from her hand: I’d been fool
enough, when I went out, to leave the damned things lying all over the
place.

I muttered some apology for being late, and she said reassuringly:

“But my father’s not here yet.”

“Your father--?” I could have kicked myself for the way I bungled it!

“He went out very early this morning, and left word that he would meet
me here at the usual hour.”

She faced me, with an eye full of bright courage, across the newspaper
lying between us.

“He ought to be here in a moment now--he’s always so punctual. But my
watch is a little fast, I think.”

She held it out to me almost gaily, and I was just pretending to compare
it with mine, when there was a smart rap on the door and Vard stalked
in. There was always a civic majesty in his gait, an air of having just
stepped off his pedestal and of dissembling an oration in his umbrella;
and that day he surpassed himself. Miss Vard had turned pale at the
knock; but the mere sight of him replenished her veins, and if she now
avoided my eye, it was in mere pity for my discomfiture.

I was in fact the only one of the three who didn’t instantly “play up”;
but such virtuosity was inspiring, and by the time Vard had thrown off
his coat and dropped into a senatorial pose, I was ready to pitch into
my work. I swore I’d do his face then and there; do it as she saw it;
she sat close to him, and I had only to glance at her while I painted--

Vard himself was masterly: his talk rattled through my hesitations and
embarrassments like a brisk northwester sweeping the dry leaves from
its path. Even his daughter showed the sudden brilliance of a lamp from
which the shade has been removed. We were all surprisingly vivid--it
felt, somehow, as though we were being photographed by flash-light...

It was the best sitting we’d ever had--but unfortunately it didn’t last
more than ten minutes.

It was Vard’s secretary who interrupted us--a slinking chap called
Cornley, who burst in, as white as sweetbread, with the face of a
depositor who hears his bank has stopped payment. Miss Vard started up
as he entered, but caught herself together and dropped back into her
chair. Vard, who had taken out a cigarette, held the tip tranquilly to
his fusée.

“You’re here, thank God!” Cornley cried. “There’s no time to be lost,
Mr. Vard. I’ve got a carriage waiting round the corner in Thirteenth
Street--”

Vard looked at the tip of his cigarette.

“A carriage in Thirteenth Street? My good fellow, my own brougham is at
the door.”

“I know, I know--but _they_‘re there too, sir; or they will be, inside
of a minute. For God’s sake, Mr. Vard, don’t trifle!--There’s a way out
by Thirteenth Street, I tell you”--

“Bardwell’s myrmidons, eh?” said Vard. “Help me on with my overcoat,
Cornley, will you?”

Cornley’s teeth chattered.

“Mr. Vard, your best friends ... Miss Vard, won’t you speak to your
father?” He turned to me haggardly;--“We can get out by the back way?”

I nodded.

Vard stood towering--in some infernal way he seemed literally to rise
to the situation--one hand in the bosom of his coat, in the attitude of
patriotism in bronze. I glanced at his daughter: she hung on him with a
drowning look. Suddenly she straightened herself; there was something
of Vard in the way she faced her fears--a kind of primitive calm we
drawing-room folk don’t have. She stepped to him and laid her hand on
his arm. The pause hadn’t lasted ten seconds.

“Father--” she said.

Vard threw back his head and swept the studio with a sovereign eye.

“The back way, Mr. Vard, the back way,” Cornley whimpered. “For God’s
sake, sir, don’t lose a minute.”

Vard transfixed his abject henchman.

“I have never yet taken the back way,” he enunciated; and, with a
gesture matching the words, he turned to me and bowed.

“I regret the disturbance”--and he walked to the door. His daughter was
at his side, alert, transfigured.

“Stay here, my dear.”

“Never!”

They measured each other an instant; then he drew her arm in his. She
flung back one look at me--a paean of victory--and they passed out with
Cornley at their heels.

I wish I’d finished the face then; I believe I could have caught
something of the look she had tried to make me see in him. Unluckily I
was too excited to work that day or the next, and within the week the
whole business came out. If the indictment wasn’t a put-up job--and
on that I believe there were two opinions--all that followed was. You
remember the farcical trial, the packed jury, the compliant judge, the
triumphant acquittal?... It’s a spectacle that always carries
conviction to the voter: Vard was never more popular than after his
“exoneration”...

I didn’t see Miss Vard for weeks. It was she who came to me at length;
came to the studio alone, one afternoon at dusk. She had--what shall I
say?--a veiled manner; as though she had dropped a fine gauze between
us. I waited for her to speak.

She glanced about the room, admiring a hawthorn vase I had picked up at
auction. Then, after a pause, she said:

“You haven’t finished the picture?”

“Not quite,” I said.

She asked to see it, and I wheeled out the easel and threw the drapery
back.

“Oh,” she murmured, “you haven’t gone on with the face?”

I shook my head.

She looked down on her clasped hands and up at the picture; not once at
me.

“You--you’re going to finish it?”

“Of course,” I cried, throwing the revived purpose into my voice. By
God, I would finish it!

The merest tinge of relief stole over her face, faint as the first thin
chirp before daylight.

“Is it so very difficult?” she asked tentatively.

“Not insuperably, I hope.”

She sat silent, her eyes on the picture. At length, with an effort, she
brought out: “Shall you want more sittings?”

For a second I blundered between two conflicting conjectures; then the
truth came to me with a leap, and I cried out, “No, no more sittings!”

She looked up at me then for the first time; looked too soon, poor
child; for in the spreading light of reassurance that made her eyes
like a rainy dawn, I saw, with terrible distinctness, the rout of her
disbanded hopes. I knew that she knew ...

I finished the picture and sent it home within a week. I tried to make
it--what you see.--Too late, you say? Yes--for her; but not for me or
for the public. If she could be made to feel, for a day longer, for an
hour even, that her miserable secret _was_ a secret--why, she’d made it
seem worth while to me to chuck my own ambitions for that ...

       *        *        *        *        *

Lillo rose, and taking down the sketch stood looking at it in silence.

After a while I ventured, “And Miss Vard--?”

He opened the portfolio and put the sketch back, tying the strings with
deliberation. Then, turning to relight his cigar at the lamp, he said:
“She died last year, thank God.”





THE EARLY SHORT FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON

By Edith Wharton

A Ten-Volume Collection

Volume One



Contents of Volume One

                               Stories
              KERFOL.........................March     1916
              MRS. MANSTEY’S VIEW............July      1891
              THE BOLTED DOOR................March     1909
              THE DILETTANTE.................December  1903
              THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND.....August    1904


The following works not included in the present eBook:

                               Verse
              THE PARTING DAY................February  1880
              AEROPAGUS......................March     1880
              A FAILURE......................April     1880
              PATIENCE.......................April     1880
              WANTS..........................May       1880
              THE LAST GIUSTIANINI...........October   1889
              EURYALUS.......................December  1889
              HAPPINESS......................December  1889


                             Bibliography

              EDITH WHARTON BIBLIOGRAPHY:
              SHORT STORIES AND POEMS........Judy Boss





KERFOL

As first published in Scribner’s Magazine, March 1916




I


“You ought to buy it,” said my host; “it’s just the place for a
solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to
own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead
broke, and it’s going for a song--you ought to buy it.”

It was not with the least idea of living up to the character my friend
Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my unsociable
exterior I have always had secret yearnings for domesticity) that I took
his hint one autumn afternoon and went to Kerfol. My friend was motoring
over to Quimper on business: he dropped me on the way, at a cross-road
on a heath, and said: “First turn to the right and second to the left.
Then straight ahead till you see an avenue. If you meet any peasants,
don’t ask your way. They don’t understand French, and they would pretend
they did and mix you up. I’ll be back for you here by sunset--and don’t
forget the tombs in the chapel.”

I followed Lanrivain’s directions with the hesitation occasioned by the
usual difficulty of remembering whether he had said the first turn
to the right and second to the left, or the contrary. If I had met a
peasant I should certainly have asked, and probably been sent astray;
but I had the desert landscape to myself, and so stumbled on the right
turn and walked on across the heath till I came to an avenue. It was so
unlike any other avenue I have ever seen that I instantly knew it must
be THE avenue. The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great
height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long tunnel
through which the autumn light fell faintly. I know most trees by name,
but I haven’t to this day been able to decide what those trees were.
They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity of poplars, the ashen
colour of olives under a rainy sky; and they stretched ahead of me for
half a mile or more without a break in their arch. If ever I saw an
avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol.
My heart beat a little as I began to walk down it.

Presently the trees ended and I came to a fortified gate in a long wall.
Between me and the wall was an open space of grass, with other grey
avenues radiating from it. Behind the wall were tall slate roofs mossed
with silver, a chapel belfry, the top of a keep. A moat filled with
wild shrubs and brambles surrounded the place; the drawbridge had been
replaced by a stone arch, and the portcullis by an iron gate. I stood
for a long time on the hither side of the moat, gazing about me, and
letting the influence of the place sink in. I said to myself: “If I wait
long enough, the guardian will turn up and show me the tombs--” and I
rather hoped he wouldn’t turn up too soon.

I sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette. As soon as I had done it, it
struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with that great blind
house looking down at me, and all the empty avenues converging on me. It
may have been the depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my
gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a
brake, and I almost fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto
the grass. But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance,
of littleness, of childish bravado, in sitting there puffing my
cigarette-smoke into the face of such a past.

I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol--I was new to Brittany, and
Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before--but
one couldn’t as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a
long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to
guess: perhaps only the sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths
which gives a kind of majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of
Kerfol suggested something more--a perspective of stern and cruel
memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of
darkness.

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the
present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the
sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. “Tombs in the chapel?
The whole place is a tomb!” I reflected. I hoped more and more that the
guardian would not come. The details of the place, however striking,
would seem trivial compared with its collective impressiveness; and I
wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence.

“It’s the very place for you!” Lanrivain had said; and I was overcome by
the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any living being that
Kerfol was the place for him. “Is it possible that any one could NOT
see--?” I wondered. I did not finish the thought: what I meant was
undefinable. I stood up and wandered toward the gate. I was beginning
to want to know more; not to SEE more--I was by now so sure it was not
a question of seeing--but to feel more: feel all the place had to
communicate. “But to get in one will have to rout out the keeper,” I
thought reluctantly, and hesitated. Finally I crossed the bridge and
tried the iron gate. It yielded, and I walked under the tunnel formed
by the thickness of the chemin de ronde. At the farther end, a wooden
barricade had been laid across the entrance, and beyond it I saw a court
enclosed in noble architecture. The main building faced me; and I now
discovered that one half was a mere ruined front, with gaping windows
through which the wild growths of the moat and the trees of the park
were visible. The rest of the house was still in its robust beauty. One
end abutted on the round tower, the other on the small traceried chapel,
and in an angle of the building stood a graceful well-head adorned
with mossy urns. A few roses grew against the walls, and on an upper
window-sill I remember noticing a pot of fuchsias.

My sense of the pressure of the invisible began to yield to my
architectural interest. The building was so fine that I felt a desire
to explore it for its own sake. I looked about the court, wondering in
which corner the guardian lodged. Then I pushed open the barrier
and went in. As I did so, a little dog barred my way. He was such a
remarkably beautiful little dog that for a moment he made me forget
the splendid place he was defending. I was not sure of his breed at the
time, but have since learned that it was Chinese, and that he was of
a rare variety called the “Sleeve-dog.” He was very small and golden
brown, with large brown eyes and a ruffled throat: he looked rather
like a large tawny chrysanthemum. I said to myself: “These little beasts
always snap and scream, and somebody will be out in a minute.”

The little animal stood before me, forbidding, almost menacing: there
was anger in his large brown eyes. But he made no sound, he came no
nearer. Instead, as I advanced, he gradually fell back, and I noticed
that another dog, a vague rough brindled thing, had limped up. “There’ll
be a hubbub now,” I thought; for at the same moment a third dog, a
long-haired white mongrel, slipped out of a doorway and joined the
others. All three stood looking at me with grave eyes; but not a sound
came from them. As I advanced they continued to fall back on muffled
paws, still watching me. “At a given point, they’ll all charge at my
ankles: it’s one of the dodges that dogs who live together put up on
one,” I thought. I was not much alarmed, for they were neither large
nor formidable. But they let me wander about the court as I pleased,
following me at a little distance--always the same distance--and always
keeping their eyes on me. Presently I looked across at the ruined
facade, and saw that in one of its window-frames another dog stood: a
large white pointer with one brown ear. He was an old grave dog, much
more experienced than the others; and he seemed to be observing me with
a deeper intentness.

“I’ll hear from HIM,” I said to myself; but he stood in the empty
window-frame, against the trees of the park, and continued to watch me
without moving. I looked back at him for a time, to see if the sense
that he was being watched would not rouse him. Half the width of the
court lay between us, and we stared at each other silently across it.
But he did not stir, and at last I turned away. Behind me I found the
rest of the pack, with a newcomer added: a small black greyhound with
pale agate-coloured eyes. He was shivering a little, and his expression
was more timid than that of the others. I noticed that he kept a little
behind them. And still there was not a sound.

I stood there for fully five minutes, the circle about me--waiting, as
they seemed to be waiting. At last I went up to the little golden-brown
dog and stooped to pat him. As I did so, I heard myself laugh. The
little dog did not start, or growl, or take his eyes from me--he simply
slipped back about a yard, and then paused and continued to look at me.
“Oh, hang it!” I exclaimed aloud, and walked across the court toward the
well.

As I advanced, the dogs separated and slid away into different corners
of the court. I examined the urns on the well, tried a locked door or
two, and up and down the dumb facade; then I faced about toward the
chapel. When I turned I perceived that all the dogs had disappeared
except the old pointer, who still watched me from the empty
window-frame. It was rather a relief to be rid of that cloud of
witnesses; and I began to look about me for a way to the back of the
house. “Perhaps there’ll be somebody in the garden,” I thought. I found
a way across the moat, scrambled over a wall smothered in brambles, and
got into the garden. A few lean hydrangeas and geraniums pined in the
flower-beds, and the ancient house looked down on them indifferently.
Its garden side was plainer and severer than the other: the long
granite front, with its few windows and steep roof, looked like
a fortress-prison. I walked around the farther wing, went up some
disjointed steps, and entered the deep twilight of a narrow and
incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide enough for one person to
slip through, and its branches met overhead. It was like the ghost of a
box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to the shadowy greyness of the
avenues. I walked on and on, the branches hitting me in the face and
springing back with a dry rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy
top of the chemin de ronde. I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking
down into the court, which was just below me. Not a human being was
in sight; and neither were the dogs. I found a flight of steps in the
thickness of the wall and went down them; and when I emerged again into
the court, there stood the circle of dogs, the golden-brown one a little
ahead of the others, the black greyhound shivering in the rear.

“Oh, hang it--you uncomfortable beasts, you!” I exclaimed, my voice
startling me with a sudden echo. The dogs stood motionless, watching me.
I knew by this time that they would not try to prevent my approaching
the house, and the knowledge left me free to examine them. I had a
feeling that they must be horribly cowed to be so silent and inert. Yet
they did not look hungry or ill-treated. Their coats were smooth and
they were not thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if
they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked
at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually benumbed their
busy inquisitive natures. And this strange passivity, this almost human
lassitude, seemed to me sadder than the misery of starved and beaten
animals. I should have liked to rouse them for a minute, to coax them
into a game or a scamper; but the longer I looked into their fixed and
weary eyes the more preposterous the idea became. With the windows of
that house looking down on us, how could I have imagined such a thing?
The dogs knew better: THEY knew what the house would tolerate and what
it would not. I even fancied that they knew what was passing through
my mind, and pitied me for my frivolity. But even that feeling probably
reached them through a thick fog of listlessness. I had an idea that
their distance from me was as nothing to my remoteness from them. In the
last analysis, the impression they produced was that of having in common
one memory so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was
worth either a growl or a wag.

“I say,” I broke out abruptly, addressing myself to the dumb circle, “do
you know what you look like, the whole lot of you? You look as if you’d
seen a ghost--that’s how you look! I wonder if there IS a ghost here,
and nobody but you left for it to appear to?” The dogs continued to gaze
at me without moving...


It was dark when I saw Lanrivain’s motor lamps at the cross-roads--and I
wasn’t exactly sorry to see them. I had the sense of having escaped from
the loneliest place in the whole world, and of not liking loneliness--to
that degree--as much as I had imagined I should. My friend had brought
his solicitor back from Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat
and affable stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol...

But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted in the
study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the drawing-room.

“Well--are you going to buy Kerfol?” she asked, tilting up her gay chin
from her embroidery.

“I haven’t decided yet. The fact is, I couldn’t get into the house,” I
said, as if I had simply postponed my decision, and meant to go back for
another look.

“You couldn’t get in? Why, what happened? The family are mad to sell the
place, and the old guardian has orders--”

“Very likely. But the old guardian wasn’t there.”

“What a pity! He must have gone to market. But his daughter--?”

“There was nobody about. At least I saw no one.”

“How extraordinary! Literally nobody?”

“Nobody but a lot of dogs--a whole pack of them--who seemed to have the
place to themselves.”

Madame de Lanrivain let the embroidery slip to her knee and folded her
hands on it. For several minutes she looked at me thoughtfully.

“A pack of dogs--you SAW them?”

“Saw them? I saw nothing else!”

“How many?” She dropped her voice a little. “I’ve always wondered--”

I looked at her with surprise: I had supposed the place to be familiar
to her. “Have you never been to Kerfol?” I asked.

“Oh, yes: often. But never on that day.”

“What day?”

“I’d quite forgotten--and so had Herve, I’m sure. If we’d remembered, we
never should have sent you today--but then, after all, one doesn’t half
believe that sort of thing, does one?”

“What sort of thing?” I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to the
level of hers. Inwardly I was thinking: “I KNEW there was something...”

Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring smile.
“Didn’t Herve tell you the story of Kerfol? An ancestor of his was mixed
up in it. You know every Breton house has its ghost-story; and some of
them are rather unpleasant.”

“Yes--but those dogs?” I insisted.

“Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. At least, the peasants say
there’s one day in the year when a lot of dogs appear there; and that
day the keeper and his daughter go off to Morlaix and get drunk. The
women in Brittany drink dreadfully.” She stooped to match a silk; then
she lifted her charming inquisitive Parisian face: “Did you REALLY see a
lot of dogs? There isn’t one at Kerfol,” she said.




II


Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the back
of an upper shelf of his library.

“Yes--here it is. What does it call itself? A History of the Assizes
of the Duchy of Brittany. Quimper, 1702. The book was written about a
hundred years later than the Kerfol affair; but I believe the account
is transcribed pretty literally from the judicial records. Anyhow, it’s
queer reading. And there’s a Herve de Lanrivain mixed up in it--not
exactly MY style, as you’ll see. But then he’s only a collateral. Here,
take the book up to bed with you. I don’t exactly remember the details;
but after you’ve read it I’ll bet anything you’ll leave your light
burning all night!”

I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it was
chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my reading. The
account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of the lord of Kerfol,
was long and closely printed. It was, as my friend had said, probably an
almost literal transcription of what took place in the court-room;
and the trial lasted nearly a month. Besides, the type of the book was
detestable...

At first I thought of translating the old record literally. But it
is full of wearisome repetitions, and the main lines of the story are
forever straying off into side issues. So I have tried to disentangle
it, and give it here in a simpler form. At times, however, I have
reverted to the text because no other words could have conveyed so
exactly the sense of what I felt at Kerfol; and nowhere have I added
anything of my own.




III


It was in the year 16-- that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain of
Kerfol, went to the pardon of Locronan to perform his religious duties.
He was a rich and powerful noble, then in his sixty-second year, but
hale and sturdy, a great horseman and hunter and a pious man. So all
his neighbours attested. In appearance he seems to have been short
and broad, with a swarthy face, legs slightly bowed from the saddle, a
hanging nose and broad hands with black hairs on them. He had married
young and lost his wife and son soon after, and since then had lived
alone at Kerfol. Twice a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a
handsome house by the river, and spent a week or ten days there; and
occasionally he rode to Rennes on business. Witnesses were found to
declare that during these absences he led a life different from the one
he was known to lead at Kerfol, where he busied himself with his estate,
attended mass daily, and found his only amusement in hunting the wild
boar and water-fowl. But these rumours are not particularly
relevant, and it is certain that among people of his own class in the
neighbourhood he passed for a stern and even austere man, observant of
his religious obligations, and keeping strictly to himself. There was
no talk of any familiarity with the women on his estate, though at that
time the nobility were very free with their peasants. Some people said
he had never looked at a woman since his wife’s death; but such things
are hard to prove, and the evidence on this point was not worth much.

Well, in his sixty-second year, Yves de Cornault went to the pardon at
Locronan, and saw there a young lady of Douarnenez, who had ridden over
pillion behind her father to do her duty to the saint. Her name was Anne
de Barrigan, and she came of good old Breton stock, but much less
great and powerful than that of Yves de Cornault; and her father had
squandered his fortune at cards, and lived almost like a peasant in his
little granite manor on the moors... I have said I would add nothing of
my own to this bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt
myself here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate
of Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also
dismounting there. I take my description from a rather rare thing: a
faded drawing in red crayon, sober and truthful enough to be by a late
pupil of the Clouets, which hangs in Lanrivain’s study, and is said to
be a portrait of Anne de Barrigan. It is unsigned and has no mark of
identity but the initials A. B., and the date 16--, the year after her
marriage. It represents a young woman with a small oval face, almost
pointed, yet wide enough for a full mouth with a tender depression at
the corners. The nose is small, and the eyebrows are set rather high,
far apart, and as lightly pencilled as the eyebrows in a Chinese
painting. The forehead is high and serious, and the hair, which one
feels to be fine and thick and fair, drawn off it and lying close like
a cap. The eyes are neither large nor small, hazel probably, with a look
at once shy and steady. A pair of beautiful long hands are crossed below
the lady’s breast...

The chaplain of Kerfol, and other witnesses, averred that when the Baron
came back from Locronan he jumped from his horse, ordered another to be
instantly saddled, called to a young page come with him, and rode away
that same evening to the south. His steward followed the next morning
with coffers laden on a pair of pack mules. The following week Yves de
Cornault rode back to Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants, and
told them he was to be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of
Douarnenez. And on All Saints’ Day the marriage took place.

As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to show that
they passed happily for the couple. No one was found to say that Yves
de Cornault had been unkind to his wife, and it was plain to all that
he was content with his bargain. Indeed, it was admitted by the chaplain
and other witnesses for the prosecution that the young lady had a
softening influence on her husband, and that he became less exacting
with his tenants, less harsh to peasants and dependents, and less
subject to the fits of gloomy silence which had darkened his widow-hood.
As to his wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her
behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her husband was
away on business at Rennes or Morlaix--whither she was never taken--she
was not allowed so much as to walk in the park unaccompanied. But no
one asserted that she was unhappy, though one servant-woman said she
had surprised her crying, and had heard her say that she was a woman
accursed to have no child, and nothing in life to call her own. But
that was a natural enough feeling in a wife attached to her husband; and
certainly it must have been a great grief to Yves de Cornault that
she gave him no son. Yet he never made her feel her childlessness as a
reproach--she herself admits this in her evidence--but seemed to try to
make her forget it by showering gifts and favours on her. Rich though
he was, he had never been open-handed; but nothing was too fine for
his wife, in the way of silks or gems or linen, or whatever else she
fancied. Every wandering merchant was welcome at Kerfol, and when the
master was called away he never came back without bringing his wife
a handsome present--something curious and particular--from Morlaix or
Rennes or Quimper. One of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination,
an interesting list of one year’s gifts, which I copy. From Morlaix, a
carved ivory junk, with Chinamen at the oars, that a strange sailor had
brought back as a votive offering for Notre Dame de la Clarte, above
Ploumanac’h; from Quimper, an embroidered gown, worked by the nuns of
the Assumption; from Rennes, a silver rose that opened and showed an
amber Virgin with a crown of garnets; from Morlaix, again, a length
of Damascus velvet shot with gold, bought of a Jew from Syria; and for
Michaelmas that same year, from Rennes, a necklet or bracelet of round
stones--emeralds and pearls and rubies--strung like beads on a gold
wire. This was the present that pleased the lady best, the woman said.
Later on, as it happened, it was produced at the trial, and appears to
have struck the Judges and the public as a curious and valuable jewel.

The very same winter, the Baron absented himself again, this time as far
as Bordeaux, and on his return he brought his wife something even odder
and prettier than the bracelet. It was a winter evening when he rode up
to Kerfol and, walking into the hall, found her sitting listlessly by
the fire, her chin on her hand, looking into the fire. He carried a
velvet box in his hand and, setting it down on the hearth, lifted the
lid and let out a little golden-brown dog.

Anne de Cornault exclaimed with pleasure as the little creature bounded
toward her. “Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!” she cried as she
picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her shoulders and looked at
her with eyes “like a Christian’s.” After that she would never have
it out of her sight, and petted and talked to it as if it had been a
child--as indeed it was the nearest thing to a child she was to know.
Yves de Cornault was much pleased with his purchase. The dog had been
brought to him by a sailor from an East India merchantman, and the
sailor had bought it of a pilgrim in a bazaar at Jaffa, who had stolen
it from a nobleman’s wife in China: a perfectly permissible thing to do,
since the pilgrim was a Christian and the nobleman a heathen doomed to
hellfire. Yves de Cornault had paid a long price for the dog, for they
were beginning to be in demand at the French court, and the sailor knew
he had got hold of a good thing; but Anne’s pleasure was so great that,
to see her laugh and play with the little animal, her husband would
doubtless have given twice the sum.


So far, all the evidence is at one, and the narrative plain sailing;
but now the steering becomes difficult. I will try to keep as nearly as
possible to Anne’s own statements; though toward the end, poor thing...

Well, to go back. The very year after the little brown dog was brought
to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault, one winter night, was found dead at the
head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife’s rooms to
a door opening on the court. It was his wife who found him and gave the
alarm, so distracted, poor wretch, with fear and horror--for his blood
was all over her--that at first the roused household could not make out
what she was saying, and thought she had gone suddenly mad. But there,
sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay her husband, stone dead, and
head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down to the steps
below him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face
and throat, as if with a dull weapon; and one of his legs had a deep
tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his death. But
how did he come there, and who had murdered him?

His wife declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing
his cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was
immediately questioned. In the first place, it was proved that from her
room she could not have heard the struggle on the stairs, owing to the
thickness of the walls and the length of the intervening passage; then
it was evident that she had not been in bed and asleep, since she was
dressed when she roused the house, and her bed had not been slept in.
Moreover, the door at the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and the key in
the lock; and it was noticed by the chaplain (an observant man) that the
dress she wore was stained with blood about the knees, and that there
were traces of small blood-stained hands low down on the staircase
walls, so that it was conjectured that she had really been at the
postern-door when her husband fell and, feeling her way up to him in the
darkness on her hands and knees, had been stained by his blood dripping
down on her. Of course it was argued on the other side that the
blood-marks on her dress might have been caused by her kneeling down by
her husband when she rushed out of her room; but there was the open door
below, and the fact that the fingermarks in the staircase all pointed
upward.

The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of
its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that
Herve de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been
arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon
came forward to say that it was known throughout the country that
Lanrivain had formerly been on good terms with the lady of Cornault; but
that he had been absent from Brittany for over a year, and people had
ceased to associate their names. The witnesses who made this statement
were not of a very reputable sort. One was an old herb-gatherer
suspected of witch-craft, another a drunken clerk from a neighbouring
parish, the third a half-witted shepherd who could be made to say
anything; and it was clear that the prosecution was not satisfied
with its case, and would have liked to find more definite proof of
Lanrivain’s complicity than the statement of the herb-gatherer, who
swore to having seen him climbing the wall of the park on the night of
the murder. One way of patching out incomplete proofs in those days was
to put some sort of pressure, moral or physical, on the accused person.
It is not clear what pressure was put on Anne de Cornault; but on the
third day, when she was brought into court, she “appeared weak and
wandering,” and after being encouraged to collect herself and speak
the truth, on her honour and the wounds of her Blessed Redeemer, she
confessed that she had in fact gone down the stairs to speak with Herve
de Lanrivain (who denied everything), and had been surprised there by
the sound of her husband’s fall. That was better; and the prosecution
rubbed its hands with satisfaction. The satisfaction increased when
various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to say--with apparent
sincerity--that during the year or two preceding his death their master
had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits
of brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before his
second marriage. This seemed to show that things had not been going well
at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say that there had been any
signs of open disagreement between husband and wife.

Anne de Cornault, when questioned as to her reason for going down at
night to open the door to Herve de Lanrivain, made an answer which must
have sent a smile around the court. She said it was because she was
lonely and wanted to talk with the young man. Was this the only reason?
she was asked; and replied: “Yes, by the Cross over your Lordships’
heads.” “But why at midnight?” the court asked. “Because I could see him
in no other way.” I can see the exchange of glances across the ermine
collars under the Crucifix.

Anne de Cornault, further questioned, said that her married life had
been extremely lonely: “desolate” was the word she used. It was true
that her husband seldom spoke harshly to her; but there were days
when he did not speak at all. It was true that he had never struck or
threatened her; but he kept her like a prisoner at Kerfol, and when he
rode away to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes he set so close a watch on
her that she could not pick a flower in the garden without having a
waiting-woman at her heels. “I am no Queen, to need such honours,” she
once said to him; and he had answered that a man who has a treasure does
not leave the key in the lock when he goes out. “Then take me with you,”
 she urged; but to this he said that towns were pernicious places, and
young wives better off at their own firesides.

“But what did you want to say to Herve de Lanrivain?” the court asked;
and she answered: “To ask him to take me away.”

“Ah--you confess that you went down to him with adulterous thoughts?”

“No.”

“Then why did you want him to take you away?”

“Because I was afraid for my life.”

“Of whom were you afraid?”

“Of my husband.”

“Why were you afraid of your husband?”

“Because he had strangled my little dog.”

Another smile must have passed around the court-room: in days when any
nobleman had a right to hang his peasants--and most of them exercised
it--pinching a pet animal’s wind-pipe was nothing to make a fuss about.

At this point one of the Judges, who appears to have had a certain
sympathy for the accused, suggested that she should be allowed to
explain herself in her own way; and she thereupon made the following
statement.

The first years of her marriage had been lonely; but her husband had
not been unkind to her. If she had had a child she would not have been
unhappy; but the days were long, and it rained too much.

It was true that her husband, whenever he went away and left her,
brought her a handsome present on his return; but this did not make up
for the loneliness. At least nothing had, till he brought her the little
brown dog from the East: after that she was much less unhappy. Her
husband seemed pleased that she was so fond of the dog; he gave her
leave to put her jewelled bracelet around its neck, and to keep it
always with her.

One day she had fallen asleep in her room, with the dog at her feet, as
his habit was. Her feet were bare and resting on his back. Suddenly she
was waked by her husband: he stood beside her, smiling not unkindly.

“You look like my great-grandmother, Juliane de Cornault, lying in the
chapel with her feet on a little dog,” he said.

The analogy sent a chill through her, but she laughed and answered:
“Well, when I am dead you must put me beside her, carved in marble, with
my dog at my feet.”

“Oho--we’ll wait and see,” he said, laughing also, but with his black
brows close together. “The dog is the emblem of fidelity.”

“And do you doubt my right to lie with mine at my feet?”

“When I’m in doubt I find out,” he answered. “I am an old man,” he
added, “and people say I make you lead a lonely life. But I swear you
shall have your monument if you earn it.”

“And I swear to be faithful,” she returned, “if only for the sake of
having my little dog at my feet.”

Not long afterward he went on business to the Quimper Assizes; and while
he was away his aunt, the widow of a great nobleman of the duchy, came
to spend a night at Kerfol on her way to the pardon of Ste. Barbe. She
was a woman of great piety and consequence, and much respected by Yves
de Cornault, and when she proposed to Anne to go with her to Ste. Barbe
no one could object, and even the chaplain declared himself in favour of
the pilgrimage. So Anne set out for Ste. Barbe, and there for the first
time she talked with Herve de Lanrivain. He had come once or twice to
Kerfol with his father, but she had never before exchanged a dozen words
with him. They did not talk for more than five minutes now: it was under
the chestnuts, as the procession was coming out of the chapel. He said:
“I pity you,” and she was surprised, for she had not supposed that any
one thought her an object of pity. He added: “Call for me when you need
me,” and she smiled a little, but was glad afterward, and thought often
of the meeting.

She confessed to having seen him three times afterward: not more. How
or where she would not say--one had the impression that she feared to
implicate some one. Their meetings had been rare and brief; and at the
last he had told her that he was starting the next day for a foreign
country, on a mission which was not without peril and might keep him for
many months absent. He asked her for a remembrance, and she had none
to give him but the collar about the little dog’s neck. She was sorry
afterward that she had given it, but he was so unhappy at going that she
had not had the courage to refuse.

Her husband was away at the time. When he returned a few days later
he picked up the little dog to pet it, and noticed that its collar was
missing. His wife told him that the dog had lost it in the undergrowth
of the park, and that she and her maids had hunted a whole day for it.
It was true, she explained to the court, that she had made the maids
search for the necklet--they all believed the dog had lost it in the
park...

Her husband made no comment, and that evening at supper he was in his
usual mood, between good and bad: you could never tell which. He talked
a good deal, describing what he had seen and done at Rennes; but now
and then he stopped and looked hard at her; and when she went to bed she
found her little dog strangled on her pillow. The little thing was
dead, but still warm; she stooped to lift it, and her distress turned to
horror when she discovered that it had been strangled by twisting twice
round its throat the necklet she had given to Lanrivain.

The next morning at dawn she buried the dog in the garden, and hid the
necklet in her breast. She said nothing to her husband, then or later,
and he said nothing to her; but that day he had a peasant hanged for
stealing a faggot in the park, and the next day he nearly beat to death
a young horse he was breaking.

Winter set in, and the short days passed, and the long nights, one by
one; and she heard nothing of Herve de Lanrivain. It might be that
her husband had killed him; or merely that he had been robbed of the
necklet. Day after day by the hearth among the spinning maids, night
after night alone on her bed, she wondered and trembled. Sometimes at
table her husband looked across at her and smiled; and then she felt
sure that Lanrivain was dead. She dared not try to get news of him, for
she was sure her husband would find out if she did: she had an idea
that he could find out anything. Even when a witch-woman who was a noted
seer, and could show you the whole world in her crystal, came to the
castle for a night’s shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held
back. The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves
de Cornault’s absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of
performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog
with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have
been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she
took it from them. That evening her husband came back, and when she went
to bed she found the dog strangled on her pillow.

After that she said to herself that she would never have another dog;
but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found whining at
the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the maids to speak of
him to her husband. She hid him in a room that no one went to, smuggled
food to him from her own plate, made him a warm bed to lie on and petted
him like a child.

Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the greyhound
strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said nothing, and
resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger she would never
bring him into the castle; but one day she found a young sheep-dog, a
brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying with a broken leg in the snow
of the park. Yves de Cornault was at Rennes, and she brought the dog
in, warmed and fed it, tied up its leg and hid it in the castle till
her husband’s return. The day before, she gave it to a peasant woman
who lived a long way off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say
nothing; but that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door,
and when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped up
on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and the next
morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant woman when she
heard her husband ride into the court. She shut the dog in a chest and
went down to receive him. An hour or two later, when she returned to her
room, the puppy lay strangled on her pillow...

After that she dared not make a pet of any other dog; and her loneliness
became almost unendurable. Sometimes, when she crossed the court of
the castle, and thought no one was looking, she stopped to pat the old
pointer at the gate. But one day as she was caressing him her husband
came out of the chapel; and the next day the old dog was gone...

This curious narrative was not told in one sitting of the court, or
received without impatience and incredulous comment. It was plain that
the Judges were surprised by its puerility, and that it did not help the
accused in the eyes of the public. It was an odd tale, certainly; but
what did it prove? That Yves de Cornault disliked dogs, and that his
wife, to gratify her own fancy, persistently ignored this dislike.
As for pleading this trivial disagreement as an excuse for her
relations--whatever their nature--with her supposed accomplice, the
argument was so absurd that her own lawyer manifestly regretted having
let her make use of it, and tried several times to cut short her story.
But she went on to the end, with a kind of hypnotized insistence, as
though the scenes she evoked were so real to her that she had forgotten
where she was and imagined herself to be re-living them.

At length the Judge who had previously shown a certain kindness to her
said (leaning forward a little, one may suppose, from his row of dozing
colleagues): “Then you would have us believe that you murdered your
husband because he would not let you keep a pet dog?”

“I did not murder my husband.”

“Who did, then? Herve de Lanrivain?”

“No.”

“Who then? Can you tell us?”

“Yes, I can tell you. The dogs--” At that point she was carried out of
the court in a swoon.

                   .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

It was evident that her lawyer tried to get her to abandon this line
of defense. Possibly her explanation, whatever it was, had seemed
convincing when she poured it out to him in the heat of their first
private colloquy; but now that it was exposed to the cold daylight of
judicial scrutiny, and the banter of the town, he was thoroughly ashamed
of it, and would have sacrificed her without a scruple to save his
professional reputation. But the obstinate Judge--who perhaps, after
all, was more inquisitive than kindly--evidently wanted to hear
the story out, and she was ordered, the next day, to continue her
deposition.

She said that after the disappearance of the old watch-dog nothing
particular happened for a month or two. Her husband was much as usual:
she did not remember any special incident. But one evening a pedlar
woman came to the castle and was selling trinkets to the maids. She had
no heart for trinkets, but she stood looking on while the women made
their choice. And then, she did not know how, but the pedlar coaxed her
into buying for herself an odd pear-shaped pomander with a strong scent
in it--she had once seen something of the kind on a gypsy woman. She had
no desire for the pomander, and did not know why she had bought it. The
pedlar said that whoever wore it had the power to read the future;
but she did not really believe that, or care much either. However, she
bought the thing and took it up to her room, where she sat turning it
about in her hand. Then the strange scent attracted her and she began to
wonder what kind of spice was in the box. She opened it and found a grey
bean rolled in a strip of paper; and on the paper she saw a sign she
knew, and a message from Herve de Lanrivain, saying that he was at home
again and would be at the door in the court that night after the moon
had set...

She burned the paper and then sat down to think. It was nightfall, and
her husband was at home... She had no way of warning Lanrivain, and
there was nothing to do but to wait...

At this point I fancy the drowsy courtroom beginning to wake up. Even
to the oldest hand on the bench there must have been a certain aesthetic
relish in picturing the feelings of a woman on receiving such a message
at night-fall from a man living twenty miles away, to whom she had no
means of sending a warning...

She was not a clever woman, I imagine; and as the first result of her
cogitation she appears to have made the mistake of being, that evening,
too kind to her husband. She could not ply him with wine, according to
the traditional expedient, for though he drank heavily at times he had
a strong head; and when he drank beyond its strength it was because
he chose to, and not because a woman coaxed him. Not his wife, at any
rate--she was an old story by now. As I read the case, I fancy there was
no feeling for her left in him but the hatred occasioned by his supposed
dishonour.

At any rate, she tried to call up her old graces; but early in the
evening he complained of pains and fever, and left the hall to go up to
his room. His servant carried him a cup of hot wine, and brought back
word that he was sleeping and not to be disturbed; and an hour later,
when Anne lifted the tapestry and listened at his door, she heard his
loud regular breathing. She thought it might be a feint, and stayed a
long time barefooted in the cold passage, her ear to the crack; but the
breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a
man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in
the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park. The sky
was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the night was pitch
black. She knew the time had come, and stole along the passage, past her
husband’s door--where she stopped again to listen to his breathing--to
the top of the stairs. There she paused a moment, and assured herself
that no one was following her; then she began to go down the stairs in
the darkness. They were so steep and winding that she had to go very
slowly, for fear of stumbling. Her one thought was to get the door
unbolted, tell Lanrivain to make his escape, and hasten back to her
room. She had tried the bolt earlier in the evening, and managed to put
a little grease on it; but nevertheless, when she drew it, it gave a
squeak... not loud, but it made her heart stop; and the next minute,
overhead, she heard a noise...

“What noise?” the prosecution interposed.

“My husband’s voice calling out my name and cursing me.”

“What did you hear after that?”

“A terrible scream and a fall.”

“Where was Herve de Lanrivain at this time?”

“He was standing outside in the court. I just made him out in the
darkness. I told him for God’s sake to go, and then I pushed the door
shut.”

“What did you do next?”

“I stood at the foot of the stairs and listened.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard dogs snarling and panting.” (Visible discouragement of the
bench, boredom of the public, and exasperation of the lawyer for the
defense. Dogs again--! But the inquisitive Judge insisted.)

“What dogs?”

She bent her head and spoke so low that she had to be told to repeat her
answer: “I don’t know.”

“How do you mean--you don’t know?”

“I don’t know what dogs...”

The Judge again intervened: “Try to tell us exactly what happened. How
long did you remain at the foot of the stairs?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“And what was going on meanwhile overhead?”

“The dogs kept on snarling and panting. Once or twice he cried out. I
think he moaned once. Then he was quiet.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I heard a sound like the noise of a pack when the wolf is thrown
to them--gulping and lapping.”

(There was a groan of disgust and repulsion through the court, and
another attempted intervention by the distracted lawyer. But the
inquisitive Judge was still inquisitive.)

“And all the while you did not go up?”

“Yes--I went up then--to drive them off.”

“The dogs?”

“Yes.”

“Well--?”

“When I got there it was quite dark. I found my husband’s flint and
steel and struck a spark. I saw him lying there. He was dead.”

“And the dogs?”

“The dogs were gone.”

“Gone--where to?”

“I don’t know. There was no way out--and there were no dogs at Kerfol.”

She straightened herself to her full height, threw her arms above her
head, and fell down on the stone floor with a long scream. There was a
moment of confusion in the court-room. Some one on the bench was heard
to say: “This is clearly a case for the ecclesiastical authorities”--and
the prisoner’s lawyer doubtless jumped at the suggestion.

After this, the trial loses itself in a maze of cross-questioning and
squabbling. Every witness who was called corroborated Anne de Cornault’s
statement that there were no dogs at Kerfol: had been none for several
months. The master of the house had taken a dislike to dogs, there was
no denying it. But, on the other hand, at the inquest, there had been
long and bitter discussion as to the nature of the dead man’s wounds.
One of the surgeons called in had spoken of marks that looked like
bites. The suggestion of witchcraft was revived, and the opposing
lawyers hurled tomes of necromancy at each other.

At last Anne de Cornault was brought back into court--at the instance of
the same Judge--and asked if she knew where the dogs she spoke of could
have come from. On the body of her Redeemer she swore that she did not.
Then the Judge put his final question: “If the dogs you think you heard
had been known to you, do you think you would have recognized them by
their barking?”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognize them?”

“Yes.”

“What dogs do you take them to have been?”

“My dead dogs,” she said in a whisper... She was taken out of court,
not to reappear there again. There was some kind of ecclesiastical
investigation, and the end of the business was that the Judges disagreed
with each other, and with the ecclesiastical committee, and that Anne de
Cornault was finally handed over to the keeping of her husband’s family,
who shut her up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died
many years later, a harmless madwoman.

So ends her story. As for that of Herve de Lanrivain, I had only to
apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details. The
evidence against the young man being insufficient, and his family
influence in the duchy considerable, he was set free, and left soon
afterward for Paris. He was probably in no mood for a worldly life, and
he appears to have come almost immediately under the influence of the
famous M. Arnauld d’Andilly and the gentlemen of Port Royal. A year or
two later he was received into their Order, and without achieving any
particular distinction he followed its good and evil fortunes till his
death some twenty years later. Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by
a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a
narrow brow. Poor Herve de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as
I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the
Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate. After all, in the
course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved
romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal...

The End





MRS. MANSTEY’S VIEW

As first published in Scribner’s Magazine, July, 1891



The view from Mrs. Manstey’s window was not a striking one, but to her
at least it was full of interest and beauty. Mrs. Manstey occupied the
back room on the third floor of a New York boarding-house, in a street
where the ash-barrels lingered late on the sidewalk and the gaps in the
pavement would have staggered a Quintus Curtius. She was the widow of a
clerk in a large wholesale house, and his death had left her alone, for
her only daughter had married in California, and could not afford the
long journey to New York to see her mother. Mrs. Manstey, perhaps, might
have joined her daughter in the West, but they had now been so many
years apart that they had ceased to feel any need of each other’s
society, and their intercourse had long been limited to the exchange of
a few perfunctory letters, written with indifference by the daughter,
and with difficulty by Mrs. Manstey, whose right hand was growing
stiff with gout. Even had she felt a stronger desire for her daughter’s
companionship, Mrs. Manstey’s increasing infirmity, which caused her to
dread the three flights of stairs between her room and the street, would
have given her pause on the eve of undertaking so long a journey; and
without perhaps, formulating these reasons she had long since accepted
as a matter of course her solitary life in New York.

She was, indeed, not quite lonely, for a few friends still toiled up now
and then to her room; but their visits grew rare as the years went by.
Mrs. Manstey had never been a sociable woman, and during her husband’s
lifetime his companionship had been all-sufficient to her. For many
years she had cherished a desire to live in the country, to have a
hen-house and a garden; but this longing had faded with age, leaving
only in the breast of the uncommunicative old woman a vague tenderness
for plants and animals. It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her
cling so fervently to her view from her window, a view in which the
most optimistic eye would at first have failed to discover anything
admirable.

Mrs. Manstey, from her coign of vantage (a slightly projecting
bow-window where she nursed an ivy and a succession of unwholesome-looking
bulbs), looked out first upon the yard of her own dwelling, of which,
however, she could get but a restricted glimpse. Still, her gaze took in
the topmost boughs of the ailanthus below her window, and she knew how
early each year the clump of dicentra strung its bending stalk with
hearts of pink.

But of greater interest were the yards beyond. Being for the most part
attached to boarding-houses they were in a state of chronic untidiness
and fluttering, on certain days of the week, with miscellaneous garments
and frayed table-cloths. In spite of this Mrs. Manstey found much to
admire in the long vista which she commanded. Some of the yards were,
indeed, but stony wastes, with grass in the cracks of the pavement and
no shade in spring save that afforded by the intermittent leafage of the
clothes-lines. These yards Mrs. Manstey disapproved of, but the others,
the green ones, she loved. She had grown used to their disorder; the
broken barrels, the empty bottles and paths unswept no longer annoyed
her; hers was the happy faculty of dwelling on the pleasanter side of
the prospect before her.

In the very next enclosure did not a magnolia open its hard white
flowers against the watery blue of April? And was there not, a little
way down the line, a fence foamed over every May be lilac waves of
wistaria? Farther still, a horse-chestnut lifted its candelabra of buff
and pink blossoms above broad fans of foliage; while in the opposite
yard June was sweet with the breath of a neglected syringa, which
persisted in growing in spite of the countless obstacles opposed to its
welfare.

But if nature occupied the front rank in Mrs. Manstey’s view, there was
much of a more personal character to interest her in the aspect of the
houses and their inmates. She deeply disapproved of the mustard-colored
curtains which had lately been hung in the doctor’s window opposite; but
she glowed with pleasure when the house farther down had its old bricks
washed with a coat of paint. The occupants of the houses did not often
show themselves at the back windows, but the servants were always in
sight. Noisy slatterns, Mrs. Manstey pronounced the greater number;
she knew their ways and hated them. But to the quiet cook in the newly
painted house, whose mistress bullied her, and who secretly fed the
stray cats at nightfall, Mrs. Manstey’s warmest sympathies were given.
On one occasion her feelings were racked by the neglect of a housemaid,
who for two days forgot to feed the parrot committed to her care. On the
third day, Mrs. Manstey, in spite of her gouty hand, had just penned a
letter, beginning: “Madam, it is now three days since your parrot has
been fed,” when the forgetful maid appeared at the window with a cup of
seed in her hand.

But in Mrs. Manstey’s more meditative moods it was the narrowing
perspective of far-off yards which pleased her best. She loved, at
twilight, when the distant brown-stone spire seemed melting in the
fluid yellow of the west, to lose herself in vague memories of a trip
to Europe, made years ago, and now reduced in her mind’s eye to a pale
phantasmagoria of indistinct steeples and dreamy skies. Perhaps at
heart Mrs. Manstey was an artist; at all events she was sensible of many
changes of color unnoticed by the average eye, and dear to her as the
green of early spring was the black lattice of branches against a cold
sulphur sky at the close of a snowy day. She enjoyed, also, the sunny
thaws of March, when patches of earth showed through the snow, like
ink-spots spreading on a sheet of white blotting-paper; and, better
still, the haze of boughs, leafless but swollen, which replaced the
clear-cut tracery of winter. She even watched with a certain interest
the trail of smoke from a far-off factory chimney, and missed a detail
in the landscape when the factory was closed and the smoke disappeared.

Mrs. Manstey, in the long hours which she spent at her window, was not
idle. She read a little, and knitted numberless stockings; but the view
surrounded and shaped her life as the sea does a lonely island. When her
rare callers came it was difficult for her to detach herself from the
contemplation of the opposite window-washing, or the scrutiny of certain
green points in a neighboring flower-bed which might, or might not, turn
into hyacinths, while she feigned an interest in her visitor’s anecdotes
about some unknown grandchild. Mrs. Manstey’s real friends were the
denizens of the yards, the hyacinths, the magnolia, the green parrot,
the maid who fed the cats, the doctor who studied late behind his
mustard-colored curtains; and the confidant of her tenderer musings was
the church-spire floating in the sunset.

One April day, as she sat in her usual place, with knitting cast aside
and eyes fixed on the blue sky mottled with round clouds, a knock at the
door announced the entrance of her landlady. Mrs. Manstey did not
care for her landlady, but she submitted to her visits with ladylike
resignation. To-day, however, it seemed harder than usual to turn from
the blue sky and the blossoming magnolia to Mrs. Sampson’s unsuggestive
face, and Mrs. Manstey was conscious of a distinct effort as she did so.

“The magnolia is out earlier than usual this year, Mrs. Sampson,” she
remarked, yielding to a rare impulse, for she seldom alluded to the
absorbing interest of her life. In the first place it was a topic not
likely to appeal to her visitors and, besides, she lacked the power of
expression and could not have given utterance to her feelings had she
wished to.

“The what, Mrs. Manstey?” inquired the landlady, glancing about the room
as if to find there the explanation of Mrs. Manstey’s statement.

“The magnolia in the next yard--in Mrs. Black’s yard,” Mrs. Manstey
repeated.

“Is it, indeed? I didn’t know there was a magnolia there,” said Mrs.
Sampson, carelessly. Mrs. Manstey looked at her; she did not know that
there was a magnolia in the next yard!

“By the way,” Mrs. Sampson continued, “speaking of Mrs. Black reminds me
that the work on the extension is to begin next week.”

“The what?” it was Mrs. Manstey’s turn to ask.

“The extension,” said Mrs. Sampson, nodding her head in the direction of
the ignored magnolia. “You knew, of course, that Mrs. Black was going to
build an extension to her house? Yes, ma’am. I hear it is to run right
back to the end of the yard. How she can afford to build an extension in
these hard times I don’t see; but she always was crazy about building.
She used to keep a boarding-house in Seventeenth Street, and she nearly
ruined herself then by sticking out bow-windows and what not; I should
have thought that would have cured her of building, but I guess it’s a
disease, like drink. Anyhow, the work is to begin on Monday.”

Mrs. Manstey had grown pale. She always spoke slowly, so the landlady
did not heed the long pause which followed. At last Mrs. Manstey said:
“Do you know how high the extension will be?”

“That’s the most absurd part of it. The extension is to be built right
up to the roof of the main building; now, did you ever?”

Mrs. Manstey paused again. “Won’t it be a great annoyance to you, Mrs.
Sampson?” she asked.

“I should say it would. But there’s no help for it; if people have got
a mind to build extensions there’s no law to prevent ’em, that I’m aware
of.” Mrs. Manstey, knowing this, was silent. “There is no help for it,”
 Mrs. Sampson repeated, “but if I AM a church member, I wouldn’t be so
sorry if it ruined Eliza Black. Well, good-day, Mrs. Manstey; I’m glad
to find you so comfortable.”

So comfortable--so comfortable! Left to herself the old woman turned
once more to the window. How lovely the view was that day! The blue sky
with its round clouds shed a brightness over everything; the ailanthus
had put on a tinge of yellow-green, the hyacinths were budding,
the magnolia flowers looked more than ever like rosettes carved in
alabaster. Soon the wistaria would bloom, then the horse-chestnut; but
not for her. Between her eyes and them a barrier of brick and mortar
would swiftly rise; presently even the spire would disappear, and all
her radiant world be blotted out. Mrs. Manstey sent away untouched the
dinner-tray brought to her that evening. She lingered in the window
until the windy sunset died in bat-colored dusk; then, going to bed, she
lay sleepless all night.

Early the next day she was up and at the window. It was raining, but
even through the slanting gray gauze the scene had its charm--and then
the rain was so good for the trees. She had noticed the day before that
the ailanthus was growing dusty.

“Of course I might move,” said Mrs. Manstey aloud, and turning from the
window she looked about her room. She might move, of course; so might
she be flayed alive; but she was not likely to survive either operation.
The room, though far less important to her happiness than the view, was
as much a part of her existence. She had lived in it seventeen years.
She knew every stain on the wall-paper, every rent in the carpet; the
light fell in a certain way on her engravings, her books had grown
shabby on their shelves, her bulbs and ivy were used to their window
and knew which way to lean to the sun. “We are all too old to move,” she
said.

That afternoon it cleared. Wet and radiant the blue reappeared
through torn rags of cloud; the ailanthus sparkled; the earth in the
flower-borders looked rich and warm. It was Thursday, and on Monday the
building of the extension was to begin.

On Sunday afternoon a card was brought to Mrs. Black, as she was engaged
in gathering up the fragments of the boarders’ dinner in the basement.
The card, black-edged, bore Mrs. Manstey’s name.

“One of Mrs. Sampson’s boarders; wants to move, I suppose. Well, I can
give her a room next year in the extension. Dinah,” said Mrs. Black,
“tell the lady I’ll be upstairs in a minute.”

Mrs. Black found Mrs. Manstey standing in the long parlor garnished with
statuettes and antimacassars; in that house she could not sit down.

Stooping hurriedly to open the register, which let out a cloud of dust,
Mrs. Black advanced on her visitor.

“I’m happy to meet you, Mrs. Manstey; take a seat, please,” the landlady
remarked in her prosperous voice, the voice of a woman who can afford to
build extensions. There was no help for it; Mrs. Manstey sat down.

“Is there anything I can do for you, ma’am?” Mrs. Black continued. “My
house is full at present, but I am going to build an extension, and--”

“It is about the extension that I wish to speak,” said Mrs. Manstey,
suddenly. “I am a poor woman, Mrs. Black, and I have never been a
happy one. I shall have to talk about myself first to--to make you
understand.”

Mrs. Black, astonished but imperturbable, bowed at this parenthesis.

“I never had what I wanted,” Mrs. Manstey continued. “It was always one
disappointment after another. For years I wanted to live in the country.
I dreamed and dreamed about it; but we never could manage it. There was
no sunny window in our house, and so all my plants died. My daughter
married years ago and went away--besides, she never cared for the same
things. Then my husband died and I was left alone. That was seventeen
years ago. I went to live at Mrs. Sampson’s, and I have been there ever
since. I have grown a little infirm, as you see, and I don’t get
out often; only on fine days, if I am feeling very well. So you can
understand my sitting a great deal in my window--the back window on the
third floor--”

“Well, Mrs. Manstey,” said Mrs. Black, liberally, “I could give you a
back room, I dare say; one of the new rooms in the ex--”

“But I don’t want to move; I can’t move,” said Mrs. Manstey, almost with
a scream. “And I came to tell you that if you build that extension I
shall have no view from my window--no view! Do you understand?”

Mrs. Black thought herself face to face with a lunatic, and she had
always heard that lunatics must be humored.

“Dear me, dear me,” she remarked, pushing her chair back a little way,
“that is too bad, isn’t it? Why, I never thought of that. To be sure,
the extension WILL interfere with your view, Mrs. Manstey.”

“You do understand?” Mrs. Manstey gasped.

“Of course I do. And I’m real sorry about it, too. But there, don’t you
worry, Mrs. Manstey. I guess we can fix that all right.”

Mrs. Manstey rose from her seat, and Mrs. Black slipped toward the door.

“What do you mean by fixing it? Do you mean that I can induce you to
change your mind about the extension? Oh, Mrs. Black, listen to me. I
have two thousand dollars in the bank and I could manage, I know I could
manage, to give you a thousand if--” Mrs. Manstey paused; the tears were
rolling down her cheeks.

“There, there, Mrs. Manstey, don’t you worry,” repeated Mrs. Black,
soothingly. “I am sure we can settle it. I am sorry that I can’t stay
and talk about it any longer, but this is such a busy time of day, with
supper to get--”

Her hand was on the door-knob, but with sudden vigor Mrs. Manstey seized
her wrist.

“You are not giving me a definite answer. Do you mean to say that you
accept my proposition?”

“Why, I’ll think it over, Mrs. Manstey, certainly I will. I wouldn’t
annoy you for the world--”

“But the work is to begin to-morrow, I am told,” Mrs. Manstey persisted.

Mrs. Black hesitated. “It shan’t begin, I promise you that; I’ll send
word to the builder this very night.” Mrs. Manstey tightened her hold.

“You are not deceiving me, are you?” she said.

“No--no,” stammered Mrs. Black. “How can you think such a thing of me,
Mrs. Manstey?”

Slowly Mrs. Manstey’s clutch relaxed, and she passed through the open
door. “One thousand dollars,” she repeated, pausing in the hall; then
she let herself out of the house and hobbled down the steps, supporting
herself on the cast-iron railing.

“My goodness,” exclaimed Mrs. Black, shutting and bolting the hall-door,
“I never knew the old woman was crazy! And she looks so quiet and
ladylike, too.”

Mrs. Manstey slept well that night, but early the next morning she was
awakened by a sound of hammering. She got to her window with what
haste she might and, looking out saw that Mrs. Black’s yard was full of
workmen. Some were carrying loads of brick from the kitchen to the yard,
others beginning to demolish the old-fashioned wooden balcony which
adorned each story of Mrs. Black’s house. Mrs. Manstey saw that she had
been deceived. At first she thought of confiding her trouble to Mrs.
Sampson, but a settled discouragement soon took possession of her and
she went back to bed, not caring to see what was going on.

Toward afternoon, however, feeling that she must know the worst, she
rose and dressed herself. It was a laborious task, for her hands were
stiffer than usual, and the hooks and buttons seemed to evade her.

When she seated herself in the window, she saw that the workmen
had removed the upper part of the balcony, and that the bricks had
multiplied since morning. One of the men, a coarse fellow with a bloated
face, picked a magnolia blossom and, after smelling it, threw it to the
ground; the next man, carrying a load of bricks, trod on the flower in
passing.

“Look out, Jim,” called one of the men to another who was smoking a
pipe, “if you throw matches around near those barrels of paper you’ll
have the old tinder-box burning down before you know it.” And Mrs.
Manstey, leaning forward, perceived that there were several barrels of
paper and rubbish under the wooden balcony.

At length the work ceased and twilight fell. The sunset was perfect and
a roseate light, transfiguring the distant spire, lingered late in the
west. When it grew dark Mrs. Manstey drew down the shades and proceeded,
in her usual methodical manner, to light her lamp. She always filled
and lit it with her own hands, keeping a kettle of kerosene on a
zinc-covered shelf in a closet. As the lamp-light filled the room it
assumed its usual peaceful aspect. The books and pictures and plants
seemed, like their mistress, to settle themselves down for another quiet
evening, and Mrs. Manstey, as was her wont, drew up her armchair to the
table and began to knit.

That night she could not sleep. The weather had changed and a wild wind
was abroad, blotting the stars with close-driven clouds. Mrs. Manstey
rose once or twice and looked out of the window; but of the view nothing
was discernible save a tardy light or two in the opposite windows. These
lights at last went out, and Mrs. Manstey, who had watched for their
extinction, began to dress herself. She was in evident haste, for she
merely flung a thin dressing-gown over her night-dress and wrapped her
head in a scarf; then she opened her closet and cautiously took out the
kettle of kerosene. Having slipped a bundle of wooden matches into her
pocket she proceeded, with increasing precautions, to unlock her door,
and a few moments later she was feeling her way down the dark staircase,
led by a glimmer of gas from the lower hall. At length she reached the
bottom of the stairs and began the more difficult descent into the utter
darkness of the basement. Here, however, she could move more freely,
as there was less danger of being overheard; and without much delay she
contrived to unlock the iron door leading into the yard. A gust of
cold wind smote her as she stepped out and groped shiveringly under the
clothes-lines.

That morning at three o’clock an alarm of fire brought the engines to
Mrs. Black’s door, and also brought Mrs. Sampson’s startled boarders to
their windows. The wooden balcony at the back of Mrs. Black’s house was
ablaze, and among those who watched the progress of the flames was Mrs.
Manstey, leaning in her thin dressing-gown from the open window.

The fire, however, was soon put out, and the frightened occupants of the
house, who had fled in scant attire, reassembled at dawn to find that
little mischief had been done beyond the cracking of window panes and
smoking of ceilings. In fact, the chief sufferer by the fire was Mrs.
Manstey, who was found in the morning gasping with pneumonia, a not
unnatural result, as everyone remarked, of her having hung out of an
open window at her age in a dressing-gown. It was easy to see that she
was very ill, but no one had guessed how grave the doctor’s verdict
would be, and the faces gathered that evening about Mrs. Sampson’s table
were awestruck and disturbed. Not that any of the boarders knew Mrs.
Manstey well; she “kept to herself,” as they said, and seemed to fancy
herself too good for them; but then it is always disagreeable to have
anyone dying in the house and, as one lady observed to another: “It
might just as well have been you or me, my dear.”

But it was only Mrs. Manstey; and she was dying, as she had lived,
lonely if not alone. The doctor had sent a trained nurse, and Mrs.
Sampson, with muffled step, came in from time to time; but both, to Mrs.
Manstey, seemed remote and unsubstantial as the figures in a dream. All
day she said nothing; but when she was asked for her daughter’s address
she shook her head. At times the nurse noticed that she seemed to be
listening attentively for some sound which did not come; then again she
dozed.

The next morning at daylight she was very low. The nurse called Mrs.
Sampson and as the two bent over the old woman they saw her lips move.

“Lift me up--out of bed,” she whispered.

They raised her in their arms, and with her stiff hand she pointed to
the window.

“Oh, the window--she wants to sit in the window. She used to sit there
all day,” Mrs. Sampson explained. “It can do her no harm, I suppose?”

“Nothing matters now,” said the nurse.

They carried Mrs. Manstey to the window and placed her in her chair. The
dawn was abroad, a jubilant spring dawn; the spire had already caught
a golden ray, though the magnolia and horse-chestnut still slumbered in
shadow. In Mrs. Black’s yard all was quiet. The charred timbers of the
balcony lay where they had fallen. It was evident that since the fire
the builders had not returned to their work. The magnolia had unfolded a
few more sculptural flowers; the view was undisturbed.

It was hard for Mrs. Manstey to breathe; each moment it grew more
difficult. She tried to make them open the window, but they would not
understand. If she could have tasted the air, sweet with the penetrating
ailanthus savor, it would have eased her; but the view at least was
there--the spire was golden now, the heavens had warmed from pearl to
blue, day was alight from east to west, even the magnolia had caught the
sun.

Mrs. Manstey’s head fell back and smiling she died.

That day the building of the extension was resumed.

The End





THE BOLTED DOOR

As first published in Scribner’s Magazine, March 1909




I


Hubert Granice, pacing the length of his pleasant lamp-lit library,
paused to compare his watch with the clock on the chimney-piece.

Three minutes to eight.

In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm of
Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the door-bell of
the flat. It was a comfort to reflect that Ascham was so punctual--the
suspense was beginning to make his host nervous. And the sound of the
door-bell would be the beginning of the end--after that there’d be no
going back, by God--no going back!

Granice resumed his pacing. Each time he reached the end of the room
opposite the door he caught his reflection in the Florentine mirror
above the fine old walnut credence he had picked up at Dijon--saw
himself spare, quick-moving, carefully brushed and dressed, but
furrowed, gray about the temples, with a stoop which he corrected by
a spasmodic straightening of the shoulders whenever a glass confronted
him: a tired middle-aged man, baffled, beaten, worn out.

As he summed himself up thus for the third or fourth time the door
opened and he turned with a thrill of relief to greet his guest. But it
was only the man-servant who entered, advancing silently over the mossy
surface of the old Turkey rug.

“Mr. Ascham telephones, sir, to say he’s unexpectedly detained and can’t
be here till eight-thirty.”

Granice made a curt gesture of annoyance. It was becoming harder and
harder for him to control these reflexes. He turned on his heel, tossing
to the servant over his shoulder: “Very good. Put off dinner.”

Down his spine he felt the man’s injured stare. Mr. Granice had always
been so mild-spoken to his people--no doubt the odd change in his manner
had already been noticed and discussed below stairs. And very likely
they suspected the cause. He stood drumming on the writing-table till he
heard the servant go out; then he threw himself into a chair, propping
his elbows on the table and resting his chin on his locked hands.

Another half hour alone with it!

He wondered irritably what could have detained his guest. Some
professional matter, no doubt--the punctilious lawyer would have allowed
nothing less to interfere with a dinner engagement, more especially
since Granice, in his note, had said: “I shall want a little business
chat afterward.”

But what professional matter could have come up at that unprofessional
hour? Perhaps some other soul in misery had called on the lawyer; and,
after all, Granice’s note had given no hint of his own need! No doubt
Ascham thought he merely wanted to make another change in his will.
Since he had come into his little property, ten years earlier, Granice
had been perpetually tinkering with his will.

Suddenly another thought pulled him up, sending a flush to his sallow
temples. He remembered a word he had tossed to the lawyer some six weeks
earlier, at the Century Club. “Yes--my play’s as good as taken. I shall
be calling on you soon to go over the contract. Those theatrical chaps
are so slippery--I won’t trust anybody but you to tie the knot for me!”
 That, of course, was what Ascham would think he was wanted for. Granice,
at the idea, broke into an audible laugh--a queer stage-laugh, like
the cackle of a baffled villain in a melodrama. The absurdity, the
unnaturalness of the sound abashed him, and he compressed his lips
angrily. Would he take to soliloquy next?

He lowered his arms and pulled open the upper drawer of the
writing-table. In the right-hand corner lay a thick manuscript, bound
in paper folders, and tied with a string beneath which a letter had been
slipped. Next to the manuscript was a small revolver. Granice stared a
moment at these oddly associated objects; then he took the letter from
under the string and slowly began to open it. He had known he should do
so from the moment his hand touched the drawer. Whenever his eye fell on
that letter some relentless force compelled him to re-read it.

It was dated about four weeks back, under the letter-head of “The
Diversity Theatre.”


“MY DEAR MR. GRANICE:

“I have given the matter my best consideration for the last month,
and it’s no use--the play won’t do. I have talked it over with Miss
Melrose--and you know there isn’t a gamer artist on our stage--and I
regret to tell you she feels just as I do about it. It isn’t the poetry
that scares her--or me either. We both want to do all we can to help
along the poetic drama--we believe the public’s ready for it, and we’re
willing to take a big financial risk in order to be the first to give
them what they want. BUT WE DON’T BELIEVE THEY COULD BE MADE TO
WANT THIS. The fact is, there isn’t enough drama in your play to the
allowance of poetry--the thing drags all through. You’ve got a big idea,
but it’s not out of swaddling clothes.

“If this was your first play I’d say: TRY AGAIN. But it has been just
the same with all the others you’ve shown me. And you remember the
result of ‘The Lee Shore,’ where you carried all the expenses of
production yourself, and we couldn’t fill the theatre for a week. Yet
‘The Lee Shore’ was a modern problem play--much easier to swing than
blank verse. It isn’t as if you hadn’t tried all kinds--”

Granice folded the letter and put it carefully back into the envelope.
Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every phrase in it by
heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night after night, stand
out in letters of flame against the darkness of his sleepless lids?

“IT HAS BEEN JUST THE SAME WITH ALL THE OTHERS YOU’VE SHOWN ME.”

That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting
work!

“YOU REMEMBER THE RESULT OF ‘THE LEE SHORE.’”

Good God--as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all now in a
drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play, his sudden resolve
to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten thousand dollars of his
inheritance on testing his chance of success--the fever of preparation,
the dry-mouthed agony of the “first night,” the flat fall, the stupid
press, his secret rush to Europe to escape the condolence of his
friends!

“IT ISN’T AS IF YOU HADN’T TRIED ALL KINDS.”

No--he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the light
curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-realistic and the
lyrical-romantic--finally deciding that he would no longer “prostitute
his talent” to win popularity, but would impose on the public his own
theory of art in the form of five acts of blank verse. Yes, he had
offered them everything--and always with the same result.

Ten years of it--ten years of dogged work and unrelieved failure. The
ten years from forty to fifty--the best ten years of his life! And if
one counted the years before, the silent years of dreams, assimilation,
preparation--then call it half a man’s life-time: half a man’s life-time
thrown away!

And what was he to do with the remaining half? Well, he had settled
that, thank God! He turned and glanced anxiously at the clock. Ten
minutes past eight--only ten minutes had been consumed in that stormy
rush through his whole past! And he must wait another twenty minutes for
Ascham. It was one of the worst symptoms of his case that, in proportion
as he had grown to shrink from human company, he dreaded more and more
to be alone.... But why the devil was he waiting for Ascham? Why didn’t
he cut the knot himself? Since he was so unutterably sick of the whole
business, why did he have to call in an outsider to rid him of this
nightmare of living?

He opened the drawer again and laid his hand on the revolver. It was a
small slim ivory toy--just the instrument for a tired sufferer to give
himself a “hypodermic” with. Granice raised it slowly in one hand, while
with the other he felt under the thin hair at the back of his head,
between the ear and the nape. He knew just where to place the muzzle: he
had once got a young surgeon to show him. And as he found the spot, and
lifted the revolver to it, the inevitable phenomenon occurred. The hand
that held the weapon began to shake, the tremor communicated itself
to his arm, his heart gave a wild leap which sent up a wave of deadly
nausea to his throat, he smelt the powder, he sickened at the crash of
the bullet through his skull, and a sweat of fear broke out over his
forehead and ran down his quivering face...

He laid away the revolver with an oath and, pulling out a
cologne-scented handkerchief, passed it tremulously over his brow and
temples. It was no use--he knew he could never do it in that way. His
attempts at self-destruction were as futile as his snatches at fame! He
couldn’t make himself a real life, and he couldn’t get rid of the life
he had. And that was why he had sent for Ascham to help him...

The lawyer, over the Camembert and Burgundy, began to excuse himself for
his delay.

“I didn’t like to say anything while your man was about--but the fact
is, I was sent for on a rather unusual matter--”

“Oh, it’s all right,” said Granice cheerfully. He was beginning to
feel the usual reaction that food and company produced. It was not any
recovered pleasure in life that he felt, but only a deeper withdrawal
into himself. It was easier to go on automatically with the social
gestures than to uncover to any human eye the abyss within him.

“My dear fellow, it’s sacrilege to keep a dinner waiting--especially
the production of an artist like yours.” Mr. Ascham sipped his Burgundy
luxuriously. “But the fact is, Mrs. Ashgrove sent for me.”

Granice raised his head with a quick movement of surprise. For a moment
he was shaken out of his self-absorption.

“MRS. ASHGROVE?”

Ascham smiled. “I thought you’d be interested; I know your passion for
causes celebres. And this promises to be one. Of course it’s out of our
line entirely--we never touch criminal cases. But she wanted to consult
me as a friend. Ashgrove was a distant connection of my wife’s. And, by
Jove, it IS a queer case!” The servant re-entered, and Ascham snapped
his lips shut.

Would the gentlemen have their coffee in the dining-room?

“No--serve it in the library,” said Granice, rising. He led the way back
to the curtained confidential room. He was really curious to hear what
Ascham had to tell him.

While the coffee and cigars were being served he fidgeted about the
library, glancing at his letters--the usual meaningless notes and
bills--and picking up the evening paper. As he unfolded it a headline
caught his eye.


                      “ROSE MELROSE WANTS TO
                           PLAY POETRY.
                     “THINKS SHE HAS FOUND HER
                              POET.”


He read on with a thumping heart--found the name of a young author he
had barely heard of, saw the title of a play, a “poetic drama,” dance
before his eyes, and dropped the paper, sick, disgusted. It was
true, then--she WAS “game”--it was not the manner but the matter she
mistrusted!

Granice turned to the servant, who seemed to be purposely lingering. “I
shan’t need you this evening, Flint. I’ll lock up myself.”

He fancied the man’s acquiescence implied surprise. What was going on,
Flint seemed to wonder, that Mr. Granice should want him out of the
way? Probably he would find a pretext for coming back to see. Granice
suddenly felt himself enveloped in a network of espionage.

As the door closed he threw himself into an armchair and leaned forward
to take a light from Ascham’s cigar.

“Tell me about Mrs. Ashgrove,” he said, seeming to himself to speak
stiffly, as if his lips were cracked.

“Mrs. Ashgrove? Well, there’s not much to TELL.”

“And you couldn’t if there were?” Granice smiled.

“Probably not. As a matter of fact, she wanted my advice about her
choice of counsel. There was nothing especially confidential in our
talk.”

“And what’s your impression, now you’ve seen her?”

“My impression is, very distinctly, THAT NOTHING WILL EVER BE KNOWN.”

“Ah--?” Granice murmured, puffing at his cigar.

“I’m more and more convinced that whoever poisoned Ashgrove knew his
business, and will consequently never be found out. That’s a capital
cigar you’ve given me.”

“You like it? I get them over from Cuba.” Granice examined his own
reflectively. “Then you believe in the theory that the clever criminals
never ARE caught?”

“Of course I do. Look about you--look back for the last dozen
years--none of the big murder problems are ever solved.” The lawyer
ruminated behind his blue cloud. “Why, take the instance in your own
family: I’d forgotten I had an illustration at hand! Take old Joseph
Lenman’s murder--do you suppose that will ever be explained?”

As the words dropped from Ascham’s lips his host looked slowly about
the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale
unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It was
as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his throat
slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: “I could explain
the Lenman murder myself.”

Ascham’s eye kindled: he shared Granice’s interest in criminal cases.

“By Jove! You’ve had a theory all this time? It’s odd you never
mentioned it. Go ahead and tell me. There are certain features in the
Lenman case not unlike this Ashgrove affair, and your idea may be a
help.”

Granice paused and his eye reverted instinctively to the table drawer in
which the revolver and the manuscript lay side by side. What if he were
to try another appeal to Rose Melrose? Then he looked at the notes
and bills on the table, and the horror of taking up again the lifeless
routine of life--of performing the same automatic gestures another
day--displaced his fleeting vision.

“I haven’t a theory. I KNOW who murdered Joseph Lenman.”

Ascham settled himself comfortably in his chair, prepared for enjoyment.

“You KNOW? Well, who did?” he laughed.

“I did,” said Granice, rising.

He stood before Ascham, and the lawyer lay back staring up at him. Then
he broke into another laugh.

“Why, this is glorious! You murdered him, did you? To inherit his money,
I suppose? Better and better! Go on, my boy! Unbosom yourself! Tell me
all about it! Confession is good for the soul.”

Granice waited till the lawyer had shaken the last peal of laughter from
his throat; then he repeated doggedly: “I murdered him.”

The two men looked at each other for a long moment, and this time Ascham
did not laugh.

“Granice!”

“I murdered him--to get his money, as you say.”

There was another pause, and Granice, with a vague underlying sense of
amusement, saw his guest’s look change from pleasantry to apprehension.

“What’s the joke, my dear fellow? I fail to see.”

“It’s not a joke. It’s the truth. I murdered him.” He had spoken
painfully at first, as if there were a knot in his throat; but each time
he repeated the words he found they were easier to say.

Ascham laid down his extinct cigar.

“What’s the matter? Aren’t you well? What on earth are you driving at?”

“I’m perfectly well. But I murdered my cousin, Joseph Lenman, and I want
it known that I murdered him.”

“YOU WANT IT KNOWN?”

“Yes. That’s why I sent for you. I’m sick of living, and when I try to
kill myself I funk it.” He spoke quite naturally now, as if the knot in
his throat had been untied.

“Good Lord--good Lord,” the lawyer gasped.

“But I suppose,” Granice continued, “there’s no doubt this would be
murder in the first degree? I’m sure of the chair if I own up?”

Ascham drew a long breath; then he said slowly: “Sit down, Granice.
Let’s talk.”




II


Granice told his story simply, connectedly.

He began by a quick survey of his early years--the years of drudgery and
privation. His father, a charming man who could never say “no,” had so
signally failed to say it on certain essential occasions that when he
died he left an illegitimate family and a mortgaged estate. His lawful
kin found themselves hanging over a gulf of debt, and young Granice, to
support his mother and sister, had to leave Harvard and bury himself at
eighteen in a broker’s office. He loathed his work, and he was always
poor, always worried and in ill-health. A few years later his mother
died, but his sister, an ineffectual neurasthenic, remained on his
hands. His own health gave out, and he had to go away for six months,
and work harder than ever when he came back. He had no knack for
business, no head for figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of
commerce. He wanted to travel and write--those were his inmost longings.
And as the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making
any more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed
him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so tired
that his brain could not work. For half the year he did not reach his
dim up-town flat till after dark, and could only “brush up” for dinner,
and afterward lie on the lounge with his pipe, while his sister droned
through the evening paper. Sometimes he spent an evening at the theatre;
or he dined out, or, more rarely, strayed off with an acquaintance or
two in quest of what is known as “pleasure.” And in summer, when he
and Kate went to the sea-side for a month, he dozed through the days in
utter weariness. Once he fell in love with a charming girl--but what had
he to offer her, in God’s name? She seemed to like him, and in common
decency he had to drop out of the running. Apparently no one
replaced him, for she never married, but grew stoutish, grayish,
philanthropic--yet how sweet she had been when he had first kissed her!
One more wasted life, he reflected...

But the stage had always been his master-passion. He would have sold his
soul for the time and freedom to write plays! It was IN HIM--he could
not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated instinct. As the
years passed it became a morbid, a relentless obsession--yet with every
year the material conditions were more and more against it. He felt
himself growing middle-aged, and he watched the reflection of the
process in his sister’s wasted face. At eighteen she had been
pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now she was sour, trivial,
insignificant--she had missed her chance of life. And she had no
resources, poor creature, was fashioned simply for the primitive
functions she had been denied the chance to fulfil! It exasperated him
to think of it--and to reflect that even now a little travel, a
little health, a little money, might transform her, make her young and
desirable... The chief fruit of his experience was that there is no such
fixed state as age or youth--there is only health as against sickness,
wealth as against poverty; and age or youth as the outcome of the lot
one draws.

At this point in his narrative Granice stood up, and went to lean
against the mantel-piece, looking down at Ascham, who had not moved from
his seat, or changed his attitude of rigid fascinated attention.

“Then came the summer when we went to Wrenfield to be near old
Lenman--my mother’s cousin, as you know. Some of the family always
mounted guard over him--generally a niece or so. But that year they were
all scattered, and one of the nieces offered to lend us her cottage if
we’d relieve her of duty for two months. It was a nuisance for me, of
course, for Wrenfield is two hours from town; but my mother, who was a
slave to family observances, had always been good to the old man, so it
was natural we should be called on--and there was the saving of rent and
the good air for Kate. So we went.

“You never knew Joseph Lenman? Well, picture to yourself an amoeba or
some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan’s microscope. He was
large, undifferentiated, inert--since I could remember him he had
done nothing but take his temperature and read the Churchman. Oh,
and cultivate melons--that was his hobby. Not vulgar, out-of-door
melons--his were grown under glass. He had miles of it at Wrenfield--his
big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking battalions of
green-houses. And in nearly all of them melons were grown--early melons
and late, French, English, domestic--dwarf melons and monsters: every
shape, colour and variety. They were petted and nursed like children--a
staff of trained attendants waited on them. I’m not sure they didn’t
have a doctor to take their temperature--at any rate the place was full
of thermometers. And they didn’t sprawl on the ground like ordinary
melons; they were trained against the glass like nectarines, and each
melon hung in a net which sustained its weight and left it free on all
sides to the sun and air...

“It used to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of
his own melons--the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic
and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated
atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of
his existence was not to let himself be ‘worried.’... I remember his
advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate’s
bad health, and her need of a change. ‘I never let myself worry,’ he
said complacently. ‘It’s the worst thing for the liver--and you look to
me as if you had a liver. Take my advice and be cheerful. You’ll make
yourself happier and others too.’ And all he had to do was to write a
cheque, and send the poor girl off for a holiday!

“The hardest part of it was that the money half-belonged to us already.
The old skin-flint only had it for life, in trust for us and the others.
But his life was a good deal sounder than mine or Kate’s--and one could
picture him taking extra care of it for the joke of keeping us waiting.
I always felt that the sight of our hungry eyes was a tonic to him.

“Well, I tried to see if I couldn’t reach him through his vanity. I
flattered him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he was
taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine days he was
driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and waddled through them,
prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat Turk in his seraglio.
When he bragged to me of the expense of growing them I was reminded of
a hideous old Lothario bragging of what his pleasures cost. And the
resemblance was completed by the fact that he couldn’t eat as much as
a mouthful of his melons--had lived for years on buttermilk and toast.
‘But, after all, it’s my only hobby--why shouldn’t I indulge it?’ he
said sentimentally. As if I’d ever been able to indulge any of mine! On
the keep of those melons Kate and I could have lived like gods...

“One day toward the end of the summer, when Kate was too unwell to drag
herself up to the big house, she asked me to go and spend the afternoon
with cousin Joseph. It was a lovely soft September afternoon--a day to
lie under a Roman stone-pine, with one’s eyes on the sky, and let the
cosmic harmonies rush through one. Perhaps the vision was suggested
by the fact that, as I entered cousin Joseph’s hideous black walnut
library, I passed one of the under-gardeners, a handsome full-throated
Italian, who dashed out in such a hurry that he nearly knocked me down.
I remember thinking it queer that the fellow, whom I had often seen
about the melon-houses, did not bow to me, or even seem to see me.

“Cousin Joseph sat in his usual seat, behind the darkened windows, his
fat hands folded on his protuberant waistcoat, the last number of the
Churchman at his elbow, and near it, on a huge dish, a fat melon--the
fattest melon I’d ever seen. As I looked at it I pictured the ecstasy
of contemplation from which I must have roused him, and congratulated
myself on finding him in such a mood, since I had made up my mind to ask
him a favour. Then I noticed that his face, instead of looking as calm
as an egg-shell, was distorted and whimpering--and without stopping to
greet me he pointed passionately to the melon.

“‘Look at it, look at it--did you ever see such a beauty? Such
firmness--roundness--such delicious smoothness to the touch?’ It was
as if he had said ‘she’ instead of ‘it,’ and when he put out his senile
hand and touched the melon I positively had to look the other way.

“Then he told me what had happened. The Italian under-gardener, who had
been specially recommended for the melon-houses--though it was against
my cousin’s principles to employ a Papist--had been assigned to the care
of the monster: for it had revealed itself, early in its existence, as
destined to become a monster, to surpass its plumpest, pulpiest
sisters, carry off prizes at agricultural shows, and be photographed and
celebrated in every gardening paper in the land. The Italian had done
well--seemed to have a sense of responsibility. And that very morning
he had been ordered to pick the melon, which was to be shown next day at
the county fair, and to bring it in for Mr. Lenman to gaze on its blonde
virginity. But in picking it, what had the damned scoundrelly Jesuit
done but drop it--drop it crash on the sharp spout of a watering-pot,
so that it received a deep gash in its firm pale rotundity, and was
henceforth but a bruised, ruined, fallen melon?

“The old man’s rage was fearful in its impotence--he shook, spluttered
and strangled with it. He had just had the Italian up and had sacked
him on the spot, without wages or character--had threatened to have him
arrested if he was ever caught prowling about Wrenfield. ‘By God, and
I’ll do it--I’ll write to Washington--I’ll have the pauper scoundrel
deported! I’ll show him what money can do!’ As likely as not there was
some murderous Black-hand business under it--it would be found that the
fellow was a member of a ‘gang.’ Those Italians would murder you for a
quarter. He meant to have the police look into it... And then he grew
frightened at his own excitement. ‘But I must calm myself,’ he said. He
took his temperature, rang for his drops, and turned to the Churchman.
He had been reading an article on Nestorianism when the melon was
brought in. He asked me to go on with it, and I read to him for an
hour, in the dim close room, with a fat fly buzzing stealthily about the
fallen melon.

“All the while one phrase of the old man’s buzzed in my brain like the
fly about the melon. ‘I’LL SHOW HIM WHAT MONEY CAN DO!’ Good heaven!
If I could but show the old man! If I could make him see his power of
giving happiness as a new outlet for his monstrous egotism! I tried
to tell him something about my situation and Kate’s--spoke of my
ill-health, my unsuccessful drudgery, my longing to write, to make
myself a name--I stammered out an entreaty for a loan. ‘I can guarantee
to repay you, sir--I’ve a half-written play as security...’

“I shall never forget his glassy stare. His face had grown as smooth as
an egg-shell again--his eyes peered over his fat cheeks like sentinels
over a slippery rampart.

“‘A half-written play--a play of YOURS as security?’ He looked at me
almost fearfully, as if detecting the first symptoms of insanity. ‘Do
you understand anything of business?’ he enquired mildly. I laughed and
answered: ‘No, not much.’

“He leaned back with closed lids. ‘All this excitement has been too much
for me,’ he said. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll prepare for my nap.’ And I
stumbled out of the room, blindly, like the Italian.”

Granice moved away from the mantel-piece, and walked across to the tray
set out with decanters and soda-water. He poured himself a tall glass of
soda-water, emptied it, and glanced at Ascham’s dead cigar.

“Better light another,” he suggested.

The lawyer shook his head, and Granice went on with his tale. He told
of his mounting obsession--how the murderous impulse had waked in him on
the instant of his cousin’s refusal, and he had muttered to himself:
“By God, if you won’t, I’ll make you.” He spoke more tranquilly as the
narrative proceeded, as though his rage had died down once the resolve
to act on it was taken. He applied his whole mind to the question of how
the old man was to be “disposed of.” Suddenly he remembered the outcry:
“Those Italians will murder you for a quarter!” But no definite project
presented itself: he simply waited for an inspiration.

Granice and his sister moved to town a day or two after the incident of
the melon. But the cousins, who had returned, kept them informed of
the old man’s condition. One day, about three weeks later, Granice,
on getting home, found Kate excited over a report from Wrenfield. The
Italian had been there again--had somehow slipped into the house,
made his way up to the library, and “used threatening language.” The
house-keeper found cousin Joseph gasping, the whites of his eyes showing
“something awful.” The doctor was sent for, and the attack warded off;
and the police had ordered the Italian from the neighbourhood.

But cousin Joseph, thereafter, languished, had “nerves,” and lost his
taste for toast and butter-milk. The doctor called in a colleague, and
the consultation amused and excited the old man--he became once more
an important figure. The medical men reassured the family--too
completely!--and to the patient they recommended a more varied diet:
advised him to take whatever “tempted him.” And so one day, tremulously,
prayerfully, he decided on a tiny bit of melon. It was brought up
with ceremony, and consumed in the presence of the house-keeper and a
hovering cousin; and twenty minutes later he was dead...

“But you remember the circumstances,” Granice went on; “how suspicion
turned at once on the Italian? In spite of the hint the police had given
him he had been seen hanging about the house since ‘the scene.’ It was
said that he had tender relations with the kitchen-maid, and the rest
seemed easy to explain. But when they looked round to ask him for the
explanation he was gone--gone clean out of sight. He had been ‘warned’
to leave Wrenfield, and he had taken the warning so to heart that no one
ever laid eyes on him again.”

Granice paused. He had dropped into a chair opposite the lawyer’s, and
he sat for a moment, his head thrown back, looking about the familiar
room. Everything in it had grown grimacing and alien, and each strange
insistent object seemed craning forward from its place to hear him.

“It was I who put the stuff in the melon,” he said. “And I don’t want
you to think I’m sorry for it. This isn’t ‘remorse,’ understand. I’m
glad the old skin-flint is dead--I’m glad the others have their money.
But mine’s no use to me any more. My sister married miserably, and died.
And I’ve never had what I wanted.”

Ascham continued to stare; then he said: “What on earth was your object,
then?”

“Why, to GET what I wanted--what I fancied was in reach! I wanted
change, rest, LIFE, for both of us--wanted, above all, for myself, the
chance to write! I travelled, got back my health, and came home to
tie myself up to my work. And I’ve slaved at it steadily for ten years
without reward--without the most distant hope of success! Nobody will
look at my stuff. And now I’m fifty, and I’m beaten, and I know it.”
 His chin dropped forward on his breast. “I want to chuck the whole
business,” he ended.




III


It was after midnight when Ascham left.

His hand on Granice’s shoulder, as he turned to go--“District Attorney
be hanged; see a doctor, see a doctor!” he had cried; and so, with an
exaggerated laugh, had pulled on his coat and departed.

Granice turned back into the library. It had never occurred to him that
Ascham would not believe his story. For three hours he had explained,
elucidated, patiently and painfully gone over every detail--but without
once breaking down the iron incredulity of the lawyer’s eye.

At first Ascham had feigned to be convinced--but that, as Granice now
perceived, was simply to get him to expose himself, to entrap him into
contradictions. And when the attempt failed, when Granice triumphantly
met and refuted each disconcerting question, the lawyer dropped the mask
suddenly, and said with a good-humoured laugh: “By Jove, Granice you’ll
write a successful play yet. The way you’ve worked this all out is a
marvel.”

Granice swung about furiously--that last sneer about the play inflamed
him. Was all the world in a conspiracy to deride his failure?

“I did it, I did it,” he muttered sullenly, his rage spending itself
against the impenetrable surface of the other’s mockery; and Ascham
answered with a smile: “Ever read any of those books on hallucination?
I’ve got a fairly good medico-legal library. I could send you one or two
if you like...”


Left alone, Granice cowered down in the chair before his writing-table.
He understood that Ascham thought him off his head.

“Good God--what if they all think me crazy?”

The horror of it broke out over him in a cold sweat--he sat there and
shook, his eyes hidden in his icy hands. But gradually, as he began
to rehearse his story for the thousandth time, he saw again how
incontrovertible it was, and felt sure that any criminal lawyer would
believe him.

“That’s the trouble--Ascham’s not a criminal lawyer. And then he’s a
friend. What a fool I was to talk to a friend! Even if he did believe
me, he’d never let me see it--his instinct would be to cover the whole
thing up... But in that case--if he DID believe me--he might think it
a kindness to get me shut up in an asylum...” Granice began to tremble
again. “Good heaven! If he should bring in an expert--one of those
damned alienists! Ascham and Pettilow can do anything--their word always
goes. If Ascham drops a hint that I’d better be shut up, I’ll be in a
strait-jacket by to-morrow! And he’d do it from the kindest motives--be
quite right to do it if he thinks I’m a murderer!”

The vision froze him to his chair. He pressed his fists to his bursting
temples and tried to think. For the first time he hoped that Ascham had
not believed his story.

“But he did--he did! I can see it now--I noticed what a queer eye he
cocked at me. Good God, what shall I do--what shall I do?”

He started up and looked at the clock. Half-past one. What if Ascham
should think the case urgent, rout out an alienist, and come back with
him? Granice jumped to his feet, and his sudden gesture brushed the
morning paper from the table. Mechanically he stooped to pick it up, and
the movement started a new train of association.

He sat down again, and reached for the telephone book in the rack by his
chair.

“Give me three-o-ten... yes.”

The new idea in his mind had revived his flagging energy. He would
act--act at once. It was only by thus planning ahead, committing himself
to some unavoidable line of conduct, that he could pull himself through
the meaningless days. Each time he reached a fresh decision it was like
coming out of a foggy weltering sea into a calm harbour with lights. One
of the queerest phases of his long agony was the intense relief produced
by these momentary lulls.

“That the office of the Investigator? Yes? Give me Mr. Denver, please...
Hallo, Denver... Yes, Hubert Granice.... Just caught you? Going straight
home? Can I come and see you... yes, now... have a talk? It’s rather
urgent... yes, might give you some first-rate ‘copy.’... All right!” He
hung up the receiver with a laugh. It had been a happy thought to call
up the editor of the Investigator--Robert Denver was the very man he
needed...

Granice put out the lights in the library--it was odd how the automatic
gestures persisted!--went into the hall, put on his hat and overcoat,
and let himself out of the flat. In the hall, a sleepy elevator boy
blinked at him and then dropped his head on his folded arms. Granice
passed out into the street. At the corner of Fifth Avenue he hailed a
crawling cab, and called out an up-town address. The long thoroughfare
stretched before him, dim and deserted, like an ancient avenue of tombs.
But from Denver’s house a friendly beam fell on the pavement; and as
Granice sprang from his cab the editor’s electric turned the corner.

The two men grasped hands, and Denver, feeling for his latch-key,
ushered Granice into the brightly-lit hall.

“Disturb me? Not a bit. You might have, at ten to-morrow morning... but
this is my liveliest hour... you know my habits of old.”

Granice had known Robert Denver for fifteen years--watched his rise
through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the
Investigator’s editorial office. In the thick-set man with grizzling
hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young reporter who,
on his way home in the small hours, used to “bob in” on Granice, while
the latter sat grinding at his plays. Denver had to pass Granice’s flat
on the way to his own, and it became a habit, if he saw a light in the
window, and Granice’s shadow against the blind, to go in, smoke a pipe,
and discuss the universe.

“Well--this is like old times--a good old habit reversed.” The editor
smote his visitor genially on the shoulder. “Reminds me of the nights
when I used to rout you out... How’s the play, by the way? There IS a
play, I suppose? It’s as safe to ask you that as to say to some men:
‘How’s the baby?’”

Denver laughed good-naturedly, and Granice thought how thick and heavy
he had grown. It was evident, even to Granice’s tortured nerves, that
the words had not been uttered in malice--and the fact gave him a new
measure of his insignificance. Denver did not even know that he had been
a failure! The fact hurt more than Ascham’s irony.

“Come in--come in.” The editor led the way into a small cheerful room,
where there were cigars and decanters. He pushed an arm-chair toward his
visitor, and dropped into another with a comfortable groan.

“Now, then--help yourself. And let’s hear all about it.”

He beamed at Granice over his pipe-bowl, and the latter, lighting his
cigar, said to himself: “Success makes men comfortable, but it makes
them stupid.”

Then he turned, and began: “Denver, I want to tell you--”

The clock ticked rhythmically on the mantel-piece. The little room was
gradually filled with drifting blue layers of smoke, and through them
the editor’s face came and went like the moon through a moving sky. Once
the hour struck--then the rhythmical ticking began again. The atmosphere
grew denser and heavier, and beads of perspiration began to roll from
Granice’s forehead.

“Do you mind if I open the window?”

“No. It IS stuffy in here. Wait--I’ll do it myself.” Denver pushed
down the upper sash, and returned to his chair. “Well--go on,” he said,
filling another pipe. His composure exasperated Granice.

“There’s no use in my going on if you don’t believe me.”

The editor remained unmoved. “Who says I don’t believe you? And how can
I tell till you’ve finished?”

Granice went on, ashamed of his outburst. “It was simple enough, as
you’ll see. From the day the old man said to me, ‘Those Italians would
murder you for a quarter,’ I dropped everything and just worked at
my scheme. It struck me at once that I must find a way of getting to
Wrenfield and back in a night--and that led to the idea of a motor. A
motor--that never occurred to you? You wonder where I got the money, I
suppose. Well, I had a thousand or so put by, and I nosed around till I
found what I wanted--a second-hand racer. I knew how to drive a car,
and I tried the thing and found it was all right. Times were bad, and I
bought it for my price, and stored it away. Where? Why, in one of those
no-questions-asked garages where they keep motors that are not for
family use. I had a lively cousin who had put me up to that dodge, and I
looked about till I found a queer hole where they took in my car like a
baby in a foundling asylum... Then I practiced running to Wrenfield and
back in a night. I knew the way pretty well, for I’d done it often with
the same lively cousin--and in the small hours, too. The distance is
over ninety miles, and on the third trial I did it under two hours. But
my arms were so lame that I could hardly get dressed the next morning...

“Well, then came the report about the Italian’s threats, and I saw I
must act at once... I meant to break into the old man’s room, shoot him,
and get away again. It was a big risk, but I thought I could manage it.
Then we heard that he was ill--that there’d been a consultation. Perhaps
the fates were going to do it for me! Good Lord, if that could only
be!...”

Granice stopped and wiped his forehead: the open window did not seem to
have cooled the room.

“Then came word that he was better; and the day after, when I came up
from my office, I found Kate laughing over the news that he was to try
a bit of melon. The house-keeper had just telephoned her--all Wrenfield
was in a flutter. The doctor himself had picked out the melon, one of
the little French ones that are hardly bigger than a large tomato--and
the patient was to eat it at his breakfast the next morning.

“In a flash I saw my chance. It was a bare chance, no more. But I knew
the ways of the house--I was sure the melon would be brought in over
night and put in the pantry ice-box. If there were only one melon in the
ice-box I could be fairly sure it was the one I wanted. Melons
didn’t lie around loose in that house--every one was known, numbered,
catalogued. The old man was beset by the dread that the servants would
eat them, and he took a hundred mean precautions to prevent it. Yes,
I felt pretty sure of my melon... and poisoning was much safer than
shooting. It would have been the devil and all to get into the old man’s
bedroom without his rousing the house; but I ought to be able to break
into the pantry without much trouble.

“It was a cloudy night, too--everything served me. I dined quietly, and
sat down at my desk. Kate had one of her usual headaches, and went to
bed early. As soon as she was gone I slipped out. I had got together a
sort of disguise--red beard and queer-looking ulster. I shoved them
into a bag, and went round to the garage. There was no one there but a
half-drunken machinist whom I’d never seen before. That served me, too.
They were always changing machinists, and this new fellow didn’t even
bother to ask if the car belonged to me. It was a very easy-going
place...

“Well, I jumped in, ran up Broadway, and let the car go as soon as I was
out of Harlem. Dark as it was, I could trust myself to strike a sharp
pace. In the shadow of a wood I stopped a second and got into the beard
and ulster. Then away again--it was just eleven-thirty when I got to
Wrenfield.

“I left the car in a dark lane behind the Lenman place, and slipped
through the kitchen-garden. The melon-houses winked at me through the
dark--I remember thinking that they knew what I wanted to know.... By
the stable a dog came out growling--but he nosed me out, jumped on me,
and went back... The house was as dark as the grave. I knew everybody
went to bed by ten. But there might be a prowling servant--the
kitchen-maid might have come down to let in her Italian. I had to
risk that, of course. I crept around by the back door and hid in the
shrubbery. Then I listened. It was all as silent as death. I crossed
over to the house, pried open the pantry window and climbed in. I had a
little electric lamp in my pocket, and shielding it with my cap I
groped my way to the ice-box, opened it--and there was the little French
melon... only one.

“I stopped to listen--I was quite cool. Then I pulled out my bottle of
stuff and my syringe, and gave each section of the melon a hypodermic.
It was all done inside of three minutes--at ten minutes to twelve I was
back in the car. I got out of the lane as quietly as I could, struck a
back road that skirted the village, and let the car out as soon as I was
beyond the last houses. I only stopped once on the way in, to drop the
beard and ulster into a pond. I had a big stone ready to weight them
with and they went down plump, like a dead body--and at two o’clock I
was back at my desk.”

Granice stopped speaking and looked across the smoke-fumes at his
listener; but Denver’s face remained inscrutable.

At length he said: “Why did you want to tell me this?”

The question startled Granice. He was about to explain, as he had
explained to Ascham; but suddenly it occurred to him that if his motive
had not seemed convincing to the lawyer it would carry much less weight
with Denver. Both were successful men, and success does not understand
the subtle agony of failure. Granice cast about for another reason.

“Why, I--the thing haunts me... remorse, I suppose you’d call it...”

Denver struck the ashes from his empty pipe.

“Remorse? Bosh!” he said energetically.

Granice’s heart sank. “You don’t believe in--REMORSE?”

“Not an atom: in the man of action. The mere fact of your talking of
remorse proves to me that you’re not the man to have planned and put
through such a job.”

Granice groaned. “Well--I lied to you about remorse. I’ve never felt
any.”

Denver’s lips tightened sceptically about his freshly-filled pipe. “What
was your motive, then? You must have had one.”

“I’ll tell you--” And Granice began again to rehearse the story of his
failure, of his loathing for life. “Don’t say you don’t believe me this
time... that this isn’t a real reason!” he stammered out piteously as he
ended.

Denver meditated. “No, I won’t say that. I’ve seen too many queer
things. There’s always a reason for wanting to get out of life--the
wonder is that we find so many for staying in!” Granice’s heart grew
light. “Then you DO believe me?” he faltered.

“Believe that you’re sick of the job? Yes. And that you haven’t the
nerve to pull the trigger? Oh, yes--that’s easy enough, too. But all
that doesn’t make you a murderer--though I don’t say it proves you could
never have been one.”

“I HAVE been one, Denver--I swear to you.”

“Perhaps.” He meditated. “Just tell me one or two things.”

“Oh, go ahead. You won’t stump me!” Granice heard himself say with a
laugh.

“Well--how did you make all those trial trips without exciting your
sister’s curiosity? I knew your night habits pretty well at that time,
remember. You were very seldom out late. Didn’t the change in your ways
surprise her?”

“No; because she was away at the time. She went to pay several visits in
the country soon after we came back from Wrenfield, and was only in town
for a night or two before--before I did the job.”

“And that night she went to bed early with a headache?”

“Yes--blinding. She didn’t know anything when she had that kind. And her
room was at the back of the flat.”

Denver again meditated. “And when you got back--she didn’t hear you? You
got in without her knowing it?”

“Yes. I went straight to my work--took it up at the word where I’d left
off--WHY, DENVER, DON’T YOU REMEMBER?” Granice suddenly, passionately
interjected.

“Remember--?”

“Yes; how you found me--when you looked in that morning, between two and
three... your usual hour...?”

“Yes,” the editor nodded.

Granice gave a short laugh. “In my old coat--with my pipe: looked as if
I’d been working all night, didn’t I? Well, I hadn’t been in my chair
ten minutes!”

Denver uncrossed his legs and then crossed them again. “I didn’t know
whether YOU remembered that.”

“What?”

“My coming in that particular night--or morning.”

Granice swung round in his chair. “Why, man alive! That’s why I’m here
now. Because it was you who spoke for me at the inquest, when they
looked round to see what all the old man’s heirs had been doing that
night--you who testified to having dropped in and found me at my desk
as usual.... I thought THAT would appeal to your journalistic sense if
nothing else would!”

Denver smiled. “Oh, my journalistic sense is still susceptible
enough--and the idea’s picturesque, I grant you: asking the man who
proved your alibi to establish your guilt.”

“That’s it--that’s it!” Granice’s laugh had a ring of triumph.

“Well, but how about the other chap’s testimony--I mean that young
doctor: what was his name? Ned Ranney. Don’t you remember my testifying
that I’d met him at the elevated station, and told him I was on my way
to smoke a pipe with you, and his saying: ‘All right; you’ll find him
in. I passed the house two hours ago, and saw his shadow against the
blind, as usual.’ And the lady with the toothache in the flat across the
way: she corroborated his statement, you remember.”

“Yes; I remember.”

“Well, then?”

“Simple enough. Before starting I rigged up a kind of mannikin with old
coats and a cushion--something to cast a shadow on the blind. All
you fellows were used to seeing my shadow there in the small hours--I
counted on that, and knew you’d take any vague outline as mine.”

“Simple enough, as you say. But the woman with the toothache saw the
shadow move--you remember she said she saw you sink forward, as if you’d
fallen asleep.”

“Yes; and she was right. It DID move. I suppose some extra-heavy dray
must have jolted by the flimsy building--at any rate, something gave my
mannikin a jar, and when I came back he had sunk forward, half over the
table.”

There was a long silence between the two men. Granice, with a throbbing
heart, watched Denver refill his pipe. The editor, at any rate, did not
sneer and flout him. After all, journalism gave a deeper insight than
the law into the fantastic possibilities of life, prepared one better to
allow for the incalculableness of human impulses.

“Well?” Granice faltered out.

Denver stood up with a shrug. “Look here, man--what’s wrong with you?
Make a clean breast of it! Nerves gone to smash? I’d like to take you
to see a chap I know--an ex-prize-fighter--who’s a wonder at pulling
fellows in your state out of their hole--”

“Oh, oh--” Granice broke in. He stood up also, and the two men eyed each
other. “You don’t believe me, then?”

“This yarn--how can I? There wasn’t a flaw in your alibi.”

“But haven’t I filled it full of them now?”

Denver shook his head. “I might think so if I hadn’t happened to know
that you WANTED to. There’s the hitch, don’t you see?”

Granice groaned. “No, I didn’t. You mean my wanting to be found
guilty--?”

“Of course! If somebody else had accused you, the story might have been
worth looking into. As it is, a child could have invented it. It doesn’t
do much credit to your ingenuity.”

Granice turned sullenly toward the door. What was the use of arguing?
But on the threshold a sudden impulse drew him back. “Look here,
Denver--I daresay you’re right. But will you do just one thing to prove
it? Put my statement in the Investigator, just as I’ve made it. Ridicule
it as much as you like. Only give the other fellows a chance at it--men
who don’t know anything about me. Set them talking and looking about. I
don’t care a damn whether YOU believe me--what I want is to convince the
Grand Jury! I oughtn’t to have come to a man who knows me--your cursed
incredulity is infectious. I don’t put my case well, because I know in
advance it’s discredited, and I almost end by not believing it myself.
That’s why I can’t convince YOU. It’s a vicious circle.” He laid a
hand on Denver’s arm. “Send a stenographer, and put my statement in the
paper.”

But Denver did not warm to the idea. “My dear fellow, you seem to forget
that all the evidence was pretty thoroughly sifted at the time, every
possible clue followed up. The public would have been ready enough then
to believe that you murdered old Lenman--you or anybody else. All they
wanted was a murderer--the most improbable would have served. But your
alibi was too confoundedly complete. And nothing you’ve told me has
shaken it.” Denver laid his cool hand over the other’s burning fingers.
“Look here, old fellow, go home and work up a better case--then come in
and submit it to the Investigator.”




IV


The perspiration was rolling off Granice’s forehead. Every few minutes
he had to draw out his handkerchief and wipe the moisture from his
haggard face.

For an hour and a half he had been talking steadily, putting his case
to the District Attorney. Luckily he had a speaking acquaintance with
Allonby, and had obtained, without much difficulty, a private audience
on the very day after his talk with Robert Denver. In the interval
between he had hurried home, got out of his evening clothes, and gone
forth again at once into the dreary dawn. His fear of Ascham and the
alienist made it impossible for him to remain in his rooms. And it
seemed to him that the only way of averting that hideous peril was by
establishing, in some sane impartial mind, the proof of his guilt. Even
if he had not been so incurably sick of life, the electric chair seemed
now the only alternative to the strait-jacket.

As he paused to wipe his forehead he saw the District Attorney glance at
his watch. The gesture was significant, and Granice lifted an appealing
hand. “I don’t expect you to believe me now--but can’t you put me under
arrest, and have the thing looked into?”

Allonby smiled faintly under his heavy grayish moustache. He had a ruddy
face, full and jovial, in which his keen professional eyes seemed to
keep watch over impulses not strictly professional.

“Well, I don’t know that we need lock you up just yet. But of course I’m
bound to look into your statement--”

Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief. Surely Allonby wouldn’t
have said that if he hadn’t believed him!

“That’s all right. Then I needn’t detain you. I can be found at any time
at my apartment.” He gave the address.

The District Attorney smiled again, more openly. “What do you say to
leaving it for an hour or two this evening? I’m giving a little supper
at Rector’s--quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss Melrose--I
think you know her--and a friend or two; and if you’ll join us...”

Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had
made.


He waited for four days--four days of concentrated horror. During the
first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham’s alienist dogged him; and as
that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense that his avowal
had made no impression on the District Attorney. Evidently, if he had
been going to look into the case, Allonby would have been heard from
before now.... And that mocking invitation to supper showed clearly
enough how little the story had impressed him!

Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to inculpate
himself. He was chained to life--a “prisoner of consciousness.” Where
was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was learning what it meant. In
the glaring night-hours, when his brain seemed ablaze, he was visited
by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable
SELFNESS, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation
he had ever known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own
dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the
feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands
and face, and in his throat--and as his brain cleared he understood that
it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like
some thick viscous substance.

Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of
his window at the awakening activities of the street--at the
street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy workers
flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light. Oh, to be one of
them--any of them--to take his chance in any of their skins! They were
the toilers--the men whose lot was pitied--the victims wept over and
ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he would have
taken up the load of any one of them, if only he might have shaken off
his own! But, no--the iron circle of consciousness held them too: each
one was hand-cuffed to his own hideous ego. Why wish to be any one man
rather than another? The only absolute good was not to be... And Flint,
coming in to draw his bath, would ask if he preferred his eggs scrambled
or poached that morning?


On the fifth day he wrote a long urgent letter to Allonby; and for the
succeeding two days he had the occupation of waiting for an answer. He
hardly stirred from his rooms, in his fear of missing the letter by a
moment; but would the District Attorney write, or send a representative:
a policeman, a “secret agent,” or some other mysterious emissary of the
law?

On the third morning Flint, stepping softly--as if, confound it! his
master were ill--entered the library where Granice sat behind an unread
newspaper, and proferred a card on a tray.

Granice read the name--J. B. Hewson--and underneath, in pencil, “From
the District Attorney’s office.” He started up with a thumping heart,
and signed an assent to the servant.

Mr. Hewson was a slight sallow nondescript man of about fifty--the kind
of man of whom one is sure to see a specimen in any crowd. “Just the
type of the successful detective,” Granice reflected as he shook hands
with his visitor.

And it was in that character that Mr. Hewson briefly introduced himself.
He had been sent by the District Attorney to have “a quiet talk” with
Mr. Granice--to ask him to repeat the statement he had made about the
Lenman murder.

His manner was so quiet, so reasonable and receptive, that Granice’s
self-confidence returned. Here was a sensible man--a man who knew
his business--it would be easy enough to make HIM see through that
ridiculous alibi! Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, and lighting one
himself--to prove his coolness--began again to tell his story.

He was conscious, as he proceeded, of telling it better than ever
before. Practice helped, no doubt; and his listener’s detached,
impartial attitude helped still more. He could see that Hewson, at
least, had not decided in advance to disbelieve him, and the sense of
being trusted made him more lucid and more consecutive. Yes, this time
his words would certainly carry conviction...




V


Despairingly, Granice gazed up and down the shabby street. Beside him
stood a young man with bright prominent eyes, a smooth but not too
smoothly-shaven face, and an Irish smile. The young man’s nimble glance
followed Granice’s.

“Sure of the number, are you?” he asked briskly.

“Oh, yes--it was 104.”

“Well, then, the new building has swallowed it up--that’s certain.”

He tilted his head back and surveyed the half-finished front of a brick
and limestone flat-house that reared its flimsy elegance above a row of
tottering tenements and stables.

“Dead sure?” he repeated.

“Yes,” said Granice, discouraged. “And even if I hadn’t been, I know the
garage was just opposite Leffler’s over there.” He pointed across the
street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on which the words
“Livery and Boarding” were still faintly discernible.

The young man dashed across to the opposite pavement. “Well, that’s
something--may get a clue there. Leffler’s--same name there, anyhow. You
remember that name?”

“Yes--distinctly.”

Granice had felt a return of confidence since he had enlisted the
interest of the Explorer’s “smartest” reporter. If there were moments
when he hardly believed his own story, there were others when it
seemed impossible that every one should not believe it; and young Peter
McCarren, peering, listening, questioning, jotting down notes, inspired
him with an exquisite sense of security. McCarren had fastened on the
case at once, “like a leech,” as he phrased it--jumped at it, thrilled
to it, and settled down to “draw the last drop of fact from it, and
had not let go till he had.” No one else had treated Granice in that
way--even Allonby’s detective had not taken a single note. And though
a week had elapsed since the visit of that authorized official,
nothing had been heard from the District Attorney’s office: Allonby had
apparently dropped the matter again. But McCarren wasn’t going to drop
it--not he! He positively hung on Granice’s footsteps. They had spent
the greater part of the previous day together, and now they were off
again, running down clues.

But at Leffler’s they got none, after all. Leffler’s was no longer
a stable. It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between
sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a
hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a
blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood’s garage across
the way--did not even remember what had stood there before the new
flat-house began to rise.

“Well--we may run Leffler down somewhere; I’ve seen harder jobs done,”
 said McCarren, cheerfully noting down the name.

As they walked back toward Sixth Avenue he added, in a less sanguine
tone: “I’d undertake now to put the thing through if you could only put
me on the track of that cyanide.”

Granice’s heart sank. Yes--there was the weak spot; he had felt it from
the first! But he still hoped to convince McCarren that his case was
strong enough without it; and he urged the reporter to come back to his
rooms and sum up the facts with him again.

“Sorry, Mr. Granice, but I’m due at the office now. Besides, it’d be
no use till I get some fresh stuff to work on. Suppose I call you up
tomorrow or next day?”

He plunged into a trolley and left Granice gazing desolately after him.

Two days later he reappeared at the apartment, a shade less jaunty in
demeanor.

“Well, Mr. Granice, the stars in their courses are against you, as the
bard says. Can’t get a trace of Flood, or of Leffler either. And you say
you bought the motor through Flood, and sold it through him, too?”

“Yes,” said Granice wearily.

“Who bought it, do you know?”

Granice wrinkled his brows. “Why, Flood--yes, Flood himself. I sold it
back to him three months later.”

“Flood? The devil! And I’ve ransacked the town for Flood. That kind of
business disappears as if the earth had swallowed it.”

Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

“That brings us back to the poison,” McCarren continued, his note-book
out. “Just go over that again, will you?”

And Granice went over it again. It had all been so simple at the
time--and he had been so clever in covering up his traces! As soon as he
decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who manufactured
chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing
business--just the man. But at the last moment it occurred to him that
suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided
on a more tortuous course. Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of
medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of
his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the
exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice had the
habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, and
the friends generally sat in Venn’s work-shop, at the back of the old
family house in Stuyvesant Square. Off this work-shop was the cupboard
of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles. Carrick Venn was an
original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his place, on a Sunday,
was often full of visitors: a cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers,
painters, experimenters in divers forms of expression. Coming and going
among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one afternoon
Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found himself alone in
the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the cupboard, transferred the
drug to his pocket.

But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long
since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was dead, too, the
house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and
the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every
trace of their obscure little history. Even the optimistic McCarren
seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in that
direction.

“And there’s the third door slammed in our faces.” He shut his
note-book, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive
eyes on Granice’s furrowed face.

“Look here, Mr. Granice--you see the weak spot, don’t you?”

The other made a despairing motion. “I see so many!”

“Yes: but the one that weakens all the others. Why the deuce do you want
this thing known? Why do you want to put your head into the noose?”

Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his
quick light irreverent mind. No one so full of a cheerful animal life
would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive; and
Granice racked his brain for one more convincing. But suddenly he saw
the reporter’s face soften, and melt to a naive sentimentalism.

“Mr. Granice--has the memory of it always haunted you?”

Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening. “That’s it--the
memory of it... always...”

McCarren nodded vehemently. “Dogged your steps, eh? Wouldn’t let you
sleep? The time came when you HAD to make a clean breast of it?”

“I had to. Can’t you understand?”

The reporter struck his fist on the table. “God, sir! I don’t suppose
there’s a human being with a drop of warm blood in him that can’t
picture the deadly horrors of remorse--”

The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him for
the word. What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a conceivable
motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most adequate; and, as he
said, once one could find a convincing motive, the difficulties of the
case became so many incentives to effort.

“Remorse--REMORSE,” he repeated, rolling the word under his tongue with
an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama; and
Granice, perversely, said to himself: “If I could only have struck that
note I should have been running in six theatres at once.”

He saw that from that moment McCarren’s professional zeal would be
fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to propose
that they should dine together, and go on afterward to some music-hall
or theatre. It was becoming necessary to Granice to feel himself an
object of pre-occupation, to find himself in another mind. He took a
kind of gray penumbral pleasure in riveting McCarren’s attention on his
case; and to feign the grimaces of moral anguish became a passionately
engrossing game. He had not entered a theatre for months; but he sat out
the meaningless performance in rigid tolerance, sustained by the sense
of the reporter’s observation.

Between the acts, McCarren amused him with anecdotes about the audience:
he knew every one by sight, and could lift the curtain from every
physiognomy. Granice listened indulgently. He had lost all interest in
his kind, but he knew that he was himself the real centre of McCarren’s
attention, and that every word the latter spoke had an indirect bearing
on his own problem.

“See that fellow over there--the little dried-up man in the third row,
pulling his moustache? HIS memoirs would be worth publishing,” McCarren
said suddenly in the last entr’acte.

Granice, following his glance, recognized the detective from Allonby’s
office. For a moment he had the thrilling sense that he was being
shadowed.

“Caesar, if HE could talk--!” McCarren continued. “Know who he is, of
course? Dr. John B. Stell, the biggest alienist in the country--”

Granice, with a start, bent again between the heads in front of him.
“THAT man--the fourth from the aisle? You’re mistaken. That’s not Dr.
Stell.”

McCarren laughed. “Well, I guess I’ve been in court enough to know Stell
when I see him. He testifies in nearly all the big cases where they
plead insanity.”

A cold shiver ran down Granice’s spine, but he repeated obstinately:
“That’s not Dr. Stell.”

“Not Stell? Why, man, I KNOW him. Look--here he comes. If it isn’t
Stell, he won’t speak to me.”

The little dried-up man was moving slowly up the aisle. As he neared
McCarren he made a slight gesture of recognition.

“How’do, Doctor Stell? Pretty slim show, ain’t it?” the reporter
cheerfully flung out at him. And Mr. J. B. Hewson, with a nod of
amicable assent, passed on.

Granice sat benumbed. He knew he had not been mistaken--the man who
had just passed was the same man whom Allonby had sent to see him:
a physician disguised as a detective. Allonby, then, had thought him
insane, like the others--had regarded his confession as the maundering
of a maniac. The discovery froze Granice with horror--he seemed to see
the mad-house gaping for him.

“Isn’t there a man a good deal like him--a detective named J. B.
Hewson?”

But he knew in advance what McCarren’s answer would be. “Hewson? J.
B. Hewson? Never heard of him. But that was J. B. Stell fast enough--I
guess he can be trusted to know himself, and you saw he answered to his
name.”




VI


Some days passed before Granice could obtain a word with the District
Attorney: he began to think that Allonby avoided him.

But when they were face to face Allonby’s jovial countenance showed
no sign of embarrassment. He waved his visitor to a chair, and leaned
across his desk with the encouraging smile of a consulting physician.

Granice broke out at once: “That detective you sent me the other day--”

Allonby raised a deprecating hand.

“--I know: it was Stell the alienist. Why did you do that, Allonby?”

The other’s face did not lose its composure. “Because I looked up your
story first--and there’s nothing in it.”

“Nothing in it?” Granice furiously interposed.

“Absolutely nothing. If there is, why the deuce don’t you bring me
proofs? I know you’ve been talking to Peter Ascham, and to Denver, and
to that little ferret McCarren of the Explorer. Have any of them been
able to make out a case for you? No. Well, what am I to do?”

Granice’s lips began to tremble. “Why did you play me that trick?”

“About Stell? I had to, my dear fellow: it’s part of my business. Stell
IS a detective, if you come to that--every doctor is.”

The trembling of Granice’s lips increased, communicating itself in a
long quiver to his facial muscles. He forced a laugh through his dry
throat. “Well--and what did he detect?”

“In you? Oh, he thinks it’s overwork--overwork and too much smoking. If
you look in on him some day at his office he’ll show you the record of
hundreds of cases like yours, and advise you what treatment to follow.
It’s one of the commonest forms of hallucination. Have a cigar, all the
same.”

“But, Allonby, I killed that man!”

The District Attorney’s large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an
almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to the
call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer office.

“Sorry, my dear fellow--lot of people waiting. Drop in on Stell some
morning,” Allonby said, shaking hands.


McCarren had to own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in the
alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his wasting
time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice, who dropped
back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his visit to
Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why might not
Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist’s diagnosis? What if he
were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by a mad-doctor?
To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call on Dr. Stell.

The physician received him kindly, and reverted without embarrassment
to the conditions of their previous meeting. “We have to do that
occasionally, Mr. Granice; it’s one of our methods. And you had given
Allonby a fright.”

Granice was silent. He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to
produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last
talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken
for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr. Stell’s
allusion.

“You think, then, it’s a case of brain-fag--nothing more?”

“Nothing more. And I should advise you to knock off tobacco. You smoke a
good deal, don’t you?”

He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics, travel, or
any form of diversion that did not--that in short--

Granice interrupted him impatiently. “Oh, I loathe all that--and I’m
sick of travelling.”

“H’m. Then some larger interest--politics, reform, philanthropy?
Something to take you out of yourself.”

“Yes. I understand,” said Granice wearily.

“Above all, don’t lose heart. I see hundreds of cases like yours,” the
doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.

On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed. Hundreds of cases like
his--the case of a man who had committed a murder, who confessed his
guilt, and whom no one would believe! Why, there had never been a case
like it in the world. What a good figure Stell would have made in a
play: the great alienist who couldn’t read a man’s mind any better than
that!

Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.

But as he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of listlessness
returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to Peter Ascham
he found himself without an occupation, and understood that he had been
carried through the past weeks only by the necessity of constant action.
Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood
on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked
himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in
the sluggish circle of his consciousness.

The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh
recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never take
it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical reluctance,
another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the dogged desire
to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be swept aside as
an irresponsible dreamer--even if he had to kill himself in the end,
he would not do so before proving to society that he had deserved death
from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first had
been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by a
brief statement from the District Attorney’s office, and the rest of his
communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him, and begged
him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to joke him out of
his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their motives, began to dread
the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a guard on his lips. But the
words he kept back engendered others and still others in his brain.
His inner self became a humming factory of arguments, and he spent long
hours reciting and writing down elaborate statements of his crime,
which he constantly retouched and developed. Then gradually his activity
languished under the lack of an audience, the sense of being buried
beneath deepening drifts of indifference. In a passion of resentment he
swore that he would prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit
another crime to do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought
flamed red on his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining
impulse was lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his
victim... So he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose
the truth of his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to
pierce another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue
seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat one
man of the right to die.

Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his last
shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he were really
the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of
holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes against
the solid walls of consciousness? But, no--men were not so uniformly
cruel: there were flaws in the close surface of their indifference,
cracks of weakness and pity here and there...

Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to
persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible
conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce
secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of life
the slit seen between the blinders of habit: and in his walk down that
narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure. To a vision free to
follow his whole orbit his story would be more intelligible: it would
be easier to convince a chance idler in the street than the trained
intelligence hampered by a sense of his antecedents. This idea shot up
in him with the tropic luxuriance of each new seed of thought, and he
began to walk the streets, and to frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses
and bars in his search for the impartial stranger to whom he should
disclose himself.

At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he
always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential that
his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity, timidity,
intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he
sought. He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the tortuous
motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull benevolence
of the average face. Once or twice, obscurely, allusively, he made a
beginning--once sitting down at a man’s side in a basement chop-house,
another day approaching a lounger on an east-side wharf. But in both
cases the premonition of failure checked him on the brink of avowal. His
dread of being taken for a man in the clutch of a fixed idea gave him an
unnatural keenness in reading the expression of his interlocutors, and
he had provided himself in advance with a series of verbal alternatives,
trap-doors of evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.

He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home at
irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his apartment,
and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was spent in a
world so remote from this familiar setting that he sometimes had the
mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a furtive passage from one
identity to another--yet the other as unescapably himself!

One humiliation he was spared: the desire to live never revived in
him. Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with existing
conditions. He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed unwavering desire
which alone attains its end. And still the end eluded him! It would not
always, of course--he had full faith in the dark star of his destiny.
And he could prove it best by repeating his story, persistently and
indefatigably, pouring it into indifferent ears, hammering it into dull
brains, till at last it kindled a spark, and some one of the careless
millions paused, listened, believed...

It was a mild March day, and he had been loitering on the west-side
docks, looking at faces. He was becoming an expert in physiognomies: his
eagerness no longer made rash darts and awkward recoils. He knew now the
face he needed, as clearly as if it had come to him in a vision; and
not till he found it would he speak. As he walked eastward through the
shabby reeking streets he had a premonition that he should find it that
morning. Perhaps it was the promise of spring in the air--certainly he
felt calmer than for many days...

He turned into Washington Square, struck across it obliquely, and walked
up University Place. Its heterogeneous passers always allured him--they
were less hurried than in Broadway, less enclosed and classified than in
Fifth Avenue. He walked slowly, watching for his face.

At Union Square he felt a sudden relapse into discouragement, like a
votary who has watched too long for a sign from the altar. Perhaps,
after all, he should never find his face... The air was languid, and
he felt tired. He walked between the bald grass-plots and the twisted
trees, making for an empty seat. Presently he passed a bench on which a
girl sat alone, and something as definite as the twitch of a cord made
him stop before her. He had never dreamed of telling his story to a
girl, had hardly looked at the women’s faces as they passed. His case
was man’s work: how could a woman help him? But this girl’s face was
extraordinary--quiet and wide as a clear evening sky. It suggested a
hundred images of space, distance, mystery, like ships he had seen, as
a boy, quietly berthed by a familiar wharf, but with the breath of far
seas and strange harbours in their shrouds... Certainly this girl would
understand. He went up to her quietly, lifting his hat, observing the
forms--wishing her to see at once that he was “a gentleman.”

“I am a stranger to you,” he began, sitting down beside her, “but your
face is so extremely intelligent that I feel... I feel it is the face
I’ve waited for... looked for everywhere; and I want to tell you--”

The girl’s eyes widened: she rose to her feet. She was escaping him!

In his dismay he ran a few steps after her, and caught her roughly by
the arm.

“Here--wait--listen! Oh, don’t scream, you fool!” he shouted out.

He felt a hand on his own arm; turned and confronted a policeman.
Instantly he understood that he was being arrested, and something hard
within him was loosened and ran to tears.

“Ah, you know--you KNOW I’m guilty!”

He was conscious that a crowd was forming, and that the girl’s
frightened face had disappeared. But what did he care about her face? It
was the policeman who had really understood him. He turned and followed,
the crowd at his heels...




VII


In the charming place in which he found himself there were so many
sympathetic faces that he felt more than ever convinced of the certainty
of making himself heard.

It was a bad blow, at first, to find that he had not been arrested
for murder; but Ascham, who had come to him at once, explained that he
needed rest, and the time to “review” his statements; it appeared that
reiteration had made them a little confused and contradictory. To
this end he had willingly acquiesced in his removal to a large quiet
establishment, with an open space and trees about it, where he had
found a number of intelligent companions, some, like himself, engaged
in preparing or reviewing statements of their cases, and others ready to
lend an interested ear to his own recital.

For a time he was content to let himself go on the tranquil current of
this existence; but although his auditors gave him for the most part
an encouraging attention, which, in some, went the length of really
brilliant and helpful suggestion, he gradually felt a recurrence of his
old doubts. Either his hearers were not sincere, or else they had
less power to aid him than they boasted. His interminable conferences
resulted in nothing, and as the benefit of the long rest made itself
felt, it produced an increased mental lucidity which rendered inaction
more and more unbearable. At length he discovered that on certain days
visitors from the outer world were admitted to his retreat; and he wrote
out long and logically constructed relations of his crime, and furtively
slipped them into the hands of these messengers of hope.

This occupation gave him a fresh lease of patience, and he now lived
only to watch for the visitors’ days, and scan the faces that swept by
him like stars seen and lost in the rifts of a hurrying sky.

Mostly, these faces were strange and less intelligent than those of his
companions. But they represented his last means of access to the world,
a kind of subterranean channel on which he could set his “statements”
 afloat, like paper boats which the mysterious current might sweep out
into the open seas of life.

One day, however, his attention was arrested by a familiar contour,
a pair of bright prominent eyes, and a chin insufficiently shaved. He
sprang up and stood in the path of Peter McCarren.

The journalist looked at him doubtfully, then held out his hand with a
startled deprecating, “WHY--?”

“You didn’t know me? I’m so changed?” Granice faltered, feeling the
rebound of the other’s wonder.

“Why, no; but you’re looking quieter--smoothed out,” McCarren smiled.

“Yes: that’s what I’m here for--to rest. And I’ve taken the opportunity
to write out a clearer statement--”

Granice’s hand shook so that he could hardly draw the folded paper from
his pocket. As he did so he noticed that the reporter was accompanied by
a tall man with grave compassionate eyes. It came to Granice in a wild
thrill of conviction that this was the face he had waited for...

“Perhaps your friend--he IS your friend?--would glance over it--or I
could put the case in a few words if you have time?” Granice’s voice
shook like his hand. If this chance escaped him he felt that his last
hope was gone. McCarren and the stranger looked at each other, and the
former glanced at his watch.

“I’m sorry we can’t stay and talk it over now, Mr. Granice; but my
friend has an engagement, and we’re rather pressed--”

Granice continued to proffer the paper. “I’m sorry--I think I could have
explained. But you’ll take this, at any rate?”

The stranger looked at him gently. “Certainly--I’ll take it.” He had his
hand out. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” Granice echoed.

He stood watching the two men move away from him through the long light
hall; and as he watched them a tear ran down his face. But as soon as
they were out of sight he turned and walked hastily toward his room,
beginning to hope again, already planning a new statement.


Outside the building the two men stood still, and the journalist’s
companion looked up curiously at the long monotonous rows of barred
windows.

“So that was Granice?”

“Yes--that was Granice, poor devil,” said McCarren.

“Strange case! I suppose there’s never been one just like it? He’s still
absolutely convinced that he committed that murder?”

“Absolutely. Yes.”

The stranger reflected. “And there was no conceivable ground for the
idea? No one could make out how it started? A quiet conventional sort of
fellow like that--where do you suppose he got such a delusion? Did you
ever get the least clue to it?”

McCarren stood still, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked up in
contemplation of the barred windows. Then he turned his bright hard gaze
on his companion.

“That was the queer part of it. I’ve never spoken of it--but I DID get a
clue.”

“By Jove! That’s interesting. What was it?”

McCarren formed his red lips into a whistle. “Why--that it wasn’t a
delusion.”

He produced his effect--the other turned on him with a pallid stare.

“He murdered the man all right. I tumbled on the truth by the merest
accident, when I’d pretty nearly chucked the whole job.”

“He murdered him--murdered his cousin?”

“Sure as you live. Only don’t split on me. It’s about the queerest
business I ever ran into... DO ABOUT IT? Why, what was I to do? I
couldn’t hang the poor devil, could I? Lord, but I was glad when they
collared him, and had him stowed away safe in there!”

The tall man listened with a grave face, grasping Granice’s statement in
his hand.

“Here--take this; it makes me sick,” he said abruptly, thrusting the
paper at the reporter; and the two men turned and walked in silence to
the gates.

The End





THE DILETTANTE

As first published in Harper’s Monthly, December 1903


It was on an impulse hardly needing the arguments he found himself
advancing in its favor, that Thursdale, on his way to the club, turned
as usual into Mrs. Vervain’s street.

The “as usual” was his own qualification of the act; a convenient way
of bridging the interval--in days and other sequences--that lay
between this visit and the last. It was characteristic of him that he
instinctively excluded his call two days earlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from
the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending
it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved
dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to talk over
his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that
episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the
talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her corner,
he had felt the dilettante’s irresistible craving to take a last look at
a work of art that was passing out of his possession.

On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected
than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for
granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she
owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had
made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of
telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return.
The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a
picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using:
it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered
with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that the
privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman
can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he had
developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became
a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment
to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had been his
refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who now took his
easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw heights
of emotion? Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the satisfaction
of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into that chiar’oscuro
of sensation where every half-tone has its value.

As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable
to Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their
feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in. She
had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of making
the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of recklessly
undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the discipline
of his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own, and
perhaps more remarkable in that it involved keeping time with any tune
he played and reading at sight some uncommonly difficult passages.

It had taken Thursdale seven years to form this fine talent; but the
result justified the effort. At the crucial moment she had been
perfect: her way of greeting Miss Gaynor had made him regret that he had
announced his engagement by letter. It was an evasion that confessed a
difficulty; a deviation implying an obstacle, where, by common consent,
it was agreed to see none; it betrayed, in short, a lack of confidence
in the completeness of his method. It had been his pride never to put
himself in a position which had to be quitted, as it were, by the back
door; but here, as he perceived, the main portals would have opened
for him of their own accord. All this, and much more, he read in the
finished naturalness with which Mrs. Vervain had met Miss Gaynor. He
had never seen a better piece of work: there was no over-eagerness,
no suspicious warmth, above all (and this gave her art the grace of a
natural quality) there were none of those damnable implications whereby
a woman, in welcoming her friend’s betrothed, may keep him on pins
and needles while she laps the lady in complacency. So masterly a
performance, indeed, hardly needed the offset of Miss Gaynor’s door-step
words--“To be so kind to me, how she must have liked you!”--though he
caught himself wishing it lay within the bounds of fitness to transmit
them, as a final tribute, to the one woman he knew who was unfailingly
certain to enjoy a good thing. It was perhaps the one drawback to
his new situation that it might develop good things which it would be
impossible to hand on to Margaret Vervain.

The fact that he had made the mistake of underrating his friend’s
powers, the consciousness that his writing must have betrayed his
distrust of her efficiency, seemed an added reason for turning down her
street instead of going on to the club. He would show her that he knew
how to value her; he would ask her to achieve with him a feat infinitely
rarer and more delicate than the one he had appeared to avoid.
Incidentally, he would also dispose of the interval of time before
dinner: ever since he had seen Miss Gaynor off, an hour earlier, on her
return journey to Buffalo, he had been wondering how he should put in
the rest of the afternoon. It was absurd, how he missed the girl....
Yes, that was it; the desire to talk about her was, after all, at the
bottom of his impulse to call on Mrs. Vervain! It was absurd, if you
like--but it was delightfully rejuvenating. He could recall the time
when he had been afraid of being obvious: now he felt that this return
to the primitive emotions might be as restorative as a holiday in
the Canadian woods. And it was precisely by the girl’s candor, her
directness, her lack of complications, that he was taken. The sense that
she might say something rash at any moment was positively exhilarating:
if she had thrown her arms about him at the station he would not have
given a thought to his crumpled dignity. It surprised Thursdale to find
what freshness of heart he brought to the adventure; and though his
sense of irony prevented his ascribing his intactness to any conscious
purpose, he could but rejoice in the fact that his sentimental economies
had left him such a large surplus to draw upon.

Mrs. Vervain was at home--as usual. When one visits the cemetery one
expects to find the angel on the tombstone, and it struck Thursdale as
another proof of his friend’s good taste that she had been in no undue
haste to change her habits. The whole house appeared to count on his
coming; the footman took his hat and overcoat as naturally as though
there had been no lapse in his visits; and the drawing-room at once
enveloped him in that atmosphere of tacit intelligence which Mrs.
Vervain imparted to her very furniture.

It was a surprise that, in this general harmony of circumstances, Mrs.
Vervain should herself sound the first false note.

“You?” she exclaimed; and the book she held slipped from her hand.

It was crude, certainly; unless it were a touch of the finest art. The
difficulty of classifying it disturbed Thursdale’s balance.

“Why not?” he said, restoring the book. “Isn’t it my hour?” And as she
made no answer, he added gently, “Unless it’s some one else’s?”

She laid the book aside and sank back into her chair. “Mine, merely,”
 she said.

“I hope that doesn’t mean that you’re unwilling to share it?”

“With you? By no means. You’re welcome to my last crust.”

He looked at her reproachfully. “Do you call this the last?”

She smiled as he dropped into the seat across the hearth. “It’s a way of
giving it more flavor!”

He returned the smile. “A visit to you doesn’t need such condiments.”

She took this with just the right measure of retrospective amusement.

“Ah, but I want to put into this one a very special taste,” she
confessed.

Her smile was so confident, so reassuring, that it lulled him into the
imprudence of saying, “Why should you want it to be different from what
was always so perfectly right?”

She hesitated. “Doesn’t the fact that it’s the last constitute a
difference?”

“The last--my last visit to you?”

“Oh, metaphorically, I mean--there’s a break in the continuity.”

Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!

“I don’t recognize it,” he said. “Unless you make me--” he added, with a
note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.

She turned to him with grave eyes. “You recognize no difference
whatever?”

“None--except an added link in the chain.”

“An added link?”

“In having one more thing to like you for--your letting Miss Gaynor
see why I had already so many.” He flattered himself that this turn had
taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.

Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. “Was it that you came for?”
 she asked, almost gaily.

“If it is necessary to have a reason--that was one.”

“To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?”

“To tell you how she talks about you.”

“That will be very interesting--especially if you have seen her since
her second visit to me.”

“Her second visit?” Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and
moved to another. “She came to see you again?”

“This morning, yes--by appointment.”

He continued to look at her blankly. “You sent for her?”

“I didn’t have to--she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you
have seen her since.”

Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his
thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. “I saw her off
just now at the station.”

“And she didn’t tell you that she had been here again?”

“There was hardly time, I suppose--there were people about--” he
floundered.

“Ah, she’ll write, then.”

He regained his composure. “Of course she’ll write: very often, I hope.
You know I’m absurdly in love,” he cried audaciously.

She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the
chimney-piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a
pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. “Oh, my poor Thursdale!”
 she murmured.

“I suppose it’s rather ridiculous,” he owned; and as she remained
silent, he added, with a sudden break--“Or have you another reason for
pitying me?”

Her answer was another question. “Have you been back to your rooms since
you left her?”

“Since I left her at the station? I came straight here.”

“Ah, yes--you COULD: there was no reason--” Her words passed into a
silent musing.

Thursdale moved nervously nearer. “You said you had something to tell
me?”

“Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your
rooms.”

“A letter? What do you mean? A letter from HER? What has happened?”

His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. “Nothing
has happened--perhaps that is just the worst of it. You always HATED,
you know,” she added incoherently, “to have things happen: you never
would let them.”

“And now--?”

“Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To
know if anything had happened.”

“Had happened?” He gazed at her slowly. “Between you and me?” he said
with a rush of light.

The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between them
that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.

“You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are
you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?”

His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.

Mrs. Vervain went on, smoothly: “I supposed it might have struck you
that there were times when we presented that appearance.”

He made an impatient gesture. “A man’s past is his own!”

“Perhaps--it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But
one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is naturally
inexperienced.”

“Of course--but--supposing her act a natural one--” he floundered
lamentably among his innuendoes--“I still don’t see--how there was
anything--”

“Anything to take hold of? There wasn’t--”

“Well, then--?” escaped him, in crude satisfaction; but as she did not
complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: “She can hardly
object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!”

“But she does,” said Mrs. Vervain.

Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of
jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid
ring of the girl’s praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of
insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at
least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution.
The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in a
penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct query: “Won’t
you explain what you mean?”

Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his
distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it
was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was
the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything; and she had
lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted,
that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.

At last she said slowly: “She came to find out if you were really free.”

Thursdale colored again. “Free?” he stammered, with a sense of physical
disgust at contact with such crassness.

“Yes--if I had quite done with you.” She smiled in recovered security.
“It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions.”

“Yes--well?” he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.

“Well--and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she wanted
me to define MY status--to know exactly where I had stood all along.”

Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue.
“And even when you had told her that--”

“Even when I had told her that I had HAD no status--that I had
never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant,” said Mrs. Vervain,
slowly--“even then she wasn’t satisfied, it seems.”

He uttered an uneasy exclamation. “She didn’t believe you, you mean?”

“I mean that she DID believe me: too thoroughly.”

“Well, then--in God’s name, what did she want?”

“Something more--those were the words she used.”

“Something more? Between--between you and me? Is it a conundrum?” He
laughed awkwardly.

“Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden to
contemplate the relation of the sexes.”

“So it seems!” he commented. “But since, in this case, there wasn’t
any--” he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.

“That’s just it. The unpardonable offence has been--in our not
offending.”

He flung himself down despairingly. “I give it up!--What did you tell
her?” he burst out with sudden crudeness.

“The exact truth. If I had only known,” she broke off with a beseeching
tenderness, “won’t you believe that I would still have lied for you?”

“Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?”

“To save you--to hide you from her to the last! As I’ve hidden you from
myself all these years!” She stood up with a sudden tragic import in
her movement. “You believe me capable of that, don’t you? If I had only
guessed--but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out
of me with a spring.”

“The truth that you and I had never--”

“Had never--never in all these years! Oh, she knew why--she measured us
both in a flash. She didn’t suspect me of having haggled with you--her
words pelted me like hail. ‘He just took what he wanted--sifted and
sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of
cinders. And you let him--you let yourself be cut in bits’--she mixed
her metaphors a little--‘be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while
all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he’s
Shylock--and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut out
of you.’ But she despises me the most, you know--far the most--” Mrs.
Vervain ended.

The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they
seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind
of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor might intrude without
perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand
opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.

Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them,
but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of
reticence and ambiguity had fallen.

His first words were characteristic. “She DOES despise me, then?” he
exclaimed.

“She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the
heart.”

He was excessively pale. “Please tell me exactly what she said of me.”

“She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while
she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened to
the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed an
unwillingness to be taken with reservations--she thinks you would have
loved her better if you had loved some one else first. The point of view
is original--she insists on a man with a past!”

“Oh, a past--if she’s serious--I could rake up a past!” he said with a
laugh.

“So I suggested: but she has her eyes on this particular portion of it.
She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had
done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling
her.”

Thursdale drew a difficult breath. “I never supposed--your revenge is
complete,” he said slowly.

He heard a little gasp in her throat. “My revenge? When I sent for you
to warn you--to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?”

“You’re very good--but it’s rather late to talk of saving me.” He held
out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

“How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull,” was her answer.
“Don’t you see that it’s not too late for me to help you?” And as
he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: “Take the rest--in
imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied
to her--she’s too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I
sha’n’t have been wasted.”

His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look
back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to
need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept
them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this
contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but
something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went
up to his friend and took her hand.

“You would do it--you would do it!”

She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

“Good-by,” he said, kissing it.

“Good-by? You are going--?”

“To get my letter.”

“Your letter? The letter won’t matter, if you will only do what I ask.”

He returned her gaze. “I might, I suppose, without being out of
character. Only, don’t you see that if your plan helped me it could only
harm her?”

“Harm HER?”

“To sacrifice you wouldn’t make me different. I shall go on being what
I have always been--sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my
punishment to fall on HER?”

She looked at him long and deeply. “Ah, if I had to choose between
you--!”

“You would let her take her chance? But I can’t, you see. I must take my
punishment alone.”

She drew her hand away, sighing. “Oh, there will be no punishment for
either of you.”

“For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me.”

She shook her head with a slight laugh. “There will be no letter.”

Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look.
“No letter? You don’t mean--”

“I mean that she’s been with you since I saw her--she’s seen you and
heard your voice. If there IS a letter, she has recalled it--from the
first station, by telegraph.”

He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. “But in the
mean while I shall have read it,” he said.

The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness
of the room.


The End





THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD HAND

As first published in Atlantic Monthly, August 1904




I


“Above all,” the letter ended, “don’t leave Siena without seeing Doctor
Lombard’s Leonardo. Lombard is a queer old Englishman, a mystic or a
madman (if the two are not synonymous), and a devout student of the
Italian Renaissance. He has lived for years in Italy, exploring its
remotest corners, and has lately picked up an undoubted Leonardo, which
came to light in a farmhouse near Bergamo. It is believed to be one of
the missing pictures mentioned by Vasari, and is at any rate, according
to the most competent authorities, a genuine and almost untouched
example of the best period.

“Lombard is a queer stick, and jealous of showing his treasures; but we
struck up a friendship when I was working on the Sodomas in Siena three
years ago, and if you will give him the enclosed line you may get a peep
at the Leonardo. Probably not more than a peep, though, for I hear he
refuses to have it reproduced. I want badly to use it in my monograph on
the Windsor drawings, so please see what you can do for me, and if you
can’t persuade him to let you take a photograph or make a sketch, at
least jot down a detailed description of the picture and get from him
all the facts you can. I hear that the French and Italian governments
have offered him a large advance on his purchase, but that he refuses
to sell at any price, though he certainly can’t afford such luxuries; in
fact, I don’t see where he got enough money to buy the picture. He lives
in the Via Papa Giulio.”

Wyant sat at the table d’hote of his hotel, re-reading his friend’s
letter over a late luncheon. He had been five days in Siena without
having found time to call on Doctor Lombard; not from any indifference
to the opportunity presented, but because it was his first visit to
the strange red city and he was still under the spell of its more
conspicuous wonders--the brick palaces flinging out their wrought-iron
torch-holders with a gesture of arrogant suzerainty; the great
council-chamber emblazoned with civic allegories; the pageant of Pope
Julius on the Library walls; the Sodomas smiling balefully through the
dusk of mouldering chapels--and it was only when his first hunger was
appeased that he remembered that one course in the banquet was still
untasted.

He put the letter in his pocket and turned to leave the room, with a
nod to its only other occupant, an olive-skinned young man with lustrous
eyes and a low collar, who sat on the other side of the table, perusing
the FANFULLA DI DOMENICA. This gentleman, his daily vis-a-vis, returned
the nod with a Latin eloquence of gesture, and Wyant passed on to
the ante-chamber, where he paused to light a cigarette. He was just
restoring the case to his pocket when he heard a hurried step behind
him, and the lustrous-eyed young man advanced through the glass doors of
the dining-room.

“Pardon me, sir,” he said in measured English, and with an intonation of
exquisite politeness; “you have let this letter fall.”

Wyant, recognizing his friend’s note of introduction to Doctor Lombard,
took it with a word of thanks, and was about to turn away when he
perceived that the eyes of his fellow diner remained fixed on him with a
gaze of melancholy interrogation.

“Again pardon me,” the young man at length ventured, “but are you by
chance the friend of the illustrious Doctor Lombard?”

“No,” returned Wyant, with the instinctive Anglo-Saxon distrust of
foreign advances. Then, fearing to appear rude, he said with a guarded
politeness: “Perhaps, by the way, you can tell me the number of his
house. I see it is not given here.”

The young man brightened perceptibly. “The number of the house is
thirteen; but any one can indicate it to you--it is well known in Siena.
It is called,” he continued after a moment, “the House of the Dead
Hand.”

Wyant stared. “What a queer name!” he said.

“The name comes from an antique hand of marble which for many hundred
years has been above the door.”

Wyant was turning away with a gesture of thanks, when the other added:
“If you would have the kindness to ring twice.”

“To ring twice?”

“At the doctor’s.” The young man smiled. “It is the custom.”

It was a dazzling March afternoon, with a shower of sun from the
mid-blue, and a marshalling of slaty clouds behind the umber-colored
hills. For nearly an hour Wyant loitered on the Lizza, watching the
shadows race across the naked landscape and the thunder blacken in the
west; then he decided to set out for the House of the Dead Hand. The
map in his guidebook showed him that the Via Papa Giulio was one of the
streets which radiate from the Piazza, and thither he bent his course,
pausing at every other step to fill his eye with some fresh image of
weather-beaten beauty. The clouds had rolled upward, obscuring the
sunshine and hanging like a funereal baldachin above the projecting
cornices of Doctor Lombard’s street, and Wyant walked for some distance
in the shade of the beetling palace fronts before his eye fell on
a doorway surmounted by a sallow marble hand. He stood for a moment
staring up at the strange emblem. The hand was a woman’s--a dead
drooping hand, which hung there convulsed and helpless, as though it had
been thrust forth in denunciation of some evil mystery within the house,
and had sunk struggling into death.

A girl who was drawing water from the well in the court said that the
English doctor lived on the first floor, and Wyant, passing through
a glazed door, mounted the damp degrees of a vaulted stairway with a
plaster Æsculapius mouldering in a niche on the landing. Facing the
Æsculapius was another door, and as Wyant put his hand on the bell-rope
he remembered his unknown friend’s injunction, and rang twice.

His ring was answered by a peasant woman with a low forehead and small
close-set eyes, who, after a prolonged scrutiny of himself, his card,
and his letter of introduction, left him standing in a high, cold
ante-chamber floored with brick. He heard her wooden pattens click down
an interminable corridor, and after some delay she returned and told him
to follow her.

They passed through a long saloon, bare as the ante-chamber, but loftily
vaulted, and frescoed with a seventeenth-century Triumph of Scipio or
Alexander--martial figures following Wyant with the filmed melancholy
gaze of shades in limbo. At the end of this apartment he was admitted
to a smaller room, with the same atmosphere of mortal cold, but showing
more obvious signs of occupancy. The walls were covered with tapestry
which had faded to the gray-brown tints of decaying vegetation, so that
the young man felt as though he were entering a sunless autumn wood.
Against these hangings stood a few tall cabinets on heavy gilt feet, and
at a table in the window three persons were seated: an elderly lady
who was warming her hands over a brazier, a girl bent above a strip of
needle-work, and an old man.

As the latter advanced toward Wyant, the young man was conscious of
staring with unseemly intentness at his small round-backed figure,
dressed with shabby disorder and surmounted by a wonderful head,
lean, vulpine, eagle-beaked as that of some art-loving despot of the
Renaissance: a head combining the venerable hair and large prominent
eyes of the humanist with the greedy profile of the adventurer. Wyant,
in musing on the Italian portrait-medals of the fifteenth century, had
often fancied that only in that period of fierce individualism could
types so paradoxical have been produced; yet the subtle craftsmen who
committed them to the bronze had never drawn a face more strangely
stamped with contradictory passions than that of Doctor Lombard.

“I am glad to see you,” he said to Wyant, extending a hand which seemed
a mere framework held together by knotted veins. “We lead a quiet life
here and receive few visitors, but any friend of Professor Clyde’s is
welcome.” Then, with a gesture which included the two women, he added
dryly: “My wife and daughter often talk of Professor Clyde.”

“Oh yes--he used to make me such nice toast; they don’t understand toast
in Italy,” said Mrs. Lombard in a high plaintive voice.

It would have been difficult, from Doctor Lombard’s manner and
appearance to guess his nationality; but his wife was so inconsciently
and ineradicably English that even the silhouette of her cap seemed a
protest against Continental laxities. She was a stout fair woman, with
pale cheeks netted with red lines. A brooch with a miniature portrait
sustained a bogwood watch-chain upon her bosom, and at her elbow lay a
heap of knitting and an old copy of THE QUEEN.

The young girl, who had remained standing, was a slim replica of her
mother, with an apple-cheeked face and opaque blue eyes. Her small head
was prodigally laden with braids of dull fair hair, and she might have
had a kind of transient prettiness but for the sullen droop of her round
mouth. It was hard to say whether her expression implied ill-temper or
apathy; but Wyant was struck by the contrast between the fierce vitality
of the doctor’s age and the inanimateness of his daughter’s youth.

Seating himself in the chair which his host advanced, the young man
tried to open the conversation by addressing to Mrs. Lombard some random
remark on the beauties of Siena. The lady murmured a resigned assent,
and Doctor Lombard interposed with a smile: “My dear sir, my wife
considers Siena a most salubrious spot, and is favorably impressed by
the cheapness of the marketing; but she deplores the total absence of
muffins and cannel coal, and cannot resign herself to the Italian method
of dusting furniture.”

“But they don’t, you know--they don’t dust it!” Mrs. Lombard protested,
without showing any resentment of her husband’s manner.

“Precisely--they don’t dust it. Since we have lived in Siena we have not
once seen the cobwebs removed from the battlements of the Mangia. Can
you conceive of such housekeeping? My wife has never yet dared to write
it home to her aunts at Bonchurch.”

Mrs. Lombard accepted in silence this remarkable statement of her
views, and her husband, with a malicious smile at Wyant’s embarrassment,
planted himself suddenly before the young man.

“And now,” said he, “do you want to see my Leonardo?”

“DO I?” cried Wyant, on his feet in a flash.

The doctor chuckled. “Ah,” he said, with a kind of crooning
deliberation, “that’s the way they all behave--that’s what they all come
for.” He turned to his daughter with another variation of mockery in his
smile. “Don’t fancy it’s for your BEAUX YEUX, my dear; or for the mature
charms of Mrs. Lombard,” he added, glaring suddenly at his wife, who had
taken up her knitting and was softly murmuring over the number of her
stitches.

Neither lady appeared to notice his pleasantries, and he continued,
addressing himself to Wyant: “They all come--they all come; but many are
called and few are chosen.” His voice sank to solemnity. “While I live,”
 he said, “no unworthy eye shall desecrate that picture. But I will
not do my friend Clyde the injustice to suppose that he would send an
unworthy representative. He tells me he wishes a description of the
picture for his book; and you shall describe it to him--if you can.”

Wyant hesitated, not knowing whether it was a propitious moment to put
in his appeal for a photograph.

“Well, sir,” he said, “you know Clyde wants me to take away all I can of
it.”

Doctor Lombard eyed him sardonically. “You’re welcome to take away all
you can carry,” he replied; adding, as he turned to his daughter: “That
is, if he has your permission, Sybilla.”

The girl rose without a word, and laying aside her work, took a key from
a secret drawer in one of the cabinets, while the doctor continued in
the same note of grim jocularity: “For you must know that the picture is
not mine--it is my daughter’s.”

He followed with evident amusement the surprised glance which Wyant
turned on the young girl’s impassive figure.

“Sybilla,” he pursued, “is a votary of the arts; she has inherited her
fond father’s passion for the unattainable. Luckily, however, she also
recently inherited a tidy legacy from her grandmother; and having seen
the Leonardo, on which its discoverer had placed a price far beyond
my reach, she took a step which deserves to go down to history: she
invested her whole inheritance in the purchase of the picture, thus
enabling me to spend my closing years in communion with one of the
world’s masterpieces. My dear sir, could Antigone do more?”

The object of this strange eulogy had meanwhile drawn aside one of the
tapestry hangings, and fitted her key into a concealed door.

“Come,” said Doctor Lombard, “let us go before the light fails us.”

Wyant glanced at Mrs. Lombard, who continued to knit impassively.

“No, no,” said his host, “my wife will not come with us. You might
not suspect it from her conversation, but my wife has no feeling for
art--Italian art, that is; for no one is fonder of our early Victorian
school.”

“Frith’s Railway Station, you know,” said Mrs. Lombard, smiling. “I like
an animated picture.”

Miss Lombard, who had unlocked the door, held back the tapestry to let
her father and Wyant pass out; then she followed them down a narrow
stone passage with another door at its end. This door was iron-barred,
and Wyant noticed that it had a complicated patent lock. The girl fitted
another key into the lock, and Doctor Lombard led the way into a small
room. The dark panelling of this apartment was irradiated by streams of
yellow light slanting through the disbanded thunder clouds, and in
the central brightness hung a picture concealed by a curtain of faded
velvet.

“A little too bright, Sybilla,” said Doctor Lombard. His face had grown
solemn, and his mouth twitched nervously as his daughter drew a linen
drapery across the upper part of the window.

“That will do--that will do.” He turned impressively to Wyant. “Do you
see the pomegranate bud in this rug? Place yourself there--keep your
left foot on it, please. And now, Sybilla, draw the cord.”

Miss Lombard advanced and placed her hand on a cord hidden behind the
velvet curtain.

“Ah,” said the doctor, “one moment: I should like you, while looking at
the picture, to have in mind a few lines of verse. Sybilla--”

Without the slightest change of countenance, and with a promptness which
proved her to be prepared for the request, Miss Lombard began to recite,
in a full round voice like her mother’s, St. Bernard’s invocation to the
Virgin, in the thirty-third canto of the Paradise.

“Thank you, my dear,” said her father, drawing a deep breath as she
ended. “That unapproachable combination of vowel sounds prepares one
better than anything I know for the contemplation of the picture.”

As he spoke the folds of velvet slowly parted, and the Leonardo appeared
in its frame of tarnished gold:

From the nature of Miss Lombard’s recitation Wyant had expected a sacred
subject, and his surprise was therefore great as the composition was
gradually revealed by the widening division of the curtain.

In the background a steel-colored river wound through a pale calcareous
landscape; while to the left, on a lonely peak, a crucified Christ
hung livid against indigo clouds. The central figure of the foreground,
however, was that of a woman seated in an antique chair of marble with
bas-reliefs of dancing mænads. Her feet rested on a meadow sprinkled
with minute wild-flowers, and her attitude of smiling majesty recalled
that of Dosso Dossi’s Circe. She wore a red robe, flowing in closely
fluted lines from under a fancifully embroidered cloak. Above her high
forehead the crinkled golden hair flowed sideways beneath a veil; one
hand drooped on the arm of her chair; the other held up an inverted
human skull, into which a young Dionysus, smooth, brown and sidelong as
the St. John of the Louvre, poured a stream of wine from a high-poised
flagon. At the lady’s feet lay the symbols of art and luxury: a flute
and a roll of music, a platter heaped with grapes and roses, the torso
of a Greek statuette, and a bowl overflowing with coins and jewels;
behind her, on the chalky hilltop, hung the crucified Christ. A scroll
in a corner of the foreground bore the legend: LUX MUNDI.

Wyant, emerging from the first plunge of wonder, turned inquiringly
toward his companions. Neither had moved. Miss Lombard stood with her
hand on the cord, her lids lowered, her mouth drooping; the doctor, his
strange Thoth-like profile turned toward his guest, was still lost in
rapt contemplation of his treasure.

Wyant addressed the young girl.

“You are fortunate,” he said, “to be the possessor of anything so
perfect.”

“It is considered very beautiful,” she said coldly.

“Beautiful--BEAUTIFUL!” the doctor burst out. “Ah, the poor, worn out,
over-worked word! There are no adjectives in the language fresh enough
to describe such pristine brilliancy; all their brightness has been worn
off by misuse. Think of the things that have been called beautiful, and
then look at THAT!”

“It is worthy of a new vocabulary,” Wyant agreed.

“Yes,” Doctor Lombard continued, “my daughter is indeed fortunate.
She has chosen what Catholics call the higher life--the counsel of
perfection. What other private person enjoys the same opportunity of
understanding the master? Who else lives under the same roof with an
untouched masterpiece of Leonardo’s? Think of the happiness of being
always under the influence of such a creation; of living INTO it; of
partaking of it in daily and hourly communion! This room is a chapel;
the sight of that picture is a sacrament. What an atmosphere for a young
life to unfold itself in! My daughter is singularly blessed. Sybilla,
point out some of the details to Mr. Wyant; I see that he will
appreciate them.”

The girl turned her dense blue eyes toward Wyant; then, glancing away
from him, she pointed to the canvas.

“Notice the modeling of the left hand,” she began in a monotonous voice;
“it recalls the hand of the Mona Lisa. The head of the naked genius will
remind you of that of the St. John of the Louvre, but it is more purely
pagan and is turned a little less to the right. The embroidery on the
cloak is symbolic: you will see that the roots of this plant have
burst through the vase. This recalls the famous definition of Hamlet’s
character in Wilhelm Meister. Here are the mystic rose, the flame, and
the serpent, emblem of eternity. Some of the other symbols we have not
yet been able to decipher.”

Wyant watched her curiously; she seemed to be reciting a lesson.

“And the picture itself?” he said. “How do you explain that? LUX MUNDI--what
a curious device to connect with such a subject! What can it
mean?”

Miss Lombard dropped her eyes: the answer was evidently not included in
her lesson.

“What, indeed?” the doctor interposed. “What does life mean? As one
may define it in a hundred different ways, so one may find a hundred
different meanings in this picture. Its symbolism is as many-faceted as
a well-cut diamond. Who, for instance, is that divine lady? Is it she
who is the true LUX MUNDI--the light reflected from jewels and young
eyes, from polished marble and clear waters and statues of bronze? Or is
that the Light of the World, extinguished on yonder stormy hill, and is
this lady the Pride of Life, feasting blindly on the wine of iniquity,
with her back turned to the light which has shone for her in vain?
Something of both these meanings may be traced in the picture; but to
me it symbolizes rather the central truth of existence: that all that
is raised in incorruption is sown in corruption; art, beauty, love,
religion; that all our wine is drunk out of skulls, and poured for us by
the mysterious genius of a remote and cruel past.”

The doctor’s face blazed: his bent figure seemed to straighten itself
and become taller.

“Ah,” he cried, growing more dithyrambic, “how lightly you ask what
it means! How confidently you expect an answer! Yet here am I who have
given my life to the study of the Renaissance; who have violated its
tomb, laid open its dead body, and traced the course of every muscle,
bone, and artery; who have sucked its very soul from the pages of poets
and humanists; who have wept and believed with Joachim of Flora, smiled
and doubted with Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini; who have patiently followed
to its source the least inspiration of the masters, and groped in
neolithic caverns and Babylonian ruins for the first unfolding tendrils
of the arabesques of Mantegna and Crivelli; and I tell you that I
stand abashed and ignorant before the mystery of this picture. It means
nothing--it means all things. It may represent the period which saw its
creation; it may represent all ages past and to come. There are volumes
of meaning in the tiniest emblem on the lady’s cloak; the blossoms of
its border are rooted in the deepest soil of myth and tradition. Don’t
ask what it means, young man, but bow your head in thankfulness for
having seen it!”

Miss Lombard laid her hand on his arm.

“Don’t excite yourself, father,” she said in the detached tone of a
professional nurse.

He answered with a despairing gesture. “Ah, it’s easy for you to talk.
You have years and years to spend with it; I am an old man, and every
moment counts!”

“It’s bad for you,” she repeated with gentle obstinacy.

The doctor’s sacred fury had in fact burnt itself out. He dropped into
a seat with dull eyes and slackening lips, and his daughter drew the
curtain across the picture.

Wyant turned away reluctantly. He felt that his opportunity was slipping
from him, yet he dared not refer to Clyde’s wish for a photograph. He
now understood the meaning of the laugh with which Doctor Lombard had
given him leave to carry away all the details he could remember. The
picture was so dazzling, so unexpected, so crossed with elusive and
contradictory suggestions, that the most alert observer, when placed
suddenly before it, must lose his coordinating faculty in a sense of
confused wonder. Yet how valuable to Clyde the record of such a work
would be! In some ways it seemed to be the summing up of the master’s
thought, the key to his enigmatic philosophy.

The doctor had risen and was walking slowly toward the door. His
daughter unlocked it, and Wyant followed them back in silence to the
room in which they had left Mrs. Lombard. That lady was no longer there,
and he could think of no excuse for lingering.

He thanked the doctor, and turned to Miss Lombard, who stood in the
middle of the room as though awaiting farther orders.

“It is very good of you,” he said, “to allow one even a glimpse of such
a treasure.”

She looked at him with her odd directness. “You will come again?”
 she said quickly; and turning to her father she added: “You know what
Professor Clyde asked. This gentleman cannot give him any account of the
picture without seeing it again.”

Doctor Lombard glanced at her vaguely; he was still like a person in a
trance.

“Eh?” he said, rousing himself with an effort.

“I said, father, that Mr. Wyant must see the picture again if he is to
tell Professor Clyde about it,” Miss Lombard repeated with extraordinary
precision of tone.

Wyant was silent. He had the puzzled sense that his wishes were being
divined and gratified for reasons with which he was in no way connected.

“Well, well,” the doctor muttered, “I don’t say no--I don’t say no. I
know what Clyde wants--I don’t refuse to help him.” He turned to Wyant.
“You may come again--you may make notes,” he added with a sudden effort.
“Jot down what occurs to you. I’m willing to concede that.”

Wyant again caught the girl’s eye, but its emphatic message perplexed
him.

“You’re very good,” he said tentatively, “but the fact is the picture is
so mysterious--so full of complicated detail--that I’m afraid no notes I
could make would serve Clyde’s purpose as well as--as a photograph, say.
If you would allow me--”

Miss Lombard’s brow darkened, and her father raised his head furiously.

“A photograph? A photograph, did you say? Good God, man, not ten people
have been allowed to set foot in that room! A PHOTOGRAPH?”

Wyant saw his mistake, but saw also that he had gone too far to retreat.

“I know, sir, from what Clyde has told me, that you object to having
any reproduction of the picture published; but he hoped you might let
me take a photograph for his personal use--not to be reproduced in his
book, but simply to give him something to work by. I should take the
photograph myself, and the negative would of course be yours. If you
wished it, only one impression would be struck off, and that one Clyde
could return to you when he had done with it.”

Doctor Lombard interrupted him with a snarl. “When he had done with it?
Just so: I thank thee for that word! When it had been re-photographed,
drawn, traced, autotyped, passed about from hand to hand, defiled by
every ignorant eye in England, vulgarized by the blundering praise of
every art-scribbler in Europe! Bah! I’d as soon give you the picture
itself: why don’t you ask for that?”

“Well, sir,” said Wyant calmly, “if you will trust me with it, I’ll
engage to take it safely to England and back, and to let no eye but
Clyde’s see it while it is out of your keeping.”

The doctor received this remarkable proposal in silence; then he burst
into a laugh.

“Upon my soul!” he said with sardonic good humor.

It was Miss Lombard’s turn to look perplexedly at Wyant. His last words
and her father’s unexpected reply had evidently carried her beyond her
depth.

“Well, sir, am I to take the picture?” Wyant smilingly pursued.

“No, young man; nor a photograph of it. Nor a sketch, either; mind
that,--nothing that can be reproduced. Sybilla,” he cried with sudden
passion, “swear to me that the picture shall never be reproduced! No
photograph, no sketch--now or afterward. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, father,” said the girl quietly.

“The vandals,” he muttered, “the desecrators of beauty; if I thought it
would ever get into their hands I’d burn it first, by God!” He turned
to Wyant, speaking more quietly. “I said you might come back--I never
retract what I say. But you must give me your word that no one but Clyde
shall see the notes you make.”

Wyant was growing warm.

“If you won’t trust me with a photograph I wonder you trust me not to
show my notes!” he exclaimed.

The doctor looked at him with a malicious smile.

“Humph!” he said; “would they be of much use to anybody?”

Wyant saw that he was losing ground and controlled his impatience.

“To Clyde, I hope, at any rate,” he answered, holding out his hand. The
doctor shook it without a trace of resentment, and Wyant added: “When
shall I come, sir?”

“To-morrow--to-morrow morning,” cried Miss Lombard, speaking suddenly.

She looked fixedly at her father, and he shrugged his shoulders.

“The picture is hers,” he said to Wyant.

In the ante-chamber the young man was met by the woman who had admitted
him. She handed him his hat and stick, and turned to unbar the door. As
the bolt slipped back he felt a touch on his arm.

“You have a letter?” she said in a low tone.

“A letter?” He stared. “What letter?”

She shrugged her shoulders, and drew back to let him pass.




II


As Wyant emerged from the house he paused once more to glance up at
its scarred brick facade. The marble hand drooped tragically above
the entrance: in the waning light it seemed to have relaxed into the
passiveness of despair, and Wyant stood musing on its hidden meaning.
But the Dead Hand was not the only mysterious thing about Doctor
Lombard’s house. What were the relations between Miss Lombard and her
father? Above all, between Miss Lombard and her picture? She did not
look like a person capable of a disinterested passion for the arts; and
there had been moments when it struck Wyant that she hated the picture.

The sky at the end of the street was flooded with turbulent yellow
light, and the young man turned his steps toward the church of San
Domenico, in the hope of catching the lingering brightness on Sodoma’s
St. Catherine.

The great bare aisles were almost dark when he entered, and he had to
grope his way to the chapel steps. Under the momentary evocation of the
sunset, the saint’s figure emerged pale and swooning from the dusk, and
the warm light gave a sensual tinge to her ecstasy. The flesh seemed to
glow and heave, the eyelids to tremble; Wyant stood fascinated by the
accidental collaboration of light and color.

Suddenly he noticed that something white had fluttered to the ground
at his feet. He stooped and picked up a small thin sheet of note-paper,
folded and sealed like an old-fashioned letter, and bearing the
superscription:--


To the Count Ottaviano Celsi.


Wyant stared at this mysterious document. Where had it come from? He was
distinctly conscious of having seen it fall through the air, close
to his feet. He glanced up at the dark ceiling of the chapel; then he
turned and looked about the church. There was only one figure in it,
that of a man who knelt near the high altar.

Suddenly Wyant recalled the question of Doctor Lombard’s maid-servant.
Was this the letter she had asked for? Had he been unconsciously
carrying it about with him all the afternoon? Who was Count Ottaviano
Celsi, and how came Wyant to have been chosen to act as that nobleman’s
ambulant letter-box?

Wyant laid his hat and stick on the chapel steps and began to explore
his pockets, in the irrational hope of finding there some clue to the
mystery; but they held nothing which he had not himself put there, and
he was reduced to wondering how the letter, supposing some unknown hand
to have bestowed it on him, had happened to fall out while he stood
motionless before the picture.

At this point he was disturbed by a step on the floor of the aisle, and
turning, he saw his lustrous-eyed neighbor of the table d’hote.

The young man bowed and waved an apologetic hand.

“I do not intrude?” he inquired suavely.

Without waiting for a reply, he mounted the steps of the chapel,
glancing about him with the affable air of an afternoon caller.

“I see,” he remarked with a smile, “that you know the hour at which our
saint should be visited.”

Wyant agreed that the hour was indeed felicitous.

The stranger stood beamingly before the picture.

“What grace! What poetry!” he murmured, apostrophizing the St.
Catherine, but letting his glance slip rapidly about the chapel as he
spoke.

Wyant, detecting the manoeuvre, murmured a brief assent.

“But it is cold here--mortally cold; you do not find it so?” The
intruder put on his hat. “It is permitted at this hour--when the church
is empty. And you, my dear sir--do you not feel the dampness? You are
an artist, are you not? And to artists it is permitted to cover the head
when they are engaged in the study of the paintings.”

He darted suddenly toward the steps and bent over Wyant’s hat.

“Permit me--cover yourself!” he said a moment later, holding out the hat
with an ingratiating gesture.

A light flashed on Wyant.

“Perhaps,” he said, looking straight at the young man, “you will tell me
your name. My own is Wyant.”

The stranger, surprised, but not disconcerted, drew forth a coroneted
card, which he offered with a low bow. On the card was engraved:--


     Il Conte Ottaviano Celsi.


“I am much obliged to you,” said Wyant; “and I may as well tell you that
the letter which you apparently expected to find in the lining of my hat
is not there, but in my pocket.”

He drew it out and handed it to its owner, who had grown very pale.

“And now,” Wyant continued, “you will perhaps be good enough to tell me
what all this means.”

There was no mistaking the effect produced on Count Ottaviano by this
request. His lips moved, but he achieved only an ineffectual smile.

“I suppose you know,” Wyant went on, his anger rising at the sight of
the other’s discomfiture, “that you have taken an unwarrantable liberty.
I don’t yet understand what part I have been made to play, but it’s
evident that you have made use of me to serve some purpose of your own,
and I propose to know the reason why.”

Count Ottaviano advanced with an imploring gesture.

“Sir,” he pleaded, “you permit me to speak?”

“I expect you to,” cried Wyant. “But not here,” he added, hearing the
clank of the verger’s keys. “It is growing dark, and we shall be turned
out in a few minutes.”

He walked across the church, and Count Ottaviano followed him out into
the deserted square.

“Now,” said Wyant, pausing on the steps.

The Count, who had regained some measure of self-possession, began to
speak in a high key, with an accompaniment of conciliatory gesture.

“My dear sir--my dear Mr. Wyant--you find me in an abominable
position--that, as a man of honor, I immediately confess. I have
taken advantage of you--yes! I have counted on your amiability, your
chivalry--too far, perhaps? I confess it! But what could I do? It was to
oblige a lady”--he laid a hand on his heart--“a lady whom I would die
to serve!” He went on with increasing volubility, his deliberate English
swept away by a torrent of Italian, through which Wyant, with some
difficulty, struggled to a comprehension of the case.

Count Ottaviano, according to his own statement, had come to Siena some
months previously, on business connected with his mother’s property; the
paternal estate being near Orvieto, of which ancient city his father
was syndic. Soon after his arrival in Siena the young Count had met the
incomparable daughter of Doctor Lombard, and falling deeply in love with
her, had prevailed on his parents to ask her hand in marriage. Doctor
Lombard had not opposed his suit, but when the question of settlements
arose it became known that Miss Lombard, who was possessed of a small
property in her own right, had a short time before invested the
whole amount in the purchase of the Bergamo Leonardo. Thereupon Count
Ottaviano’s parents had politely suggested that she should sell the
picture and thus recover her independence; and this proposal being met
by a curt refusal from Doctor Lombard, they had withdrawn their consent
to their son’s marriage. The young lady’s attitude had hitherto been one
of passive submission; she was horribly afraid of her father, and would
never venture openly to oppose him; but she had made known to Ottaviano
her intention of not giving him up, of waiting patiently till events
should take a more favorable turn. She seemed hardly aware, the Count
said with a sigh, that the means of escape lay in her own hands; that
she was of age, and had a right to sell the picture, and to marry
without asking her father’s consent. Meanwhile her suitor spared no
pains to keep himself before her, to remind her that he, too, was
waiting and would never give her up.

Doctor Lombard, who suspected the young man of trying to persuade
Sybilla to sell the picture, had forbidden the lovers to meet or to
correspond; they were thus driven to clandestine communication, and had
several times, the Count ingenuously avowed, made use of the doctor’s
visitors as a means of exchanging letters.

“And you told the visitors to ring twice?” Wyant interposed.

The young man extended his hands in a deprecating gesture. Could Mr.
Wyant blame him? He was young, he was ardent, he was enamored! The
young lady had done him the supreme honor of avowing her attachment, of
pledging her unalterable fidelity; should he suffer his devotion to be
outdone? But his purpose in writing to her, he admitted, was not merely
to reiterate his fidelity; he was trying by every means in his power to
induce her to sell the picture. He had organized a plan of action; every
detail was complete; if she would but have the courage to carry out
his instructions he would answer for the result. His idea was that she
should secretly retire to a convent of which his aunt was the Mother
Superior, and from that stronghold should transact the sale of the
Leonardo. He had a purchaser ready, who was willing to pay a large sum;
a sum, Count Ottaviano whispered, considerably in excess of the young
lady’s original inheritance; once the picture sold, it could, if
necessary, be removed by force from Doctor Lombard’s house, and his
daughter, being safely in the convent, would be spared the painful
scenes incidental to the removal. Finally, if Doctor Lombard were
vindictive enough to refuse his consent to her marriage, she had only to
make a SOMMATION RESPECTUEUSE, and at the end of the prescribed delay no
power on earth could prevent her becoming the wife of Count Ottaviano.

Wyant’s anger had fallen at the recital of this simple romance. It was
absurd to be angry with a young man who confided his secrets to the
first stranger he met in the streets, and placed his hand on his heart
whenever he mentioned the name of his betrothed. The easiest way out of
the business was to take it as a joke. Wyant had played the wall to this
new Pyramus and Thisbe, and was philosophic enough to laugh at the part
he had unwittingly performed.

He held out his hand with a smile to Count Ottaviano.

“I won’t deprive you any longer,” he said, “of the pleasure of reading
your letter.”

“Oh, sir, a thousand thanks! And when you return to the casa Lombard,
you will take a message from me--the letter she expected this
afternoon?”

“The letter she expected?” Wyant paused. “No, thank you. I thought
you understood that where I come from we don’t do that kind of
thing--knowingly.”

“But, sir, to serve a young lady!”

“I’m sorry for the young lady, if what you tell me is true”--the Count’s
expressive hands resented the doubt--“but remember that if I am under
obligations to any one in this matter, it is to her father, who has
admitted me to his house and has allowed me to see his picture.”

“HIS picture? Hers!”

“Well, the house is his, at all events.”

“Unhappily--since to her it is a dungeon!”

“Why doesn’t she leave it, then?” exclaimed Wyant impatiently.

The Count clasped his hands. “Ah, how you say that--with what force,
with what virility! If you would but say it to HER in that tone--you,
her countryman! She has no one to advise her; the mother is an idiot;
the father is terrible; she is in his power; it is my belief that he
would kill her if she resisted him. Mr. Wyant, I tremble for her life
while she remains in that house!”

“Oh, come,” said Wyant lightly, “they seem to understand each other well
enough. But in any case, you must see that I can’t interfere--at
least you would if you were an Englishman,” he added with an escape of
contempt.




III


Wyant’s affiliations in Siena being restricted to an acquaintance with
his land-lady, he was forced to apply to her for the verification of
Count Ottaviano’s story.

The young nobleman had, it appeared, given a perfectly correct account
of his situation. His father, Count Celsi-Mongirone, was a man of
distinguished family and some wealth. He was syndic of Orvieto, and
lived either in that town or on his neighboring estate of Mongirone. His
wife owned a large property near Siena, and Count Ottaviano, who was the
second son, came there from time to time to look into its management.
The eldest son was in the army, the youngest in the Church; and an aunt
of Count Ottaviano’s was Mother Superior of the Visitandine convent in
Siena. At one time it had been said that Count Ottaviano, who was a most
amiable and accomplished young man, was to marry the daughter of the
strange Englishman, Doctor Lombard, but difficulties having arisen as to
the adjustment of the young lady’s dower, Count Celsi-Mongirone had very
properly broken off the match. It was sad for the young man, however,
who was said to be deeply in love, and to find frequent excuses for
coming to Siena to inspect his mother’s estate.

Viewed in the light of Count Ottaviano’s personality the story had a
tinge of opera bouffe; but the next morning, as Wyant mounted the stairs
of the House of the Dead Hand, the situation insensibly assumed another
aspect. It was impossible to take Doctor Lombard lightly; and there was
a suggestion of fatality in the appearance of his gaunt dwelling. Who
could tell amid what tragic records of domestic tyranny and fluttering
broken purposes the little drama of Miss Lombard’s fate was being played
out? Might not the accumulated influences of such a house modify the
lives within it in a manner unguessed by the inmates of a suburban villa
with sanitary plumbing and a telephone?

One person, at least, remained unperturbed by such fanciful problems;
and that was Mrs. Lombard, who, at Wyant’s entrance, raised a placidly
wrinkled brow from her knitting. The morning was mild, and her chair had
been wheeled into a bar of sunshine near the window, so that she made a
cheerful spot of prose in the poetic gloom of her surroundings.

“What a nice morning!” she said; “it must be delightful weather at
Bonchurch.”

Her dull blue glance wandered across the narrow street with its
threatening house fronts, and fluttered back baffled, like a bird with
clipped wings. It was evident, poor lady, that she had never seen beyond
the opposite houses.

Wyant was not sorry to find her alone. Seeing that she was surprised
at his reappearance he said at once: “I have come back to study Miss
Lombard’s picture.”

“Oh, the picture--” Mrs. Lombard’s face expressed a gentle
disappointment, which might have been boredom in a person of acuter
sensibilities. “It’s an original Leonardo, you know,” she said
mechanically.

“And Miss Lombard is very proud of it, I suppose? She seems to have
inherited her father’s love for art.”

Mrs. Lombard counted her stitches, and he went on: “It’s unusual in so
young a girl. Such tastes generally develop later.”

Mrs. Lombard looked up eagerly. “That’s what I say! I was quite
different at her age, you know. I liked dancing, and doing a pretty bit
of fancy-work. Not that I couldn’t sketch, too; I had a master down from
London. My aunts have some of my crayons hung up in their drawing-room
now--I did a view of Kenilworth which was thought pleasing. But I liked
a picnic, too, or a pretty walk through the woods with young people of
my own age. I say it’s more natural, Mr. Wyant; one may have a feeling
for art, and do crayons that are worth framing, and yet not give up
everything else. I was taught that there were other things.”

Wyant, half-ashamed of provoking these innocent confidences, could not
resist another question. “And Miss Lombard cares for nothing else?”

Her mother looked troubled.

“Sybilla is so clever--she says I don’t understand. You know how
self-confident young people are! My husband never said that of
me, now--he knows I had an excellent education. My aunts were very
particular; I was brought up to have opinions, and my husband has always
respected them. He says himself that he wouldn’t for the world miss
hearing my opinion on any subject; you may have noticed that he often
refers to my tastes. He has always respected my preference for living
in England; he likes to hear me give my reasons for it. He is so much
interested in my ideas that he often says he knows just what I am going
to say before I speak. But Sybilla does not care for what I think--”

At this point Doctor Lombard entered. He glanced sharply at Wyant. “The
servant is a fool; she didn’t tell me you were here.” His eye turned to
his wife. “Well, my dear, what have you been telling Mr. Wyant? About
the aunts at Bonchurch, I’ll be bound!”

Mrs. Lombard looked triumphantly at Wyant, and her husband rubbed his
hooked fingers, with a smile.

“Mrs. Lombard’s aunts are very superior women. They subscribe to the
circulating library, and borrow Good Words and the Monthly Packet from
the curate’s wife across the way. They have the rector to tea twice a
year, and keep a page-boy, and are visited by two baronets’ wives. They
devoted themselves to the education of their orphan niece, and I think
I may say without boasting that Mrs. Lombard’s conversation shows marked
traces of the advantages she enjoyed.”

Mrs. Lombard colored with pleasure.

“I was telling Mr. Wyant that my aunts were very particular.”

“Quite so, my dear; and did you mention that they never sleep in
anything but linen, and that Miss Sophia puts away the furs and blankets
every spring with her own hands? Both those facts are interesting to the
student of human nature.” Doctor Lombard glanced at his watch. “But we
are missing an incomparable moment; the light is perfect at this hour.”

Wyant rose, and the doctor led him through the tapestried door and down
the passageway.

The light was, in fact, perfect, and the picture shone with an inner
radiancy, as though a lamp burned behind the soft screen of the lady’s
flesh. Every detail of the foreground detached itself with jewel-like
precision. Wyant noticed a dozen accessories which had escaped him on
the previous day.

He drew out his note-book, and the doctor, who had dropped his sardonic
grin for a look of devout contemplation, pushed a chair forward, and
seated himself on a carved settle against the wall.

“Now, then,” he said, “tell Clyde what you can; but the letter killeth.”

He sank down, his hands hanging on the arm of the settle like the claws
of a dead bird, his eyes fixed on Wyant’s notebook with the obvious
intention of detecting any attempt at a surreptitious sketch.

Wyant, nettled at this surveillance, and disturbed by the speculations
which Doctor Lombard’s strange household excited, sat motionless for a
few minutes, staring first at the picture and then at the blank pages
of the note-book. The thought that Doctor Lombard was enjoying his
discomfiture at length roused him, and he began to write.

He was interrupted by a knock on the iron door. Doctor Lombard rose to
unlock it, and his daughter entered.

She bowed hurriedly to Wyant, without looking at him.

“Father, had you forgotten that the man from Monte Amiato was to come
back this morning with an answer about the bas-relief? He is here now;
he says he can’t wait.”

“The devil!” cried her father impatiently. “Didn’t you tell him--”

“Yes; but he says he can’t come back. If you want to see him you must
come now.”

“Then you think there’s a chance?--”

She nodded.

He turned and looked at Wyant, who was writing assiduously.

“You will stay here, Sybilla; I shall be back in a moment.”

He hurried out, locking the door behind him.

Wyant had looked up, wondering if Miss Lombard would show any surprise
at being locked in with him; but it was his turn to be surprised, for
hardly had they heard the key withdrawn when she moved close to him, her
small face pale and tumultuous.

“I arranged it--I must speak to you,” she gasped. “He’ll be back in five
minutes.”

Her courage seemed to fail, and she looked at him helplessly.

Wyant had a sense of stepping among explosives. He glanced about him
at the dusky vaulted room, at the haunting smile of the strange picture
overhead, and at the pink-and-white girl whispering of conspiracies in a
voice meant to exchange platitudes with a curate.

“How can I help you?” he said with a rush of compassion.

“Oh, if you would! I never have a chance to speak to any one; it’s so
difficult--he watches me--he’ll be back immediately.”

“Try to tell me what I can do.”

“I don’t dare; I feel as if he were behind me.” She turned away, fixing
her eyes on the picture. A sound startled her. “There he comes, and
I haven’t spoken! It was my only chance; but it bewilders me so to be
hurried.”

“I don’t hear any one,” said Wyant, listening. “Try to tell me.”

“How can I make you understand? It would take so long to explain.” She
drew a deep breath, and then with a plunge--“Will you come here again
this afternoon--at about five?” she whispered.

“Come here again?”

“Yes--you can ask to see the picture,--make some excuse. He will come
with you, of course; I will open the door for you--and--and lock you
both in”--she gasped.

“Lock us in?”

“You see? You understand? It’s the only way for me to leave the
house--if I am ever to do it”--She drew another difficult breath.
“The key will be returned--by a safe person--in half an hour,--perhaps
sooner--”

She trembled so much that she was obliged to lean against the settle for
support.

“Wyant looked at her steadily; he was very sorry for her.

“I can’t, Miss Lombard,” he said at length.

“You can’t?”

“I’m sorry; I must seem cruel; but consider--”

He was stopped by the futility of the word: as well ask a hunted rabbit
to pause in its dash for a hole!

Wyant took her hand; it was cold and nerveless.

“I will serve you in any way I can; but you must see that this way is
impossible. Can’t I talk to you again? Perhaps--”

“Oh,” she cried, starting up, “there he comes!”

Doctor Lombard’s step sounded in the passage.

Wyant held her fast. “Tell me one thing: he won’t let you sell the
picture?”

“No--hush!”

“Make no pledges for the future, then; promise me that.”

“The future?”

“In case he should die: your father is an old man. You haven’t
promised?”

She shook her head.

“Don’t, then; remember that.”

She made no answer, and the key turned in the lock.

As he passed out of the house, its scowling cornice and facade of
ravaged brick looked down on him with the startlingness of a strange
face, seen momentarily in a crowd, and impressing itself on the brain as
part of an inevitable future. Above the doorway, the marble hand reached
out like the cry of an imprisoned anguish.

Wyant turned away impatiently.

“Rubbish!” he said to himself. “SHE isn’t walled in; she can get out if
she wants to.”




IV


Wyant had any number of plans for coming to Miss Lombard’s aid: he was
elaborating the twentieth when, on the same afternoon, he stepped into
the express train for Florence. By the time the train reached Certaldo
he was convinced that, in thus hastening his departure, he had followed
the only reasonable course; at Empoli, he began to reflect that the
priest and the Levite had probably justified themselves in much the same
manner.

A month later, after his return to England, he was unexpectedly relieved
from these alternatives of extenuation and approval. A paragraph in
the morning paper announced the sudden death of Doctor Lombard, the
distinguished English dilettante who had long resided in Siena. Wyant’s
justification was complete. Our blindest impulses become evidence of
perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.

Wyant could now comfortably speculate on the particular complications
from which his foresight had probably saved him. The climax was
unexpectedly dramatic. Miss Lombard, on the brink of a step which,
whatever its issue, would have burdened her with retrospective
compunction, had been set free before her suitor’s ardor could have had
time to cool, and was now doubtless planning a life of domestic felicity
on the proceeds of the Leonardo. One thing, however, struck Wyant as
odd--he saw no mention of the sale of the picture. He had scanned the
papers for an immediate announcement of its transfer to one of the
great museums; but presently concluding that Miss Lombard, out of
filial piety, had wished to avoid an appearance of unseemly haste in the
disposal of her treasure, he dismissed the matter from his mind. Other
affairs happened to engage him; the months slipped by, and gradually the
lady and the picture dwelt less vividly in his mind.

It was not till five or six years later, when chance took him again to
Siena, that the recollection started from some inner fold of memory. He
found himself, as it happened, at the head of Doctor Lombard’s street,
and glancing down that grim thoroughfare, caught an oblique glimpse
of the doctor’s house front, with the Dead Hand projecting above its
threshold. The sight revived his interest, and that evening, over an
admirable frittata, he questioned his landlady about Miss Lombard’s
marriage.

“The daughter of the English doctor? But she has never married,
signore.”

“Never married? What, then, became of Count Ottaviano?”

“For a long time he waited; but last year he married a noble lady of the
Maremma.”

“But what happened--why was the marriage broken?”

The landlady enacted a pantomime of baffled interrogation.

“And Miss Lombard still lives in her father’s house?”

“Yes, signore; she is still there.”

“And the Leonardo--”

“The Leonardo, also, is still there.”

The next day, as Wyant entered the House of the Dead Hand, he remembered
Count Ottaviano’s injunction to ring twice, and smiled mournfully to
think that so much subtlety had been vain. But what could have prevented
the marriage? If Doctor Lombard’s death had been long delayed, time
might have acted as a dissolvent, or the young lady’s resolve have
failed; but it seemed impossible that the white heat of ardor in which
Wyant had left the lovers should have cooled in a few short weeks.

As he ascended the vaulted stairway the atmosphere of the place seemed
a reply to his conjectures. The same numbing air fell on him, like
an emanation from some persistent will-power, a something fierce and
imminent which might reduce to impotence every impulse within its range.
Wyant could almost fancy a hand on his shoulder, guiding him upward with
the ironical intent of confronting him with the evidence of its work.

A strange servant opened the door, and he was presently introduced to
the tapestried room, where, from their usual seats in the window, Mrs.
Lombard and her daughter advanced to welcome him with faint ejaculations
of surprise.

Both had grown oddly old, but in a dry, smooth way, as fruits might
shrivel on a shelf instead of ripening on the tree. Mrs. Lombard was
still knitting, and pausing now and then to warm her swollen hands above
the brazier; and Miss Lombard, in rising, had laid aside a strip of
needle-work which might have been the same on which Wyant had first seen
her engaged.

Their visitor inquired discreetly how they had fared in the interval,
and learned that they had thought of returning to England, but had
somehow never done so.

“I am sorry not to see my aunts again,” Mrs. Lombard said resignedly;
“but Sybilla thinks it best that we should not go this year.”

“Next year, perhaps,” murmured Miss Lombard, in a voice which seemed to
suggest that they had a great waste of time to fill.

She had returned to her seat, and sat bending over her work. Her hair
enveloped her head in the same thick braids, but the rose color of her
cheeks had turned to blotches of dull red, like some pigment which has
darkened in drying.

“And Professor Clyde--is he well?” Mrs. Lombard asked affably;
continuing, as her daughter raised a startled eye: “Surely, Sybilla,
Mr. Wyant was the gentleman who was sent by Professor Clyde to see the
Leonardo?”

Miss Lombard was silent, but Wyant hastened to assure the elder lady of
his friend’s well-being.

“Ah--perhaps, then, he will come back some day to Siena,” she said,
sighing. Wyant declared that it was more than likely; and there ensued
a pause, which he presently broke by saying to Miss Lombard: “And you
still have the picture?”

She raised her eyes and looked at him. “Should you like to see it?” she
asked.

On his assenting, she rose, and extracting the same key from the same
secret drawer, unlocked the door beneath the tapestry. They walked down
the passage in silence, and she stood aside with a grave gesture, making
Wyant pass before her into the room. Then she crossed over and drew the
curtain back from the picture.

The light of the early afternoon poured full on it: its surface appeared
to ripple and heave with a fluid splendor. The colors had lost none of
their warmth, the outlines none of their pure precision; it seemed to
Wyant like some magical flower which had burst suddenly from the mould
of darkness and oblivion.

He turned to Miss Lombard with a movement of comprehension.

“Ah, I understand--you couldn’t part with it, after all!” he cried.

“No--I couldn’t part with it,” she answered.

“It’s too beautiful,--too beautiful,”--he assented.

“Too beautiful?” She turned on him with a curious stare. “I have never
thought it beautiful, you know.”

He gave back the stare. “You have never--”

She shook her head. “It’s not that. I hate it; I’ve always hated it. But
he wouldn’t let me--he will never let me now.”

Wyant was startled by her use of the present tense. Her look surprised
him, too: there was a strange fixity of resentment in her innocuous eye.
Was it possible that she was laboring under some delusion? Or did the
pronoun not refer to her father?

“You mean that Doctor Lombard did not wish you to part with the
picture?”

“No--he prevented me; he will always prevent me.”

There was another pause. “You promised him, then, before his death--”

“No; I promised nothing. He died too suddenly to make me.” Her voice
sank to a whisper. “I was free--perfectly free--or I thought I was till
I tried.”

“Till you tried?”

“To disobey him--to sell the picture. Then I found it was impossible. I
tried again and again; but he was always in the room with me.”

She glanced over her shoulder as though she had heard a step; and to
Wyant, too, for a moment, the room seemed full of a third presence.

“And you can’t”--he faltered, unconsciously dropping his voice to the
pitch of hers.

She shook her head, gazing at him mystically. “I can’t lock him out;
I can never lock him out now. I told you I should never have another
chance.”

Wyant felt the chill of her words like a cold breath in his hair.

“Oh”--he groaned; but she cut him off with a grave gesture.

“It is too late,” she said; “but you ought to have helped me that day.”





THE EARLY SHORT FICTION OF EDITH WHARTON

A Ten-Part Collection

Volume Two



Contents of Part Two

                               Stories
           AFTERWARD............................January   1910
           THE FULNESS OF LIFE..................December  1893
           A VENETIAN NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT.....December  1903
           XINGU................................December  1911
           THE VERDICT..........................June      1908
           THE RECKONING........................August    1902


                                Verse

           BOTTICELLI’S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE...January   1891
           THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI...........February  1891
           THE SONNET...........................November  1891
           TWO BACKGROUNDS......................November  1892
           EXPERIENCE...........................January   1893
           CHARTRES.............................September 1893
           LIFE.................................June      1894
           AN AUTUMN SUNSET.....................October   1894





AFTERWARD

January 1910




I


“Oh, there IS one, of course, but you’ll never know it.”

The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June
garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent
significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps
to be brought into the library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at
tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which
the library in question was the central, the pivotal “feature.” Mary
Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the
southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England,
carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully
solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected,
almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that
she threw it out: “Well, there’s Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to
Hugo’s cousins, and you can get it for a song.”

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes,
and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading in its
favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the economic
drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with unusual
architectural felicities.

“I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly uncomfortable,” Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two,
had jocosely insisted; “the least hint of ‘convenience’ would make me
think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered,
and set up again.” And they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous
precision, their various suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe
that the house their cousin recommended was REALLY Tudor till they
learned it had no heating system, or that the village church was
literally in the grounds till she assured them of the deplorable
uncertainty of the water-supply.

“It’s too uncomfortable to be true!” Edward Boyne had continued to exult
as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but
he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse to distrust:
“And the ghost? You’ve been concealing from us the fact that there is no
ghost!”

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh,
being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a
sudden flatness of tone in Alida’s answering hilarity.

“Oh, Dorsetshire’s full of ghosts, you know.”

“Yes, yes; but that won’t do. I don’t want to have to drive ten miles
to see somebody else’s ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. IS
there a ghost at Lyng?”

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had
flung back tantalizingly: “Oh, there IS one, of course, but you’ll never
know it.”

“Never know it?” Boyne pulled her up. “But what in the world constitutes
a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?”

“I can’t say. But that’s the story.”

“That there’s a ghost, but that nobody knows it’s a ghost?”

“Well--not till afterward, at any rate.”

“Till afterward?”

“Not till long, long afterward.”

“But if it’s once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why hasn’t
its signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to
preserve its incognito?”

Alida could only shake her head. “Don’t ask me. But it has.”

“And then suddenly--” Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth of
divination--“suddenly, long afterward, one says to one’s self, ‘THAT WAS
it?’”

She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her question
fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow of the same
surprise flit across Alida’s clear pupils. “I suppose so. One just has
to wait.”

“Oh, hang waiting!” Ned broke in. “Life’s too short for a ghost who can
only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can’t we do better than that, Mary?”

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for
within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were
established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point of
planning it out in all its daily details had actually begun for them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a wide-hooded
fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond
the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude: it
was for the ultimate indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had
endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of the
Middle West, and that Boyne had ground on doggedly at his engineering
till, with a suddenness that still made her blink, the prodigious
windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession
of life and the leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant
their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and
gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the
production of his long-planned book on the “Economic Basis of
Culture”; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too
sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge
deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But
to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole
incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they put it--that
for the production of its effects so little of a given quality went
so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance a
difference.

“It’s that,” Ned had once enthusiastically explained, “that gives such
depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They’ve
been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful.”

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house,
hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of
commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that it was neither large
nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in
its special sense--the sense of having been for centuries a deep, dim
reservoir of life. The life had probably not been of the most vivid
order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into
the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the
green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence
sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion,
and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when,
waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and
stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had gone off, after
luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of
late that he preferred to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and,
in the tried security of their personal relations, had been driven
to conclude that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the morning’s
work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had imagined
it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been
there in his engineering days. Then he had often looked fagged to the
verge of illness, but the native demon of “worry” had never branded his
brow. Yet the few pages he had so far read to her--the introduction, and
a synopsis of the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession
of his subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done
with “business” and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible
element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then?
But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown
robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only within a week that she
had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless in his
absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who
had a secret to keep from him!

The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck her
with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the
dim, long room.

“Can it be the house?” she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be
piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of
velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books,
the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

“Why, of course--the house is haunted!” she reflected.

The ghost--Alida’s imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in the
banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded
as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the
tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few
rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, “They du say so, Ma’am,” the
villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had apparently
never had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it,
and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their
profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses
good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

“And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that’s why it beats its
beautiful wings in vain in the void,” Mary had laughingly concluded.

“Or, rather,” Ned answered, in the same strain, “why, amid so much
that’s ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as THE
ghost.” And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out
of their references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly
unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity
revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense gradually
acquired through close daily contact with the scene of the lurking
mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed the
ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with its own
past; and if one could only get into close enough communion with the
house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on
one’s own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary hours in this very
room, where she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband HAD
acquired it already, and was silently carrying the dread weight of
whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-versed in the code of
the spectral world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts
one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-breeding as to
name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her.
“What, after all, except for the fun of the frisson,” she reflected,
“would he really care for any of their old ghosts?” And thence she was
thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one’s
greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular
bearing on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did
not know it.

“Not till long afterward,” Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned HAD
seen one when they first came, and had known only within the last week
what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of the hour, she
threw back her searching thoughts to the early days of their tenancy,
but at first only to recall a gay confusion of unpacking, settling,
arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the
house as treasure after treasure of their habitation revealed itself to
them. It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled
a certain soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the
first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the
old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel that opened at
her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to an unsuspected flat
ledge of the roof--the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on
all sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown down
to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her discovery.
She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge, he had passed
his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-line
of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the arabesque
of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the
lawn.

“And now the other way,” he had said, gently turning her about within
his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long,
satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled court, the squat lions
on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the highroad under the
downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had
felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp “Hullo!” that made her turn to
glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow
of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following
his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in loose, grayish
clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering down the lime-avenue
to the court with the tentative gait of a stranger seeking his way. Her
short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness
and grayness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of
the figure or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen
enough to make him push past her with a sharp “Wait!” and dash down the
twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch
at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow him down
more cautiously; and when she had reached the attic landing she paused
again for a less definite reason, leaning over the oak banister to
strain her eyes through the silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths
below. She lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard
the closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the
shallow flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and after
listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she quickly crossed
the threshold, and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers
on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the
shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she
fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

“What was it? Who was it?” she asked.

“Who?” he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

“The man we saw coming toward the house.”

He seemed honestly to reflect. “The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters;
I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains, but he had
disappeared before I could get down.”

“Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him.”

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. “So I thought; but he must have got up
steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up
Meldon Steep before sunset?”

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing,
had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first
vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing
ever since they had first seen its bare spine heaving itself above the
low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incident’s
having occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept
it stored away in the unconscious fold of association from which it now
emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment
there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash
himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the
period when they were always on the watch for one or the other of the
specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for them,
and dashing out at them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And
certainly in the distance the gray figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband’s
explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his
face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious?
Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with that
authority on the subject of the stable-drains, had the failure to find
him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not say that any one
of these considerations had occurred to her at the time, yet, from the
promptness with which they now marshaled themselves at her summons, she
had a sudden sense that they must all along have been there, waiting
their hour.




II


Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library was
now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint light
the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in
the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper
gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her
heart thumped to the thought, “It’s the ghost!”

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of
whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from the roof
was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as NOT
having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the
disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock the ambiguous
figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself even to her weak
sight as her husband’s; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered,
with the confession of her folly.

“It’s really too absurd,” she laughed out from the threshold, “but I
never CAN remember!”

“Remember what?” Boyne questioned as they drew together.

“That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it.”

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response
in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face.

“Did you think you’d seen it?” he asked, after an appreciable interval.

“Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad determination to
spot it!”

“Me--just now?” His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a
faint echo of her laugh. “Really, dearest, you’d better give it up, if
that’s the best you can do.”

“Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have YOU?” she asked, turning round on
him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light
struck up into Boyne’s face as he bent above the tray she presented.

“Have YOU?” Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had disappeared
on her errand of illumination.

“Have I what?” he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp
stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

“Given up trying to see the ghost.” Her heart beat a little at the
experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of the
hearth.

“I never tried,” he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.

“Well, of course,” Mary persisted, “the exasperating thing is that
there’s no use trying, since one can’t be sure till so long afterward.”

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after a
pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his hands,
he lifted his head to say abruptly, “Have you any idea HOW LONG?”

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat
she looked up, startled, at her husband’s profile, which was darkly
projected against the circle of lamplight.

“No; none. Have YOU?” she retorted, repeating her former phrase with an
added keenness of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently turned
back with it toward the lamp.

“Lord, no! I only meant,” he explained, with a faint tinge of
impatience, “is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?”

“Not that I know of,” she answered; but the impulse to add, “What makes
you ask?” was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-maid with tea
and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily domestic
office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that sense of
something mutely imminent which had darkened her solitary afternoon. For
a few moments she gave herself silently to the details of her task, and
when she looked up from it she was struck to the point of bewilderment
by the change in her husband’s face. He had seated himself near the
farther lamp, and was absorbed in the perusal of his letters; but was it
something he had found in them, or merely the shifting of her own point
of view, that had restored his features to their normal aspect? The
longer she looked, the more definitely the change affirmed itself. The
lines of painful tension had vanished, and such traces of fatigue as
lingered were of the kind easily attributable to steady mental effort.
He glanced up, as if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

“I’m dying for my tea, you know; and here’s a letter for you,” he said.

She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she proffered
him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with the languid gesture
of the reader whose interests are all inclosed in the circle of one
cherished presence.

Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the letter
falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her husband a long
newspaper clipping.

“Ned! What’s this? What does it mean?”

He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry before
she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and she studied
each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage, across the space
between her chair and his desk.

“What’s what? You fairly made me jump!” Boyne said at length, moving
toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of
apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding,
but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of his
feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

“This article--from the ‘Waukesha Sentinel’--that a man named Elwell has
brought suit against you--that there was something wrong about the Blue
Star Mine. I can’t understand more than half.”

They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her astonishment,
she saw that her words had the almost immediate effect of dissipating
the strained watchfulness of his look.

“Oh, THAT!” He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it with
the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar. “What’s
the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you’d got bad news.”

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly under
the reassuring touch of his composure.

“You knew about this, then--it’s all right?”

“Certainly I knew about it; and it’s all right.”

“But what IS it? I don’t understand. What does this man accuse you of?”

“Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar.” Boyne had tossed the
clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair near
the fire. “Do you want to hear the story? It’s not particularly
interesting--just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star.”

“But who is this Elwell? I don’t know the name.”

“Oh, he’s a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you all
about him at the time.”

“I daresay. I must have forgotten.” Vainly she strained back among her
memories. “But if you helped him, why does he make this return?”

“Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him over.
It’s all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind of thing
bored you.”

His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated the
American wife’s detachment from her husband’s professional interests,
but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix her attention
on Boyne’s report of the transactions in which his varied interests
involved him. Besides, she had felt from the first that, in a community
where the amenities of living could be obtained only at the cost of
efforts as arduous as her husband’s professional labors, such brief
leisure as they could command should be used as an escape from immediate
preoccupations, a flight to the life they always dreamed of living. Once
or twice, now that this new life had actually drawn its magic circle
about them, she had asked herself if she had done right; but hitherto
such conjectures had been no more than the retrospective excursions of
an active fancy. Now, for the first time, it startled her a little
to find how little she knew of the material foundation on which her
happiness was built.

She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure
of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her
reassurance.

“But doesn’t this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me about
it?”

He answered both questions at once: “I didn’t speak of it at first
because it DID worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it’s all ancient
history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number of
the ‘Sentinel.’”

She felt a quick thrill of relief. “You mean it’s over? He’s lost his
case?”

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne’s reply. “The suit’s been
withdrawn--that’s all.”

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge of
being too easily put off. “Withdrawn because he saw he had no chance?”

“Oh, he had no chance,” Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of her
thoughts.

“How long ago was it withdrawn?”

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty. “I’ve
just had the news now; but I’ve been expecting it.”

“Just now--in one of your letters?”

“Yes; in one of my letters.”

She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of
waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had placed
himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so, pass an arm
about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and turning slowly,
drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met the smiling clearness of his
eyes.

“It’s all right--it’s all right?” she questioned, through the flood of
her dissolving doubts; and “I give you my word it never was righter!” he
laughed back at her, holding her close.




III


One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all the
next day’s incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete recovery
of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it
accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at her
from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks of the
urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as if, in
some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the previous
day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper
article,--as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return
upon the past,--had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting
moral obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband’s
affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith in him
instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right to her faith
had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face of menace and
suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled, more naturally and
unconsciously in possession of himself, than after the cross-examination
to which she had subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of
her lurking doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that surprised
her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her
daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his desk, indulging
herself, as she passed the library door, by a last peep at his quiet
face, where he bent, pipe in his mouth, above his papers, and now she
had her own morning’s task to perform. The task involved on such charmed
winter days almost as much delighted loitering about the different
quarters of her demesne as if spring were already at work on shrubs and
borders. There were such inexhaustible possibilities still before her,
such opportunities to bring out the latent graces of the old place,
without a single irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter months
were all too short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her
recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar
zest to her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to
the kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated
patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening about
the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something wrong about
the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an authority from
Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and make a diagnosis of
the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp heat of the greenhouses,
among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and reds of old-fashioned
exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the note!--she learned that the
great man had not arrived, and the day being too rare to waste in an
artificial atmosphere, she came out again and paced slowly along the
springy turf of the bowling-green to the gardens behind the house. At
their farther end rose a grass terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond
and the yew hedges, a view of the long house-front, with its twisted
chimney-stacks and the blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in
the pale gold moisture of the air.

Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused,
mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and hospitably smoking
chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind slowly ripened
on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before had so deep a sense
of her intimacy with it, such a conviction that its secrets were
all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, “for one’s good,” so
complete a trust in its power to gather up her life and Ned’s into the
harmonious pattern of the long, long story it sat there weaving in the
sun.

She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener,
accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one figure was
in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man, who, for reasons she
could not on the spot have specified, did not remotely resemble her
preconceived notion of an authority on hot-house boilers. The
new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and paused with the air of a
gentleman--perhaps a traveler--desirous of having it immediately known
that his intrusion is involuntary. The local fame of Lyng occasionally
attracted the more intelligent sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see
the stranger dissemble a camera, or justify his presence by producing
it. But he made no gesture of any sort, and after a moment she asked,
in a tone responding to the courteous deprecation of his attitude: “Is
there any one you wish to see?”

“I came to see Mr. Boyne,” he replied. His intonation, rather than his
accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar note, looked
at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a shade on his
face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted gaze a look of
seriousness, as of a person arriving “on business,” and civilly but
firmly aware of his rights.

Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but she
was jealous of her husband’s morning hours, and doubtful of his having
given any one the right to intrude on them.

“Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?” she asked.

He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.

“Not exactly an appointment,” he replied.

“Then I’m afraid, this being his working-time, that he can’t receive you
now. Will you give me a message, or come back later?”

The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would come
back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of the house. As
his figure receded down the walk between the yew hedges, Mary saw him
pause and look up an instant at the peaceful house-front bathed in faint
winter sunshine; and it struck her, with a tardy touch of compunction,
that it would have been more humane to ask if he had come from a
distance, and to offer, in that case, to inquire if her husband could
receive him. But as the thought occurred to her he passed out of
sight behind a pyramidal yew, and at the same moment her attention was
distracted by the approach of the gardener, attended by the bearded
pepper-and-salt figure of the boiler-maker from Dorchester.

The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues that
they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his train, and
beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the morning in absorbed
confabulation among the greenhouses. She was startled to find, when the
colloquy ended, that it was nearly luncheon-time, and she half expected,
as she hurried back to the house, to see her husband coming out to meet
her. But she found no one in the court but an under-gardener raking
the gravel, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she
guessed Boyne to be still at work behind the closed door of the library.

Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and there,
at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of the outlay
to which the morning’s conference had committed her. The knowledge that
she could permit herself such follies had not yet lost its novelty; and
somehow, in contrast to the vague apprehensions of the previous days, it
now seemed an element of her recovered security, of the sense that, as
Ned had said, things in general had never been “righter.”

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously worded
inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of their
jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging a
state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an
absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in rebuke
of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps sounded down the
passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed the hall, and went
to the library door. It was still closed, and she wavered in her turn,
disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious that he should not exceed
his normal measure of work. As she stood there, balancing her impulses,
the esoteric Trimmle returned with the announcement of luncheon, and
Mary, thus impelled, opened the door and went into the library.

Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to
discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the room;
but her call brought no response, and gradually it became clear to her
that he was not in the library.

She turned back to the parlor-maid.

“Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is ready.”

The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of obeying
orders and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness of
the injunction laid upon her. The struggle resulted in her saying
doubtfully, “If you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne’s not up-stairs.”

“Not in his room? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Madam.”

Mary consulted the clock. “Where is he, then?”

“He’s gone out,” Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who has
respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind would have
first propounded.

Mary’s previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have gone to
the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it was clear that
he had taken the shorter way by the south door, instead of going round
to the court. She crossed the hall to the glass portal opening directly
on the yew garden, but the parlor-maid, after another moment of inner
conflict, decided to bring out recklessly, “Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne
didn’t go that way.”

Mary turned back. “Where DID he go? And when?”

“He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam.” It was a matter of
principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one question at a time.

“Up the drive? At this hour?” Mary went to the door herself, and
glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare limes. But
its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering the
house.

“Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?” she asked.

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the forces
of chaos.

“No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman.”

“The gentleman? What gentleman?” Mary wheeled about, as if to front this
new factor.

“The gentleman who called, Madam,” said Trimmle, resignedly.

“When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!”

Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to consult
her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to lay so
unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was detached
enough to note in Trimmle’s eye the dawning defiance of the respectful
subordinate who has been pressed too hard.

“I couldn’t exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn’t let the
gentleman in,” she replied, with the air of magnanimously ignoring the
irregularity of her mistress’s course.

“You didn’t let him in?”

“No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--”

“Go and ask Agnes, then,” Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her
look of patient magnanimity. “Agnes would not know, Madam, for she had
unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of the new lamp from
town--” Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to the new
lamp--“and so Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead.”

Mary looked again at the clock. “It’s after two! Go and ask the
kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word.”

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently brought
her there the kitchen-maid’s statement that the gentleman had called
about one o’clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with him without leaving
any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the caller’s name, for
he had written it on a slip of paper, which he had folded and handed to
her, with the injunction to deliver it at once to Mr. Boyne.

Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over,
and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder had
deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike Boyne
to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour, and the
difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had apparently
obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable. Mary Boyne’s
experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to sudden calls and
compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her to the philosophic
acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne’s withdrawal from business he
had adopted a Benedictine regularity of life. As if to make up for the
dispersed and agitated years, with their “stand-up” lunches and dinners
rattled down to the joltings of the dining-car, he cultivated the last
refinements of punctuality and monotony, discouraging his wife’s fancy
for the unexpected; and declaring that to a delicate taste there were
infinite gradations of pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.

Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the unforeseen,
it was evident that all Boyne’s precautions would sooner or later prove
unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short a tiresome visit
by walking with his caller to the station, or at least accompanying him
for part of the way.

This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she went
out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence she
walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when she
turned toward home, the early twilight was setting in.

She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile,
had probably returned from the station by the highroad, there was little
likelihood of their meeting on the way. She felt sure, however, of his
having reached the house before her; so sure that, when she entered it
herself, without even pausing to inquire of Trimmle, she made directly
for the library. But the library was still empty, and with an unwonted
precision of visual memory she immediately observed that the papers on
her husband’s desk lay precisely as they had lain when she had gone in
to call him to luncheon.

Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had
closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the
long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound,
to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her
short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual
presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from
that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope
and gave it a desperate pull.

The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a
lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the
usual.

“You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in,” she said, to justify her ring.

“Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in,” said Trimmle, putting down
the lamp.

“Not in? You mean he’s come back and gone out again?”

“No, Madam. He’s never been back.”

The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

“Not since he went out with--the gentleman?”

“Not since he went out with the gentleman.”

“But who WAS the gentleman?” Mary gasped out, with the sharp note of
some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless noises.

“That I couldn’t say, Madam.” Trimmle, standing there by the lamp,
seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by the
same creeping shade of apprehension.

“But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn’t it the kitchen-maid who let him in?”

“She doesn’t know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded
paper.”

Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both designating
the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the conventional
formula which, till then, had kept their allusions within the bounds of
custom. And at the same moment her mind caught at the suggestion of the
folded paper.

“But he must have a name! Where is the paper?”

She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered documents
that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an unfinished letter
in her husband’s hand, with his pen lying across it, as though dropped
there at a sudden summons.

“My dear Parvis,”--who was Parvis?--“I have just received your letter
announcing Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now no farther
risk of trouble, it might be safer--”

She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded
paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript which
had been swept together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a hurried or a
startled gesture.

“But the kitchen-maid SAW him. Send her here,” she commanded, wondering
at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a solution.

Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be out
of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated underling,
Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her questions pat.

The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood. But what had he
said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question was
easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had said so
little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling something on a
bit of paper, had requested that it should at once be carried in to him.

“Then you don’t know what he wrote? You’re not sure it WAS his name?”

The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had written
it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.

“And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?”

The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but she
could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and he was
opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had followed her
into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the two gentlemen
together.

“But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that they
went out of the house?”

This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness,
from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious
circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross the
hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her, and had
seen them go out of the front door together.

“Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me what
he looked like.”

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became
clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid’s endurance had been reached.
The obligation of going to the front door to “show in” a visitor was
in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of things that it had
thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and she could only stammer
out, after various panting efforts at evocation, “His hat, mum, was
different-like, as you might say--”

“Different? How different?” Mary flashed out at her, her own mind, in
the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that morning, but
temporarily lost under layers of subsequent impressions.

“His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a youngish
face?” Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of interrogation.
But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to this challenge,
it was swept away for her listener down the rushing current of her own
convictions. The stranger--the stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not
thought of him before? She needed no one now to tell her that it was he
who had called for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he,
and why had Boyne obeyed his call?




IV


It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that they
had often called England so little--“such a confoundedly hard place to
get lost in.”

A CONFOUNDEDLY HARD PLACE TO GET LOST IN! That had been her husband’s
phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official investigation
sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and across the dividing
straits; now, with Boyne’s name blazing from the walls of every town
and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!) hawked up and down the
country like the image of a hunted criminal; now the little compact,
populous island, so policed, surveyed, and administered, revealed itself
as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal mysteries, staring back into his
wife’s anguished eyes as if with the malicious joy of knowing something
they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne’s disappearance there had been no word of
him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports that
raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting. No one
but the bewildered kitchen-maid had seen him leave the house, and no one
else had seen “the gentleman” who accompanied him. All inquiries in the
neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a stranger’s presence that
day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one had met Edward Boyne, either
alone or in company, in any of the neighboring villages, or on the road
across the downs, or at either of the local railway-stations. The sunny
English noon had swallowed him as completely as if he had gone out into
Cimmerian night.

Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its
highest pressure, had ransacked her husband’s papers for any trace of
antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown to
her, that might throw a faint ray into the darkness. But if any such
had existed in the background of Boyne’s life, they had disappeared as
completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor had written his
name. There remained no possible thread of guidance except--if it were
indeed an exception--the letter which Boyne had apparently been in the
act of writing when he received his mysterious summons. That letter,
read and reread by his wife, and submitted by her to the police, yielded
little enough for conjecture to feed on.

“I have just heard of Elwell’s death, and while I suppose there is now
no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--” That was all. The “risk
of trouble” was easily explained by the newspaper clipping which had
apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by one of his
associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new information
conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing Boyne, when he wrote
it, to be still apprehensive of the results of the suit, though he
had assured his wife that it had been withdrawn, and though the letter
itself declared that the plaintiff was dead. It took several weeks
of exhaustive cabling to fix the identity of the “Parvis” to whom the
fragmentary communication was addressed, but even after these inquiries
had shown him to be a Waukesha lawyer, no new facts concerning the
Elwell suit were elicited. He appeared to have had no direct concern
in it, but to have been conversant with the facts merely as an
acquaintance, and possible intermediary; and he declared himself unable
to divine with what object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight’s feverish
search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks that followed.
Mary knew that the investigations were still being carried on, but she
had a vague sense of their gradually slackening, as the actual march of
time seemed to slacken. It was as though the days, flying horror-struck
from the shrouded image of the one inscrutable day, gained assurance as
the distance lengthened, till at last they fell back into their normal
gait. And so with the human imaginations at work on the dark event. No
doubt it occupied them still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew
less absorbing, took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded
out of the foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually
bubbling up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne’s consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of
velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of conjecture;
but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat. There were moments
of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim of some poison which
leaves the brain clear, but holds the body motionless, she saw herself
domesticated with the Horror, accepting its perpetual presence as one of
the fixed conditions of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a
phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of life
with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of
civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard
herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel, revolving with its
motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the room in which she sat,
an insensate object to be dusted and pushed about with the chairs and
tables. And this deepening apathy held her fast at Lyng, in spite of
the urgent entreaties of friends and the usual medical recommendation of
“change.” Her friends supposed that her refusal to move was inspired by
the belief that her husband would one day return to the spot from which
he had vanished, and a beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary
state of waiting. But in reality she had no such belief: the depths of
anguish inclosing her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was
sure that Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight
as completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold.
She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his
disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and her
own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned from these
alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact that he was
gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would ever know.
But the house KNEW; the library in which she spent her long, lonely
evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted,
here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused
Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the
books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the
intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out
into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation
never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the
garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its
very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the
incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary
Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the
futility of seeking to break it by any human means.




V


“I don’t say it WASN’T straight, yet don’t say it WAS straight. It was
business.”

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked intently at
the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with “Mr. Parvis” on it had been
brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had been
a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the head of
Boyne’s unfinished letter. In the library she had found awaiting her a
small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold eye-glasses, and it
sent a strange tremor through her to know that this was the person to
whom her husband’s last known thought had been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a man who
has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of his visit.
He had “run over” to England on business, and finding himself in the
neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it without paying
his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if the occasion offered,
what she meant to do about Bob Elwell’s family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary’s bosom.
Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his unfinished
phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and noticed at
once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance of the subject.
Was it possible that she really knew as little as she said?

“I know nothing--you must tell me,” she faltered out; and her visitor
thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to her confused
perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid glare on the
whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband had made his money
in that brilliant speculation at the cost of “getting ahead” of some one
less alert to seize the chance; the victim of his ingenuity was young
Robert Elwell, who had “put him on” to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary’s first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering glance
through his impartial glasses.

“Bob Elwell wasn’t smart enough, that’s all; if he had been, he might
have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It’s the kind of thing
that happens every day in business. I guess it’s what the scientists
call the survival of the fittest,” said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased
with the aptness of his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to
frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that nauseated
her.

“But then--you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?”

Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. “Oh, no, I don’t.
I don’t even say it wasn’t straight.” He glanced up and down the long
lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with the
definition he sought. “I don’t say it WASN’T straight, and yet I don’t
say it WAS straight. It was business.” After all, no definition in his
category could be more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like the
indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.

“But Mr. Elwell’s lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I
suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice.”

“Oh, yes, they knew he hadn’t a leg to stand on, technically. It was
when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate. You
see, he’d borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star, and he
was up a tree. That’s why he shot himself when they told him he had no
show.”

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.

“He shot himself? He killed himself because of THAT?”

“Well, he didn’t kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months before
he died.” Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a gramophone
grinding out its “record.”

“You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried again?”

“Oh, he didn’t have to try again,” said Parvis, grimly.

They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glass
thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched along
her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

“But if you knew all this,” she began at length, hardly able to force
her voice above a whisper, “how is it that when I wrote you at the
time of my husband’s disappearance you said you didn’t understand his
letter?”

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. “Why, I didn’t
understand it--strictly speaking. And it wasn’t the time to talk
about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the suit was
withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped you to find
your husband.”

Mary continued to scrutinize him. “Then why are you telling me now?”

Still Parvis did not hesitate. “Well, to begin with, I supposed you
knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances of Elwell’s
death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole matter’s been
raked up again. And I thought, if you didn’t know, you ought to.”

She remained silent, and he continued: “You see, it’s only come out
lately what a bad state Elwell’s affairs were in. His wife’s a proud
woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work, and
taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--something with the heart,
I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after, and the
children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to ask for help.
That attracted attention to the case, and the papers took it up, and a
subscription was started. Everybody out there liked Bob Elwell, and most
of the prominent names in the place are down on the list, and people
began to wonder why--”

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. “Here,” he continued,
“here’s an account of the whole thing from the ‘Sentinel’--a little
sensational, of course. But I guess you’d better look it over.”

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly, remembering,
as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the perusal of
a clipping from the “Sentinel” had first shaken the depths of her
security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring
head-lines, “Widow of Boyne’s Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid,” ran down
the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first was
her husband’s, taken from a photograph made the year they had come to
England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the one that
stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the eyes in the
photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to read what was
said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of the pain.

“I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--” she heard
Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other portrait.
It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough clothes, with
features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a projecting hat-brim. Where
had she seen that outline before? She stared at it confusedly, her heart
hammering in her throat and ears. Then she gave a cry.

“This is the man--the man who came for my husband!”

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had
slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was bending
above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened herself, and
reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

“It’s the man! I should know him anywhere!” she cried in a voice that
sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis’s voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,
fog-muffled windings.

“Mrs. Boyne, you’re not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I get a
glass of water?”

“No, no, no!” She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically
clenching the newspaper. “I tell you, it’s the man! I KNOW him! He spoke
to me in the garden!”

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the portrait.
“It can’t be, Mrs. Boyne. It’s Robert Elwell.”

“Robert Elwell?” Her white stare seemed to travel into space. “Then it
was Robert Elwell who came for him.”

“Came for Boyne? The day he went away?” Parvis’s voice dropped as hers
rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to coax her
gently back into her seat. “Why, Elwell was dead! Don’t you remember?”

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he was
saying.

“Don’t you remember Boyne’s unfinished letter to me--the one you found
on his desk that day? It was written just after he’d heard of Elwell’s
death.” She noticed an odd shake in Parvis’s unemotional voice. “Surely
you remember that!” he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell had
died the day before her husband’s disappearance; and this was Elwell’s
portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken to her in
the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about the library. The
library could have borne witness that it was also the portrait of the
man who had come in that day to call Boyne from his unfinished letter.
Through the misty surgings of her brain she heard the faint boom
of half-forgotten words--words spoken by Alida Stair on the lawn at
Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever seen the house at Lyng, or
had imagined that they might one day live there.

“This was the man who spoke to me,” she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance
under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent commiseration;
but the edges of his lips were blue. “He thinks me mad; but I’m not
mad,” she reflected; and suddenly there flashed upon her a way of
justifying her strange affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till she
could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said, looking
straight at Parvis: “Will you answer me one question, please? When was
it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?”

“When--when?” Parvis stammered.

“Yes; the date. Please try to remember.”

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. “I have a reason,”
 she insisted gently.

“Yes, yes. Only I can’t remember. About two months before, I should
say.”

“I want the date,” she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. “We might see here,” he said, still
humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. “Here it is. Last
October--the--”

She caught the words from him. “The 20th, wasn’t it?” With a sharp look
at her, he verified. “Yes, the 20th. Then you DID know?”

“I know now.” Her white stare continued to travel past him. “Sunday, the
20th--that was the day he came first.”

Parvis’s voice was almost inaudible. “Came HERE first?”

“Yes.”

“You saw him twice, then?”

“Yes, twice.” She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. “He came first
on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the day
we went up Meldon Steep for the first time.” She felt a faint gasp
of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might have
forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her gaze.

“We saw him from the roof,” she went on. “He came down the lime-avenue
toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My
husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but
there was no one there. He had vanished.”

“Elwell had vanished?” Parvis faltered.

“Yes.” Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. “I couldn’t
think what had happened. I see now. He TRIED to come then; but he wasn’t
dead enough--he couldn’t reach us. He had to wait for two months; and
then he came back again--and Ned went with him.”

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has
successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her
hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

“Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent him to
this room!” she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling
ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins,
crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his
touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard
but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at
Pangbourne.

“You won’t know till afterward,” it said. “You won’t know till long,
long afterward.”


The End of Afterward





THE FULNESS OF LIFE

December 1893




I.


For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet
lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the
heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk
in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing
of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and
then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her,
like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless
stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without
a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the
vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque
visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting
lines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld,
indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in the
length of journeys half forgotten--through her mind there now only moved
a few primal sensations of colorless well-being; a vague satisfaction
in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of
medicine... and that she should never again hear the creaking of her
husband’s boots--those horrible boots--and that no one would come to
bother her about the next day’s dinner... or the butcher’s book....

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening
obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric
roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a
uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And
into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle
sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it
rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety
embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breast and
shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her
throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth.... Ah, now it was rising
too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed;... her mouth was full;...
she was choking.... Help!

“It is all over,” said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with official
composure.

The clock struck three. They remembered it afterward. Someone opened the
window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air which walks
the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husband into
another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking
boots.




II.


She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in
front of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the
gathered glimmer of innumerable stars, expanded gradually before her
eyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which she had
of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes
began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her,
she distinguished the outlines of a landscape, at first swimming in
the opaline uncertainty of Shelley’s vaporous creations, then gradually
resolved into distincter shape--the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain,
aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a
river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its
curve--something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background
of Leonardo’s, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and
the imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her
heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise
she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

“And so death is not the end after all,” in sheer gladness she heard
herself exclaiming aloud. “I always knew that it couldn’t be. I believed
in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then Darwin himself said that he
wasn’t sure about the soul--at least, I think he did--and Wallace was a
spiritualist; and then there was St. George Mivart--”

Her gaze lost itself in the ethereal remoteness of the mountains.

“How beautiful! How satisfying!” she murmured. “Perhaps now I shall
really know what it is to live.”

As she spoke she felt a sudden thickening of her heart-beats, and
looking up she was aware that before her stood the Spirit of Life.

“Have you never really known what it is to live?” the Spirit of Life
asked her.

“I have never known,” she replied, “that fulness of life which we all
feel ourselves capable of knowing; though my life has not been without
scattered hints of it, like the scent of earth which comes to one
sometimes far out at sea.”

“And what do you call the fulness of life?” the Spirit asked again.

“Oh, I can’t tell you, if you don’t know,” she said, almost
reproachfully. “Many words are supposed to define it--love and sympathy
are those in commonest use, but I am not even sure that they are the
right ones, and so few people really know what they mean.”

“You were married,” said the Spirit, “yet you did not find the fulness
of life in your marriage?”

“Oh, dear, no,” she replied, with an indulgent scorn, “my marriage was a
very incomplete affair.”

“And yet you were fond of your husband?”

“You have hit upon the exact word; I was fond of him, yes, just as I
was fond of my grandmother, and the house that I was born in, and my old
nurse. Oh, I was fond of him, and we were counted a very happy couple.
But I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house
full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going
in and out; the drawing-room, where one receives formal visits; the
sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list;
but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors
perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows
whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the
soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes.”

“And your husband,” asked the Spirit, after a pause, “never got beyond
the family sitting-room?”

“Never,” she returned, impatiently; “and the worst of it was that he was
quite content to remain there. He thought it perfectly beautiful, and
sometimes, when he was admiring its commonplace furniture, insignificant
as the chairs and tables of a hotel parlor, I felt like crying out to
him: ‘Fool, will you never guess that close at hand are rooms full of
treasures and wonders, such as the eye of man hath not seen, rooms that
no step has crossed, but that might be yours to live in, could you but
find the handle of the door?’”

“Then,” the Spirit continued, “those moments of which you lately spoke,
which seemed to come to you like scattered hints of the fulness of life,
were not shared with your husband?”

“Oh, no--never. He was different. His boots creaked, and he always
slammed the door when he went out, and he never read anything but
railway novels and the sporting advertisements in the papers--and--and,
in short, we never understood each other in the least.”

“To what influence, then, did you owe those exquisite sensations?”

“I can hardly tell. Sometimes to the perfume of a flower; sometimes to a
verse of Dante or of Shakespeare; sometimes to a picture or a sunset,
or to one of those calm days at sea, when one seems to be lying in
the hollow of a blue pearl; sometimes, but rarely, to a word spoken by
someone who chanced to give utterance, at the right moment, to what I
felt but could not express.”

“Someone whom you loved?” asked the Spirit.

“I never loved anyone, in that way,” she said, rather sadly, “nor was
I thinking of any one person when I spoke, but of two or three who, by
touching for an instant upon a certain chord of my being, had called
forth a single note of that strange melody which seemed sleeping in my
soul. It has seldom happened, however, that I have owed such feelings to
people; and no one ever gave me a moment of such happiness as it was my
lot to feel one evening in the Church of Or San Michele, in Florence.”

“Tell me about it,” said the Spirit.

“It was near sunset on a rainy spring afternoon in Easter week. The
clouds had vanished, dispersed by a sudden wind, and as we entered the
church the fiery panes of the high windows shone out like lamps through
the dusk. A priest was at the high altar, his white cope a livid spot in
the incense-laden obscurity, the light of the candles flickering up and
down like fireflies about his head; a few people knelt near by. We stole
behind them and sat down on a bench close to the tabernacle of Orcagna.

“Strange to say, though Florence was not new to me, I had never been in
the church before; and in that magical light I saw for the first time
the inlaid steps, the fluted columns, the sculptured bas-reliefs and
canopy of the marvellous shrine. The marble, worn and mellowed by the
subtle hand of time, took on an unspeakable rosy hue, suggestive in
some remote way of the honey-colored columns of the Parthenon, but more
mystic, more complex, a color not born of the sun’s inveterate kiss,
but made up of cryptal twilight, and the flame of candles upon martyrs’
tombs, and gleams of sunset through symbolic panes of chrysoprase and
ruby; such a light as illumines the missals in the library of Siena,
or burns like a hidden fire through the Madonna of Gian Bellini in the
Church of the Redeemer, at Venice; the light of the Middle Ages, richer,
more solemn, more significant than the limpid sunshine of Greece.

“The church was silent, but for the wail of the priest and the
occasional scraping of a chair against the floor, and as I sat there,
bathed in that light, absorbed in rapt contemplation of the marble
miracle which rose before me, cunningly wrought as a casket of ivory and
enriched with jewel-like incrustations and tarnished gleams of gold, I
felt myself borne onward along a mighty current, whose source seemed to
be in the very beginning of things, and whose tremendous waters gathered
as they went all the mingled streams of human passion and endeavor.
Life in all its varied manifestations of beauty and strangeness seemed
weaving a rhythmical dance around me as I moved, and wherever the spirit
of man had passed I knew that my foot had once been familiar.

“As I gazed the mediaeval bosses of the tabernacle of Orcagna seemed to
melt and flow into their primal forms so that the folded lotus of
the Nile and the Greek acanthus were braided with the runic knots and
fish-tailed monsters of the North, and all the plastic terror and beauty
born of man’s hand from the Ganges to the Baltic quivered and mingled
in Orcagna’s apotheosis of Mary. And so the river bore me on, past the
alien face of antique civilizations and the familiar wonders of Greece,
till I swam upon the fiercely rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with its
swirling eddies of passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry
and art; I heard the rhythmic blow of the craftsmen’s hammers in the
goldsmiths’ workshops and on the walls of churches, the party-cries of
armed factions in the narrow streets, the organ-roll of Dante’s verse,
the crackle of the fagots around Arnold of Brescia, the twitter of
the swallows to which St. Francis preached, the laughter of the
ladies listening on the hillside to the quips of the Decameron, while
plague-struck Florence howled beneath them--all this and much more I
heard, joined in strange unison with voices earlier and more remote,
fierce, passionate, or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that
I thought of the song that the morning stars sang together and felt as
though it were sounding in my ears. My heart beat to suffocation, the
tears burned my lids, the joy, the mystery of it seemed too intolerable
to be borne. I could not understand even then the words of the song; but
I knew that if there had been someone at my side who could have heard it
with me, we might have found the key to it together.

“I turned to my husband, who was sitting beside me in an attitude of
patient dejection, gazing into the bottom of his hat; but at that moment
he rose, and stretching his stiffened legs, said, mildly: ‘Hadn’t we
better be going? There doesn’t seem to be much to see here, and you know
the table d’hote dinner is at half-past six o’clock.”


Her recital ended, there was an interval of silence; then the Spirit of
Life said: “There is a compensation in store for such needs as you have
expressed.”

“Oh, then you DO understand?” she exclaimed. “Tell me what compensation,
I entreat you!”

“It is ordained,” the Spirit answered, “that every soul which seeks
in vain on earth for a kindred soul to whom it can lay bare its inmost
being shall find that soul here and be united to it for eternity.”

A glad cry broke from her lips. “Ah, shall I find him at last?” she
cried, exultant.

“He is here,” said the Spirit of Life.

She looked up and saw that a man stood near whose soul (for in that
unwonted light she seemed to see his soul more clearly than his face)
drew her toward him with an invincible force.

“Are you really he?” she murmured.

“I am he,” he answered.

She laid her hand in his and drew him toward the parapet which overhung
the valley.

“Shall we go down together,” she asked him, “into that marvellous
country; shall we see it together, as if with the self-same eyes, and
tell each other in the same words all that we think and feel?”

“So,” he replied, “have I hoped and dreamed.”

“What?” she asked, with rising joy. “Then you, too, have looked for me?”

“All my life.”

“How wonderful! And did you never, never find anyone in the other world
who understood you?”

“Not wholly--not as you and I understand each other.”

“Then you feel it, too? Oh, I am happy,” she sighed.

They stood, hand in hand, looking down over the parapet upon the
shimmering landscape which stretched forth beneath them into sapphirine
space, and the Spirit of Life, who kept watch near the threshold, heard
now and then a floating fragment of their talk blown backward like the
stray swallows which the wind sometimes separates from their migratory
tribe.

“Did you never feel at sunset--”

“Ah, yes; but I never heard anyone else say so. Did you?”

“Do you remember that line in the third canto of the ‘Inferno?’”

“Ah, that line--my favorite always. Is it possible--”

“You know the stooping Victory in the frieze of the Nike Apteros?”

“You mean the one who is tying her sandal? Then you have noticed, too,
that all Botticelli and Mantegna are dormant in those flying folds of
her drapery?”

“After a storm in autumn have you never seen--”

“Yes, it is curious how certain flowers suggest certain painters--the
perfume of the incarnation, Leonardo; that of the rose, Titian; the
tuberose, Crivelli--”

“I never supposed that anyone else had noticed it.”

“Have you never thought--”

“Oh, yes, often and often; but I never dreamed that anyone else had.”

“But surely you must have felt--”

“Oh, yes, yes; and you, too--”

“How beautiful! How strange--”

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmur of two fountains answering
each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain
tender impatience, he turned to her and said: “Love, why should we
linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that
beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue
hill above the shining river.”

As he spoke, the hand she had forgotten in his was suddenly withdrawn,
and he felt that a cloud was passing over the radiance of her soul.

“A home,” she repeated, slowly, “a home for you and me to live in for
all eternity?”

“Why not, love? Am I not the soul that yours has sought?”

“Y-yes--yes, I know--but, don’t you see, home would not be like home to
me, unless--”

“Unless?” he wonderingly repeated.

She did not answer, but she thought to herself, with an impulse of
whimsical inconsistency, “Unless you slammed the door and wore creaking
boots.”

But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptible
degrees was leading her toward the shining steps which descended to the
valley.

“Come, O my soul’s soul,” he passionately implored; “why delay a moment?
Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too short to hold such
bliss as ours. It seems to me that I can see our home already. Have
I not always seem it in my dreams? It is white, love, is it not, with
polished columns, and a sculptured cornice against the blue? Groves
of laurel and oleander and thickets of roses surround it; but from the
terrace where we walk at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands and
cool meadows where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goes
delicately toward the river. Indoors our favorite pictures hang upon the
walls and the rooms are lined with books. Think, dear, at last we shall
have time to read them all. With which shall we begin? Come, help me to
choose. Shall it be ‘Faust’ or the ‘Vita Nuova,’ the ‘Tempest’ or ‘Les
Caprices de Marianne,’ or the thirty-first canto of the ‘Paradise,’ or
‘Epipsychidion’ or ‘Lycidas’? Tell me, dear, which one?”

As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips; but it
died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless, resisting the
persuasion of his hand.

“What is it?” he entreated.

“Wait a moment,” she said, with a strange hesitation in her voice. “Tell
me first, are you quite sure of yourself? Is there no one on earth whom
you sometimes remember?”

“Not since I have seen you,” he replied; for, being a man, he had indeed
forgotten.

Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened on her
soul.

“Surely, love,” he rebuked her, “it was not that which troubled you? For
my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has melted like a cloud
before the moon. I never lived until I saw you.”

She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing herself with
a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved toward the Spirit
of Life, who still stood near the threshold.

“I want to ask you a question,” she said, in a troubled voice.

“Ask,” said the Spirit.

“A little while ago,” she began, slowly, “you told me that every soul
which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to find one
here.”

“And have you not found one?” asked the Spirit.

“Yes; but will it be so with my husband’s soul also?”

“No,” answered the Spirit of Life, “for your husband imagined that
he had found his soul’s mate on earth in you; and for such delusions
eternity itself contains no cure.”

She gave a little cry. Was it of disappointment or triumph?

“Then--then what will happen to him when he comes here?”

“That I cannot tell you. Some field of activity and happiness he will
doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being active and
happy.”

She interrupted, almost angrily: “He will never be happy without me.”

“Do not be too sure of that,” said the Spirit.

She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: “He will not
understand you here any better than he did on earth.”

“No matter,” she said; “I shall be the only sufferer, for he always
thought that he understood me.”

“His boots will creak just as much as ever--”

“No matter.”

“And he will slam the door--”

“Very likely.”

“And continue to read railway novels--”

She interposed, impatiently: “Many men do worse than that.”

“But you said just now,” said the Spirit, “that you did not love him.”

“True,” she answered, simply; “but don’t you understand that I shouldn’t
feel at home without him? It is all very well for a week or two--but for
eternity! After all, I never minded the creaking of his boots, except
when my head ached, and I don’t suppose it will ache HERE; and he
was always so sorry when he had slammed the door, only he never COULD
remember not to. Besides, no one else would know how to look after him,
he is so helpless. His inkstand would never be filled, and he would
always be out of stamps and visiting-cards. He would never remember to
have his umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price of anything before he
bought it. Why, he wouldn’t even know what novels to read. I always had
to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a forgery and a successful
detective.”

She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with a mien
of wonder and dismay.

“Don’t you see,” she said, “that I can’t possibly go with you?”

“But what do you intend to do?” asked the Spirit of Life.

“What do I intend to do?” she returned, indignantly. “Why, I mean to
wait for my husband, of course. If he had come here first HE would have
waited for me for years and years; and it would break his heart not to
find me here when he comes.” She pointed with a contemptuous gesture
to the magic vision of hill and vale sloping away to the translucent
mountains. “He wouldn’t give a fig for all that,” she said, “if he
didn’t find me here.”

“But consider,” warned the Spirit, “that you are now choosing for
eternity. It is a solemn moment.”

“Choosing!” she said, with a half-sad smile. “Do you still keep up here
that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that YOU knew
better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here
when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had
gone away with someone else--never, never.”

“So be it,” said the Spirit. “Here, as on earth, each one must decide
for himself.”

She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost
wistfully. “I am sorry,” she said. “I should have liked to talk with
you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say you will find
someone else a great deal cleverer--”

And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift farewell
and turned back toward the threshold.

“Will my husband come soon?” she asked the Spirit of Life.

“That you are not destined to know,” the Spirit replied.

“No matter,” she said, cheerfully; “I have all eternity to wait in.”

And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the creaking of
his boots.


The End of The Fulness of Life





A VENETIAN NIGHT’S ENTERTAINMENT

December 1903



This is the story that, in the dining-room of the old Beacon Street
house (now the Aldebaran Club), Judge Anthony Bracknell, of the famous
East India firm of Bracknell & Saulsbee, when the ladies had withdrawn
to the oval parlour (and Maria’s harp was throwing its gauzy web of
sound across the Common), used to relate to his grandsons, about the
year that Buonaparte marched upon Moscow.




I


“Him Venice!” said the Lascar with the big earrings; and Tony Bracknell,
leaning on the high gunwale of his father’s East Indiaman, the Hepzibah
B., saw far off, across the morning sea, a faint vision of towers and
domes dissolved in golden air.

It was a rare February day of the year 1760, and a young Tony, newly
of age, and bound on the grand tour aboard the crack merchantman of old
Bracknell’s fleet, felt his heart leap up as the distant city trembled
into shape. VENICE! The name, since childhood, had been a magician’s
wand to him. In the hall of the old Bracknell house at Salem there hung
a series of yellowing prints which Uncle Richard Saulsbee had brought
home from one of his long voyages: views of heathen mosques and palaces,
of the Grand Turk’s Seraglio, of St. Peter’s Church in Rome; and, in
a corner--the corner nearest the rack where the old flintlocks hung--a
busy merry populous scene, entitled: ST. MARK’S SQUARE IN VENICE. This
picture, from the first, had singularly taken little Tony’s fancy. His
unformulated criticism on the others was that they lacked action.
True, in the view of St. Peter’s an experienced-looking gentleman in
a full-bottomed wig was pointing out the fairly obvious monument to a
bashful companion, who had presumably not ventured to raise his eyes to
it; while, at the doors of the Seraglio, a group of turbaned infidels
observed with less hesitancy the approach of a veiled lady on a camel.
But in Venice so many things were happening at once--more, Tony was
sure, than had ever happened in Boston in a twelve-month or in Salem in
a long lifetime. For here, by their garb, were people of every nation
on earth, Chinamen, Turks, Spaniards, and many more, mixed with a
parti-coloured throng of gentry, lacqueys, chapmen, hucksters, and tall
personages in parsons’ gowns who stalked through the crowd with an air
of mastery, a string of parasites at their heels. And all these people
seemed to be diverting themselves hugely, chaffering with the hucksters,
watching the antics of trained dogs and monkeys, distributing doles
to maimed beggars or having their pockets picked by slippery-looking
fellows in black--the whole with such an air of ease and good-humour
that one felt the cut-purses to be as much a part of the show as the
tumbling acrobats and animals.

As Tony advanced in years and experience this childish mumming lost
its magic; but not so the early imaginings it had excited. For the old
picture had been but the spring-board of fancy, the first step of a
cloud-ladder leading to a land of dreams. With these dreams the name
of Venice remained associated; and all that observation or report
subsequently brought him concerning the place seemed, on a sober
warranty of fact, to confirm its claim to stand midway between
reality and illusion. There was, for instance, a slender Venice glass,
gold-powdered as with lily-pollen or the dust of sunbeams, that,
standing in the corner cabinet betwixt two Lowestoft caddies, seemed,
among its lifeless neighbours, to palpitate like an impaled butterfly.
There was, farther, a gold chain of his mother’s, spun of that same
sun-pollen, so thread-like, impalpable, that it slipped through the
fingers like light, yet so strong that it carried a heavy pendant which
seemed held in air as if by magic. MAGIC! That was the word which the
thought of Venice evoked. It was the kind of place, Tony felt, in which
things elsewhere impossible might naturally happen, in which two and two
might make five, a paradox elope with a syllogism, and a conclusion give
the lie to its own premiss. Was there ever a young heart that did not,
once and again, long to get away into such a world as that? Tony, at
least, had felt the longing from the first hour when the axioms in
his horn-book had brought home to him his heavy responsibilities as a
Christian and a sinner. And now here was his wish taking shape before
him, as the distant haze of gold shaped itself into towers and domes
across the morning sea!

The Reverend Ozias Mounce, Tony’s governor and bear-leader, was just
putting a hand to the third clause of the fourth part of a sermon
on Free-Will and Predestination as the Hepzibah B.’s anchor rattled
overboard. Tony, in his haste to be ashore, would have made one plunge
with the anchor; but the Reverend Ozias, on being roused from his
lucubrations, earnestly protested against leaving his argument in
suspense. What was the trifle of an arrival at some Papistical
foreign city, where the very churches wore turbans like so many
Moslem idolators, to the important fact of Mr. Mounce’s summing up his
conclusions before the Muse of Theology took flight? He should be happy,
he said, if the tide served, to visit Venice with Mr. Bracknell the next
morning.

The next morning, ha!--Tony murmured a submissive “Yes, sir,” winked at
the subjugated captain, buckled on his sword, pressed his hat down
with a flourish, and before the Reverend Ozias had arrived at his next
deduction, was skimming merrily shoreward in the Hepzibah’s gig.

A moment more and he was in the thick of it! Here was the very world of
the old print, only suffused with sunlight and colour, and bubbling
with merry noises. What a scene it was! A square enclosed in fantastic
painted buildings, and peopled with a throng as fantastic: a bawling,
laughing, jostling, sweating mob, parti-coloured, parti-speeched,
crackling and sputtering under the hot sun like a dish of fritters over
a kitchen fire. Tony, agape, shouldered his way through the press, aware
at once that, spite of the tumult, the shrillness, the gesticulation,
there was no undercurrent of clownishness, no tendency to horse-play,
as in such crowds on market-day at home, but a kind of facetious suavity
which seemed to include everybody in the circumference of one huge joke.
In such an air the sense of strangeness soon wore off, and Tony was
beginning to feel himself vastly at home, when a lift of the tide bore
him against a droll-looking bell-ringing fellow who carried above his
head a tall metal tree hung with sherbet-glasses.

The encounter set the glasses spinning and three or four spun off and
clattered to the stones. The sherbet-seller called on all the saints,
and Tony, clapping a lordly hand to his pocket, tossed him a ducat by
mistake for a sequin. The fellow’s eyes shot out of their orbits,
and just then a personable-looking young man who had observed the
transaction stepped up to Tony and said pleasantly, in English:

“I perceive, sir, that you are not familiar with our currency.”

“Does he want more?” says Tony, very lordly; whereat the other laughed
and replied: “You have given him enough to retire from his business and
open a gaming-house over the arcade.”

Tony joined in the laugh, and this incident bridging the preliminaries,
the two young men were presently hobnobbing over a glass of Canary in
front of one of the coffee-houses about the square. Tony counted
himself lucky to have run across an English-speaking companion who was
good-natured enough to give him a clue to the labyrinth; and when he had
paid for the Canary (in the coin his friend selected) they set out
again to view the town. The Italian gentleman, who called himself Count
Rialto, appeared to have a very numerous acquaintance, and was able to
point out to Tony all the chief dignitaries of the state, the men of ton
and ladies of fashion, as well as a number of other characters of a kind
not openly mentioned in taking a census of Salem.

Tony, who was not averse from reading when nothing better offered,
had perused the “Merchant of Venice” and Mr. Otway’s fine tragedy; but
though these pieces had given him a notion that the social usages of
Venice differed from those at home, he was unprepared for the surprising
appearance and manners of the great people his friend named to him. The
gravest Senators of the Republic went in prodigious striped trousers,
short cloaks and feathered hats. One nobleman wore a ruff and doctor’s
gown, another a black velvet tunic slashed with rose-colour; while the
President of the dreaded Council of Ten was a terrible strutting fellow
with a rapier-like nose, a buff leather jerkin and a trailing scarlet
cloak that the crowd was careful not to step on.

It was all vastly diverting, and Tony would gladly have gone on forever;
but he had given his word to the captain to be at the landing-place at
sunset, and here was dusk already creeping over the skies! Tony was a
man of honour; and having pressed on the Count a handsome damascened
dagger selected from one of the goldsmiths’ shops in a narrow street
lined with such wares, he insisted on turning his face toward the
Hepzibah’s gig. The Count yielded reluctantly; but as they came out
again on the square they were caught in a great throng pouring toward
the doors of the cathedral.

“They go to Benediction,” said the Count. “A beautiful sight, with many
lights and flowers. It is a pity you cannot take a peep at it.”

Tony thought so too, and in another minute a legless beggar had pulled
back the leathern flap of the cathedral door, and they stood in a
haze of gold and perfume that seemed to rise and fall on the mighty
undulations of the organ. Here the press was as thick as without; and as
Tony flattened himself against a pillar, he heard a pretty voice at his
elbow:--“Oh, sir, oh, sir, your sword!”

He turned at sound of the broken English, and saw a girl who matched the
voice trying to disengage her dress from the tip of his scabbard.
She wore one of the voluminous black hoods which the Venetian ladies
affected, and under its projecting eaves her face spied out at him as
sweet as a nesting bird.

In the dusk their hands met over the scabbard, and as she freed herself
a shred of her lace flounce clung to Tony’s enchanted fingers. Looking
after her, he saw she was on the arm of a pompous-looking graybeard in
a long black gown and scarlet stockings, who, on perceiving the
exchange of glances between the young people, drew the lady away with a
threatening look.

The Count met Tony’s eye with a smile. “One of our Venetian beauties,”
 said he; “the lovely Polixena Cador. She is thought to have the finest
eyes in Venice.”

“She spoke English,” stammered Tony.

“Oh--ah--precisely: she learned the language at the Court of Saint
James’s, where her father, the Senator, was formerly accredited as
Ambassador. She played as an infant with the royal princes of England.”

“And that was her father?”

“Assuredly: young ladies of Donna Polixena’s rank do not go abroad save
with their parents or a duenna.”

Just then a soft hand slid into Tony’s. His heart gave a foolish bound,
and he turned about half-expecting to meet again the merry eyes under
the hood; but saw instead a slender brown boy, in some kind of fanciful
page’s dress, who thrust a folded paper between his fingers and vanished
in the throng. Tony, in a tingle, glanced surreptitiously at the Count,
who appeared absorbed in his prayers. The crowd, at the ringing of a
bell, had in fact been overswept by a sudden wave of devotion; and Tony
seized the moment to step beneath a lighted shrine with his letter.

“I am in dreadful trouble and implore your help. Polixena”--he read;
but hardly had he seized the sense of the words when a hand fell on his
shoulder, and a stern-looking man in a cocked hat, and bearing a kind of
rod or mace, pronounced a few words in Venetian.

Tony, with a start, thrust the letter in his breast, and tried to jerk
himself free; but the harder he jerked the tighter grew the other’s
grip, and the Count, presently perceiving what had happened, pushed
his way through the crowd, and whispered hastily to his companion: “For
God’s sake, make no struggle. This is serious. Keep quiet and do as I
tell you.”

Tony was no chicken-heart. He had something of a name for pugnacity
among the lads of his own age at home, and was not the man to stand in
Venice what he would have resented in Salem; but the devil of it was
that this black fellow seemed to be pointing to the letter in his
breast; and this suspicion was confirmed by the Count’s agitated
whisper.

“This is one of the agents of the Ten.--For God’s sake, no outcry.” He
exchanged a word or two with the mace-bearer and again turned to Tony.
“You have been seen concealing a letter about your person--”

“And what of that?” says Tony furiously.

“Gently, gently, my master. A letter handed to you by the page of Donna
Polixena Cador.--A black business! Oh, a very black business! This Cador
is one of the most powerful nobles in Venice--I beseech you, not a word,
sir! Let me think--deliberate--”

His hand on Tony’s shoulder, he carried on a rapid dialogue with the
potentate in the cocked hat.

“I am sorry, sir--but our young ladies of rank are as jealously guarded
as the Grand Turk’s wives, and you must be answerable for this scandal.
The best I can do is to have you taken privately to the Palazzo Cador,
instead of being brought before the Council. I have pleaded your youth
and inexperience”--Tony winced at this--“and I think the business may
still be arranged.”

Meanwhile the agent of the Ten had yielded his place to a sharp-featured
shabby-looking fellow in black, dressed somewhat like a lawyer’s clerk,
who laid a grimy hand on Tony’s arm, and with many apologetic gestures
steered him through the crowd to the doors of the church. The Count held
him by the other arm, and in this fashion they emerged on the square,
which now lay in darkness save for the many lights twinkling under the
arcade and in the windows of the gaming-rooms above it.

Tony by this time had regained voice enough to declare that he would go
where they pleased, but that he must first say a word to the mate of the
Hepzibah, who had now been awaiting him some two hours or more at the
landing-place.

The Count repeated this to Tony’s custodian, but the latter shook his
head and rattled off a sharp denial.

“Impossible, sir,” said the Count. “I entreat you not to insist. Any
resistance will tell against you in the end.”

Tony fell silent. With a rapid eye he was measuring his chances of
escape. In wind and limb he was more than a mate for his captors, and
boyhood’s ruses were not so far behind him but he felt himself equal to
outwitting a dozen grown men; but he had the sense to see that at a cry
the crowd would close in on him. Space was what he wanted: a clear ten
yards, and he would have laughed at Doge and Council. But the throng was
thick as glue, and he walked on submissively, keeping his eye alert for
an opening. Suddenly the mob swerved aside after some new show. Tony’s
fist shot out at the black fellow’s chest, and before the latter could
right himself the young New Englander was showing a clean pair of heels
to his escort. On he sped, cleaving the crowd like a flood-tide in
Gloucester bay, diving under the first arch that caught his eye,
dashing down a lane to an unlit water-way, and plunging across a narrow
hump-back bridge which landed him in a black pocket between walls. But
now his pursuers were at his back, reinforced by the yelping mob. The
walls were too high to scale, and for all his courage Tony’s breath came
short as he paced the masonry cage in which ill-luck had landed him.
Suddenly a gate opened in one of the walls, and a slip of a servant
wench looked out and beckoned him. There was no time to weigh chances.
Tony dashed through the gate, his rescuer slammed and bolted it, and the
two stood in a narrow paved well between high houses.




II


The servant picked up a lantern and signed to Tony to follow her. They
climbed a squalid stairway of stone, felt their way along a corridor,
and entered a tall vaulted room feebly lit by an oil-lamp hung from
the painted ceiling. Tony discerned traces of former splendour in his
surroundings, but he had no time to examine them, for a figure started
up at his approach and in the dim light he recognized the girl who was
the cause of all his troubles.

She sprang toward him with outstretched hands, but as he advanced her
face changed and she shrank back abashed.

“This is a misunderstanding--a dreadful misunderstanding,” she cried
out in her pretty broken English. “Oh, how does it happen that you are
here?”

“Through no choice of my own, madam, I assure you!” retorted Tony, not
over-pleased by his reception.

“But why--how--how did you make this unfortunate mistake?”

“Why, madam, if you’ll excuse my candour, I think the mistake was
yours--”

“Mine?”

--“in sending me a letter--”

“YOU--a letter?”

--“by a simpleton of a lad, who must needs hand it to me under your
father’s very nose--”

The girl broke in on him with a cry. “What! It was YOU who received my
letter?” She swept round on the little maid-servant and submerged her
under a flood of Venetian. The latter volleyed back in the same jargon,
and as she did so, Tony’s astonished eye detected in her the doubleted
page who had handed him the letter in Saint Mark’s.

“What!” he cried, “the lad was this girl in disguise?”

Polixena broke off with an irrepressible smile; but her face clouded
instantly and she returned to the charge.

“This wicked, careless girl--she has ruined me, she will be my undoing!
Oh, sir, how can I make you understand? The letter was not intended
for you--it was meant for the English Ambassador, an old friend of my
mother’s, from whom I hoped to obtain assistance--oh, how can I ever
excuse myself to you?”

“No excuses are needed, madam,” said Tony, bowing; “though I am
surprised, I own, that any one should mistake me for an ambassador.”

Here a wave of mirth again overran Polixena’s face. “Oh, sir, you
must pardon my poor girl’s mistake. She heard you speaking English,
and--and--I had told her to hand the letter to the handsomest foreigner
in the church.” Tony bowed again, more profoundly. “The English
Ambassador,” Polixena added simply, “is a very handsome man.”

“I wish, madam, I were a better proxy!”

She echoed his laugh, and then clapped her hands together with a look
of anguish. “Fool that I am! How can I jest at such a moment? I am in
dreadful trouble, and now perhaps I have brought trouble on you also--
Oh, my father! I hear my father coming!” She turned pale and leaned
tremblingly upon the little servant.

Footsteps and loud voices were in fact heard outside, and a moment
later the red-stockinged Senator stalked into the room attended by
half-a-dozen of the magnificoes whom Tony had seen abroad in the square.
At sight of him, all clapped hands to their swords and burst into
furious outcries; and though their jargon was unintelligible to the
young man, their tones and gestures made their meaning unpleasantly
plain. The Senator, with a start of anger, first flung himself on the
intruder; then, snatched back by his companions, turned wrathfully on
his daughter, who, at his feet, with outstretched arms and streaming
face, pleaded her cause with all the eloquence of young distress.
Meanwhile the other nobles gesticulated vehemently among themselves,
and one, a truculent-looking personage in ruff and Spanish cape, stalked
apart, keeping a jealous eye on Tony. The latter was at his wit’s
end how to comport himself, for the lovely Polixena’s tears had
quite drowned her few words of English, and beyond guessing that the
magnificoes meant him a mischief he had no notion what they would be at.

At this point, luckily, his friend Count Rialto suddenly broke in on
the scene, and was at once assailed by all the tongues in the room. He
pulled a long face at sight of Tony, but signed to the young man to be
silent, and addressed himself earnestly to the Senator. The latter, at
first, would not draw breath to hear him; but presently, sobering,
he walked apart with the Count, and the two conversed together out of
earshot.

“My dear sir,” said the Count, at length turning to Tony with a
perturbed countenance, “it is as I feared, and you are fallen into a
great misfortune.”

“A great misfortune! A great trap, I call it!” shouted Tony, whose
blood, by this time, was boiling; but as he uttered the word the
beautiful Polixena cast such a stricken look on him that he blushed up
to the forehead.

“Be careful,” said the Count, in a low tone. “Though his Illustriousness
does not speak your language, he understands a few words of it, and--”

“So much the better!” broke in Tony; “I hope he will understand me if I
ask him in plain English what is his grievance against me.”

The Senator, at this, would have burst forth again; but the Count,
stepping between, answered quickly: “His grievance against you is that
you have been detected in secret correspondence with his daughter, the
most noble Polixena Cador, the betrothed bride of this gentleman, the
most illustrious Marquess Zanipolo--” and he waved a deferential hand at
the frowning hidalgo of the cape and ruff.

“Sir,” said Tony, “if that is the extent of my offence, it lies with
the young lady to set me free, since by her own avowal--” but here he
stopped short, for, to his surprise, Polixena shot a terrified glance at
him.

“Sir,” interposed the Count, “we are not accustomed in Venice to take
shelter behind a lady’s reputation.”

“No more are we in Salem,” retorted Tony in a white heat. “I was merely
about to remark that, by the young lady’s avowal, she has never seen me
before.”

Polixena’s eyes signalled her gratitude, and he felt he would have died
to defend her.

The Count translated his statement, and presently pursued: “His
Illustriousness observes that, in that case, his daughter’s misconduct
has been all the more reprehensible.”

“Her misconduct? Of what does he accuse her?”

“Of sending you, just now, in the church of Saint Mark’s, a letter which
you were seen to read openly and thrust in your bosom. The incident
was witnessed by his Illustriousness the Marquess Zanipolo, who, in
consequence, has already repudiated his unhappy bride.”

Tony stared contemptuously at the black Marquess. “If his
Illustriousness is so lacking in gallantry as to repudiate a lady on so
trivial a pretext, it is he and not I who should be the object of her
father’s resentment.”

“That, my dear young gentleman, is hardly for you to decide. Your only
excuse being your ignorance of our customs, it is scarcely for you to
advise us how to behave in matters of punctilio.”

It seemed to Tony as though the Count were going over to his enemies,
and the thought sharpened his retort.

“I had supposed,” said he, “that men of sense had much the same
behaviour in all countries, and that, here as elsewhere, a gentleman
would be taken at his word. I solemnly affirm that the letter I was seen
to read reflects in no way on the honour of this young lady, and has in
fact nothing to do with what you suppose.”

As he had himself no notion what the letter was about, this was as far
as he dared commit himself.

There was another brief consultation in the opposing camp, and the
Count then said:--“We all know, sir, that a gentleman is obliged to meet
certain enquiries by a denial; but you have at your command the means of
immediately clearing the lady. Will you show the letter to her father?”

There was a perceptible pause, during which Tony, while appearing to
look straight before him, managed to deflect an interrogatory glance
toward Polixena. Her reply was a faint negative motion, accompanied by
unmistakable signs of apprehension.

“Poor girl!” he thought, “she is in a worse case than I imagined, and
whatever happens I must keep her secret.”

He turned to the Senator with a deep bow. “I am not,” said he, “in the
habit of showing my private correspondence to strangers.”

The Count interpreted these words, and Donna Polixena’s father, dashing
his hand on his hilt, broke into furious invective, while the Marquess
continued to nurse his outraged feelings aloof.

The Count shook his head funereally. “Alas, sir, it is as I feared.
This is not the first time that youth and propinquity have led to fatal
imprudence. But I need hardly, I suppose, point out the obligation
incumbent upon you as a man of honour.”

Tony stared at him haughtily, with a look which was meant for the
Marquess. “And what obligation is that?”

“To repair the wrong you have done--in other words, to marry the lady.”

Polixena at this burst into tears, and Tony said to himself: “Why in
heaven does she not bid me show the letter?” Then he remembered that it
had no superscription, and that the words it contained, supposing them
to have been addressed to himself, were hardly of a nature to disarm
suspicion. The sense of the girl’s grave plight effaced all thought of
his own risk, but the Count’s last words struck him as so preposterous
that he could not repress a smile.

“I cannot flatter myself,” said he, “that the lady would welcome this
solution.”

The Count’s manner became increasingly ceremonious. “Such modesty,”
 he said, “becomes your youth and inexperience; but even if it were
justified it would scarcely alter the case, as it is always assumed in
this country that a young lady wishes to marry the man whom her father
has selected.”

“But I understood just now,” Tony interposed, “that the gentleman yonder
was in that enviable position.”

“So he was, till circumstances obliged him to waive the privilege in
your favour.”

“He does me too much honour; but if a deep sense of my unworthiness
obliges me to decline--”

“You are still,” interrupted the Count, “labouring under a
misapprehension. Your choice in the matter is no more to be consulted
than the lady’s. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is necessary that
you should marry her within the hour.”

Tony, at this, for all his spirit, felt the blood run thin in his veins.
He looked in silence at the threatening visages between himself and the
door, stole a side-glance at the high barred windows of the apartment,
and then turned to Polixena, who had fallen sobbing at her father’s
feet.

“And if I refuse?” said he.

The Count made a significant gesture. “I am not so foolish as to
threaten a man of your mettle. But perhaps you are unaware what the
consequences would be to the lady.”

Polixena, at this, struggling to her feet, addressed a few impassioned
words to the Count and her father; but the latter put her aside with an
obdurate gesture.

The Count turned to Tony. “The lady herself pleads for you--at what
cost you do not guess--but as you see it is vain. In an hour his
Illustriousness’s chaplain will be here. Meanwhile his Illustriousness
consents to leave you in the custody of your betrothed.”

He stepped back, and the other gentlemen, bowing with deep ceremony to
Tony, stalked out one by one from the room. Tony heard the key turn in
the lock, and found himself alone with Polixena.




III


The girl had sunk into a chair, her face hidden, a picture of shame
and agony. So moving was the sight that Tony once again forgot his own
extremity in the view of her distress. He went and kneeled beside her,
drawing her hands from her face.

“Oh, don’t make me look at you!” she sobbed; but it was on his bosom
that she hid from his gaze. He held her there a breathing-space, as
he might have clasped a weeping child; then she drew back and put him
gently from her.

“What humiliation!” she lamented.

“Do you think I blame you for what has happened?”

“Alas, was it not my foolish letter that brought you to this plight? And
how nobly you defended me! How generous it was of you not to show the
letter! If my father knew I had written to the Ambassador to save me
from this dreadful marriage his anger against me would be even greater.”

“Ah--it was that you wrote for?” cried Tony with unaccountable relief.

“Of course--what else did you think?”

“But is it too late for the Ambassador to save you?”

“From YOU?” A smile flashed through her tears. “Alas, yes.” She drew
back and hid her face again, as though overcome by a fresh wave of
shame.

Tony glanced about him. “If I could wrench a bar out of that window--”
 he muttered.

“Impossible! The court is guarded. You are a prisoner, alas.--Oh, I must
speak!” She sprang up and paced the room. “But indeed you can scarce
think worse of me than you do already--”

“I think ill of you?”

“Alas, you must! To be unwilling to marry the man my father has chosen
for me--”

“Such a beetle-browed lout! It would be a burning shame if you married
him.”

“Ah, you come from a free country. Here a girl is allowed no choice.”

“It is infamous, I say--infamous!”

“No, no--I ought to have resigned myself, like so many others.”

“Resigned yourself to that brute! Impossible!”

“He has a dreadful name for violence--his gondolier has told my little
maid such tales of him! But why do I talk of myself, when it is of you I
should be thinking?”

“Of me, poor child?” cried Tony, losing his head.

“Yes, and how to save you--for I CAN save you! But every moment
counts--and yet what I have to say is so dreadful.”

“Nothing from your lips could seem dreadful.”

“Ah, if he had had your way of speaking!”

“Well, now at least you are free of him,” said Tony, a little wildly;
but at this she stood up and bent a grave look on him.

“No, I am not free,” she said; “but you are, if you will do as I tell
you.”

Tony, at this, felt a sudden dizziness; as though, from a mad flight
through clouds and darkness, he had dropped to safety again, and the
fall had stunned him.

“What am I to do?” he said.

“Look away from me, or I can never tell you.”

He thought at first that this was a jest, but her eyes commanded him,
and reluctantly he walked away and leaned in the embrasure of the
window. She stood in the middle of the room, and as soon as his back
was turned she began to speak in a quick monotonous voice, as though she
were reciting a lesson.

“You must know that the Marquess Zanipolo, though a great noble, is
not a rich man. True, he has large estates, but he is a desperate
spendthrift and gambler, and would sell his soul for a round sum of
ready money.--If you turn round I shall not go on!--He wrangled horribly
with my father over my dowry--he wanted me to have more than either of
my sisters, though one married a Procurator and the other a grandee
of Spain. But my father is a gambler too--oh, such fortunes as are
squandered over the arcade yonder! And so--and so--don’t turn, I implore
you--oh, do you begin to see my meaning?”

She broke off sobbing, and it took all his strength to keep his eyes
from her.

“Go on,” he said.

“Will you not understand? Oh, I would say anything to save you! You
don’t know us Venetians--we’re all to be bought for a price. It is
not only the brides who are marketable--sometimes the husbands sell
themselves too. And they think you rich--my father does, and the
others--I don’t know why, unless you have shown your money too
freely--and the English are all rich, are they not? And--oh, oh--do you
understand? Oh, I can’t bear your eyes!”

She dropped into a chair, her head on her arms, and Tony in a flash was
at her side.

“My poor child, my poor Polixena!” he cried, and wept and clasped her.

“You ARE rich, are you not? You would promise them a ransom?” she
persisted.

“To enable you to marry the Marquess?”

“To enable you to escape from this place. Oh, I hope I may never see
your face again.” She fell to weeping once more, and he drew away and
paced the floor in a fever.

Presently she sprang up with a fresh air of resolution, and pointed to a
clock against the wall. “The hour is nearly over. It is quite true that
my father is gone to fetch his chaplain. Oh, I implore you, be warned by
me! There is no other way of escape.”

“And if I do as you say--?”

“You are safe! You are free! I stake my life on it.”

“And you--you are married to that villain?”

“But I shall have saved you. Tell me your name, that I may say it to
myself when I am alone.”

“My name is Anthony. But you must not marry that fellow.”

“You forgive me, Anthony? You don’t think too badly of me?”

“I say you must not marry that fellow.”

She laid a trembling hand on his arm. “Time presses,” she adjured him,
“and I warn you there is no other way.”

For a moment he had a vision of his mother, sitting very upright, on a
Sunday evening, reading Dr. Tillotson’s sermons in the best parlour at
Salem; then he swung round on the girl and caught both her hands in his.
“Yes, there is,” he cried, “if you are willing. Polixena, let the priest
come!”

She shrank back from him, white and radiant. “Oh, hush, be silent!” she
said.

“I am no noble Marquess, and have no great estates,” he cried. “My
father is a plain India merchant in the colony of Massachusetts--but if
you--”

“Oh, hush, I say! I don’t know what your long words mean. But I bless
you, bless you, bless you on my knees!” And she knelt before him, and
fell to kissing his hands.

He drew her up to his breast and held her there.

“You are willing, Polixena?” he said.

“No, no!” She broke from him with outstretched hands. “I am not willing.
You mistake me. I must marry the Marquess, I tell you!”

“On my money?” he taunted her; and her burning blush rebuked him.

“Yes, on your money,” she said sadly.

“Why? Because, much as you hate him, you hate me still more?”

She was silent.

“If you hate me, why do you sacrifice yourself for me?” he persisted.

“You torture me! And I tell you the hour is past.”

“Let it pass. I’ll not accept your sacrifice. I will not lift a finger
to help another man to marry you.”

“Oh, madman, madman!” she murmured.

Tony, with crossed arms, faced her squarely, and she leaned against the
wall a few feet off from him. Her breast throbbed under its lace and
falbalas, and her eyes swam with terror and entreaty.

“Polixena, I love you!” he cried.

A blush swept over her throat and bosom, bathing her in light to the
verge of her troubled brows.

“I love you! I love you!” he repeated.

And now she was on his breast again, and all their youth was in their
lips. But her embrace was as fleeting as a bird’s poise and before he
knew it he clasped empty air, and half the room was between them.

She was holding up a little coral charm and laughing. “I took it from
your fob,” she said. “It is of no value, is it? And I shall not get any
of the money, you know.”

She continued to laugh strangely, and the rouge burned like fire in her
ashen face.

“What are you talking of?” he said.

“They never give me anything but the clothes I wear. And I shall never
see you again, Anthony!” She gave him a dreadful look. “Oh, my poor boy,
my poor love--‘I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, POLIXENA!’”

He thought she had turned light-headed, and advanced to her with
soothing words; but she held him quietly at arm’s length, and as he
gazed he read the truth in her face.

He fell back from her, and a sob broke from him as he bowed his head on
his hands.

“Only, for God’s sake, have the money ready, or there may be foul play
here,” she said.

As she spoke there was a great tramping of steps outside and a burst of
voices on the threshold.

“It is all a lie,” she gasped out, “about my marriage, and the Marquess,
and the Ambassador, and the Senator--but not, oh, not about your danger
in this place--or about my love,” she breathed to him. And as the key
rattled in the door she laid her lips on his brow.

The key rattled, and the door swung open--but the black-cassocked
gentleman who stepped in, though a priest indeed, was no votary of
idolatrous rites, but that sound orthodox divine, the Reverend Ozias
Mounce, looking very much perturbed at his surroundings, and very much
on the alert for the Scarlet Woman. He was supported, to his evident
relief, by the captain of the Hepzibah B., and the procession was closed
by an escort of stern-looking fellows in cocked hats and small-swords,
who led between them Tony’s late friends the magnificoes, now as sorry a
looking company as the law ever landed in her net.

The captain strode briskly into the room, uttering a grunt of
satisfaction as he clapped eyes on Tony.

“So, Mr. Bracknell,” said he, “you have been seeing the Carnival with
this pack of mummers, have you? And this is where your pleasuring has
landed you? H’m--a pretty establishment, and a pretty lady at the head
of it.” He glanced about the apartment and doffed his hat with mock
ceremony to Polixena, who faced him like a princess.

“Why, my girl,” said he, amicably, “I think I saw you this morning in
the square, on the arm of the Pantaloon yonder; and as for that Captain
Spavent--” and he pointed a derisive finger at the Marquess--“I’ve
watched him drive his bully’s trade under the arcade ever since I
first dropped anchor in these waters. Well, well,” he continued, his
indignation subsiding, “all’s fair in Carnival, I suppose, but this
gentleman here is under sailing orders, and I fear we must break up your
little party.”

At this Tony saw Count Rialto step forward, looking very small and
explanatory, and uncovering obsequiously to the captain.

“I can assure you, sir,” said the Count in his best English, “that this
incident is the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding, and if you
will oblige us by dismissing these myrmidons, any of my friends
here will be happy to offer satisfaction to Mr. Bracknell and his
companions.”

Mr. Mounce shrank visibly at this, and the captain burst into a loud
guffaw.

“Satisfaction?” says he. “Why, my cock, that’s very handsome of you,
considering the rope’s at your throats. But we’ll not take advantage of
your generosity, for I fear Mr. Bracknell has already trespassed on
it too long. You pack of galley-slaves, you!” he spluttered suddenly,
“decoying young innocents with that devil’s bait of yours--” His eye
fell on Polixena, and his voice softened unaccountably. “Ah, well, we
must all see the Carnival once, I suppose,” he said. “All’s well that
ends well, as the fellow says in the play; and now, if you please, Mr.
Bracknell, if you’ll take the reverend gentleman’s arm there, we’ll
bid adieu to our hospitable entertainers, and right about face for the
Hepzibah.”


The End of A Venetian Night’s Entertainment





XINGU

December, 1911


Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as
though it were dangerous to meet alone. To this end she had founded
the Lunch Club, an association composed of herself and several other
indomitable huntresses of erudition. The Lunch Club, after three or four
winters of lunching and debate, had acquired such local distinction that
the entertainment of distinguished strangers became one of its accepted
functions; in recognition of which it duly extended to the celebrated
“Osric Dane,” on the day of her arrival in Hillbridge, an invitation to
be present at the next meeting.

The Club was to meet at Mrs. Ballinger’s. The other members, behind
her back, were of one voice in deploring her unwillingness to cede
her rights in favor of Mrs. Plinth, whose house made a more impressive
setting for the entertainment of celebrities; while, as Mrs. Leveret
observed, there was always the picture-gallery to fall back on.

Mrs. Plinth made no secret of sharing this view. She had always regarded
it as one of her obligations to entertain the Lunch Club’s distinguished
guests. Mrs. Plinth was almost as proud of her obligations as she was
of her picture-gallery; she was in fact fond of implying that the one
possession implied the other, and that only a woman of her wealth
could afford to live up to a standard as high as that which she had set
herself. An all-round sense of duty, roughly adaptable to various ends,
was, in her opinion, all that Providence exacted of the more humbly
stationed; but the power which had predestined Mrs. Plinth to keep
footmen clearly intended her to maintain an equally specialized staff of
responsibilities. It was the more to be regretted that Mrs. Ballinger,
whose obligations to society were bounded by the narrow scope of two
parlour-maids, should have been so tenacious of the right to entertain
Osric Dane.

The question of that lady’s reception had for a month past profoundly
moved the members of the Lunch Club. It was not that they felt
themselves unequal to the task, but that their sense of the opportunity
plunged them into the agreeable uncertainty of the lady who weighs the
alternatives of a well-stocked wardrobe. If such subsidiary members as
Mrs. Leveret were fluttered by the thought of exchanging ideas with the
author of “The Wings of Death,” no forebodings of the kind disturbed the
conscious adequacy of Mrs. Plinth, Mrs. Ballinger and Miss Van Vluyck.
“The Wings of Death” had, in fact, at Miss Van Vluyck’s suggestion, been
chosen as the subject of discussion at the last club meeting, and
each member had thus been enabled to express her own opinion or to
appropriate whatever seemed most likely to be of use in the comments
of the others. Mrs. Roby alone had abstained from profiting by the
opportunity thus offered; but it was now openly recognised that, as a
member of the Lunch Club, Mrs. Roby was a failure. “It all comes,” as
Miss Van Vluyck put it, “of accepting a woman on a man’s estimation.”
 Mrs. Roby, returning to Hillbridge from a prolonged sojourn in exotic
regions--the other ladies no longer took the trouble to remember
where--had been emphatically commended by the distinguished biologist,
Professor Foreland, as the most agreeable woman he had ever met; and the
members of the Lunch Club, awed by an encomium that carried the weight
of a diploma, and rashly assuming that the Professor’s social sympathies
would follow the line of his scientific bent, had seized the chance of
annexing a biological member. Their disillusionment was complete. At
Miss Van Vluyck’s first off-hand mention of the pterodactyl Mrs. Roby
had confusedly murmured: “I know so little about metres--” and after
that painful betrayal of incompetence she had prudently withdrawn from
farther participation in the mental gymnastics of the club.

“I suppose she flattered him,” Miss Van Vluyck summed up--“or else it’s
the way she does her hair.”

The dimensions of Miss Van Vluyck’s dining-room having restricted the
membership of the club to six, the non-conductiveness of one member was
a serious obstacle to the exchange of ideas, and some wonder had already
been expressed that Mrs. Roby should care to live, as it were, on the
intellectual bounty of the others. This feeling was augmented by the
discovery that she had not yet read “The Wings of Death.” She owned
to having heard the name of Osric Dane; but that--incredible as it
appeared--was the extent of her acquaintance with the celebrated
novelist. The ladies could not conceal their surprise, but Mrs.
Ballinger, whose pride in the club made her wish to put even Mrs. Roby
in the best possible light, gently insinuated that, though she had not
had time to acquaint herself with “The Wings of Death,” she must at
least be familiar with its equally remarkable predecessor, “The Supreme
Instant.”

Mrs. Roby wrinkled her sunny brows in a conscientious effort of memory,
as a result of which she recalled that, oh, yes, she HAD seen the book
at her brother’s, when she was staying with him in Brazil, and had even
carried it off to read one day on a boating party; but they had all
got to shying things at each other in the boat, and the book had gone
overboard, so she had never had the chance--

The picture evoked by this anecdote did not advance Mrs. Roby’s credit
with the club, and there was a painful pause, which was broken by
Mrs. Plinth’s remarking: “I can understand that, with all your other
pursuits, you should not find much time for reading; but I should have
thought you might at least have GOT UP ‘The Wings of Death’ before Osric
Dane’s arrival.”

Mrs. Roby took this rebuke good-humouredly. She had meant, she owned
to glance through the book; but she had been so absorbed in a novel of
Trollope’s that--

“No one reads Trollope now,” Mrs. Ballinger interrupted impatiently.

Mrs. Roby looked pained. “I’m only just beginning,” she confessed.

“And does he interest you?” Mrs. Plinth inquired.

“He amuses me.”

“Amusement,” said Mrs. Plinth sententiously, “is hardly what I look for
in my choice of books.”

“Oh, certainly, ‘The Wings of Death’ is not amusing,” ventured Mrs.
Leveret, whose manner of putting forth an opinion was like that of an
obliging salesman with a variety of other styles to submit if his first
selection does not suit.

“Was it MEANT to be?” enquired Mrs. Plinth, who was fond of asking
questions that she permitted no one but herself to answer. “Assuredly
not.”

“Assuredly not--that is what I was going to say,” assented Mrs. Leveret,
hastily rolling up her opinion and reaching for another. “It was meant
to--to elevate.”

Miss Van Vluyck adjusted her spectacles as though they were the black
cap of condemnation. “I hardly see,” she interposed, “how a book steeped
in the bitterest pessimism can be said to elevate, however much it may
instruct.”

“I meant, of course, to instruct,” said Mrs. Leveret, flurried by the
unexpected distinction between two terms which she had supposed to be
synonymous. Mrs. Leveret’s enjoyment of the Lunch Club was frequently
marred by such surprises; and not knowing her own value to the other
ladies as a mirror for their mental complacency she was sometimes
troubled by a doubt of her worthiness to join in their debates. It was
only the fact of having a dull sister who thought her clever that saved
her from a sense of hopeless inferiority.

“Do they get married in the end?” Mrs. Roby interposed.

“They--who?” the Lunch Club collectively exclaimed.

“Why, the girl and man. It’s a novel, isn’t it? I always think that’s
the one thing that matters. If they’re parted it spoils my dinner.”

Mrs. Plinth and Mrs. Ballinger exchanged scandalised glances, and the
latter said: “I should hardly advise you to read ‘The Wings of Death,’
in that spirit. For my part, when there are so many books that one HAS
to read, I wonder how any one can find time for those that are merely
amusing.”

“The beautiful part of it,” Laura Glyde murmured, “is surely just
this--that no one can tell HOW ‘The Wings of Death’ ends. Osric Dane,
overcome by the dread significance of her own meaning, has mercifully
veiled it--perhaps even from herself--as Apelles, in representing the
sacrifice of Iphigenia, veiled the face of Agamemnon.”

“What’s that? Is it poetry?” whispered Mrs. Leveret nervously to Mrs.
Plinth, who, disdaining a definite reply, said coldly: “You should
look it up. I always make it a point to look things up.” Her tone
added--“though I might easily have it done for me by the footman.”

“I was about to say,” Miss Van Vluyck resumed, “that it must always be a
question whether a book CAN instruct unless it elevates.”

“Oh--” murmured Mrs. Leveret, now feeling herself hopelessly astray.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Ballinger, scenting in Miss Van Vluyck’s tone
a tendency to depreciate the coveted distinction of entertaining Osric
Dane; “I don’t know that such a question can seriously be raised as to a
book which has attracted more attention among thoughtful people than any
novel since ‘Robert Elsmere.’”

“Oh, but don’t you see,” exclaimed Laura Glyde, “that it’s just the
dark hopelessness of it all--the wonderful tone-scheme of black on
black--that makes it such an artistic achievement? It reminded me so
when I read it of Prince Rupert’s MANIÈRE NOIRE... the book is etched,
not painted, yet one feels the colour values so intensely...”

“Who is HE?” Mrs. Leveret whispered to her neighbour. “Some one she’s
met abroad?”

“The wonderful part of the book,” Mrs. Ballinger conceded, “is that it
may be looked at from so many points of view. I hear that as a study of
determinism Professor Lupton ranks it with ‘The Data of Ethics.’”

“I’m told that Osric Dane spent ten years in preparatory studies
before beginning to write it,” said Mrs. Plinth. “She looks up
everything--verifies everything. It has always been my principle, as
you know. Nothing would induce me, now, to put aside a book before I’d
finished it, just because I can buy as many more as I want.”

“And what do YOU think of ‘The Wings of Death’?” Mrs. Roby abruptly
asked her.

It was the kind of question that might be termed out of order, and the
ladies glanced at each other as though disclaiming any share in such a
breach of discipline. They all knew that there was nothing Mrs. Plinth
so much disliked as being asked her opinion of a book. Books were
written to read; if one read them what more could be expected? To be
questioned in detail regarding the contents of a volume seemed to her
as great an outrage as being searched for smuggled laces at the Custom
House. The club had always respected this idiosyncrasy of Mrs. Plinth’s.
Such opinions as she had were imposing and substantial: her mind, like
her house, was furnished with monumental “pieces” that were not meant
to be suddenly disarranged; and it was one of the unwritten rules of
the Lunch Club that, within her own province, each member’s habits
of thought should be respected. The meeting therefore closed with
an increased sense, on the part of the other ladies, of Mrs. Roby’s
hopeless unfitness to be one of them.




II


Mrs. Leveret, on the eventful day, had arrived early at Mrs.
Ballinger’s, her volume of Appropriate Allusions in her pocket.

It always flustered Mrs. Leveret to be late at the Lunch Club: she liked
to collect her thoughts and gather a hint, as the others assembled, of
the turn the conversation was likely to take. To-day, however, she
felt herself completely at a loss; and even the familiar contact of
Appropriate Allusions, which stuck into her as she sat down, failed to
give her any reassurance. It was an admirable little volume, compiled
to meet all the social emergencies; so that, whether on the occasion
of Anniversaries, joyful or melancholy (as the classification ran),
of Banquets, social or municipal, or of Baptisms, Church of England
or sectarian, its student need never be at a loss for a pertinent
reference. Mrs. Leveret, though she had for years devoutly conned its
pages, valued it, however, rather for its moral support than for its
practical services; for though in the privacy of her own room she
commanded an army of quotations, these invariably deserted her at the
critical moment, and the only line she retained--CANST THOU DRAW OUT
LEVIATHAN WITH A HOOK?--was one she had never yet found the occasion to
apply.

To-day she felt that even the complete mastery of the volume would
hardly have insured her self-possession; for she thought it probable,
even if she DID, in some miraculous way, remember an Allusion, it would
be only to find that Osric Dane used a different volume (Mrs. Leveret
was convinced that literary people always carried them), and would
consequently not recognise her quotations.

Mrs. Leveret’s sense of being adrift was intensified by the appearance
of Mrs. Ballinger’s drawing-room. To a careless eye its aspect was
unchanged; but those acquainted with Mrs. Ballinger’s way of
arranging her books would instantly have detected the marks of recent
perturbation. Mrs. Ballinger’s province, as a member of the Lunch Club,
was the Book of the Day. On that, whatever it was, from a novel to
a treatise on experimental psychology, she was confidently,
authoritatively “up.” What became of last year’s books, or last week’s
even; what she did with the “subjects” she had previously professed with
equal authority; no one had ever yet discovered. Her mind was an hotel
where facts came and went like transient lodgers, without leaving their
address behind, and frequently without paying for their board. It was
Mrs. Ballinger’s boast that she was “abreast with the Thought of the
Day,” and her pride that this advanced position should be expressed by
the books on her drawing-room table. These volumes, frequently renewed,
and almost always damp from the press, bore names generally unfamiliar
to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively scanned them, a
disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge to be breathlessly
traversed in Mrs. Ballinger’s wake. But to-day a number of
maturer-looking volumes were adroitly mingled with the primeurs of the
press--Karl Marx jostled Professor Bergson, and the “Confessions of St.
Augustine” lay beside the last work on “Mendelism”; so that even to Mrs.
Leveret’s fluttered perceptions it was clear that Mrs. Ballinger didn’t
in the least know what Osric Dane was likely to talk about, and had
taken measures to be prepared for anything. Mrs. Leveret felt like a
passenger on an ocean steamer who is told that there is no immediate
danger, but that she had better put on her life-belt.

It was a relief to be roused from these forebodings by Miss Van Vluyck’s
arrival.

“Well, my dear,” the new-comer briskly asked her hostess, “what subjects
are we to discuss to-day?”

Mrs. Ballinger was furtively replacing a volume of Wordsworth by a copy
of Verlaine. “I hardly know,” she said somewhat nervously. “Perhaps we
had better leave that to circumstances.”

“Circumstances?” said Miss Van Vluyck drily. “That means, I suppose,
that Laura Glyde will take the floor as usual, and we shall be deluged
with literature.”

Philanthropy and statistics were Miss Van Vluyck’s province, and she
naturally resented any tendency to divert their guest’s attention from
these topics.

Mrs. Plinth at this moment appeared.

“Literature?” she protested in a tone of remonstrance. “But this is
perfectly unexpected. I understood we were to talk of Osric Dane’s
novel.”

Mrs. Ballinger winced at the discrimination, but let it pass. “We can
hardly make that our chief subject--at least not TOO intentionally,” she
suggested. “Of course we can let our talk DRIFT in that direction; but
we ought to have some other topic as an introduction, and that is what
I wanted to consult you about. The fact is, we know so little of Osric
Dane’s tastes and interests that it is difficult to make any special
preparation.”

“It may be difficult,” said Mrs. Plinth with decision, “but it is
absolutely necessary. I know what that happy-go-lucky principle
leads to. As I told one of my nieces the other day, there are certain
emergencies for which a lady should always be prepared. It’s in shocking
taste to wear colours when one pays a visit of condolence, or a last
year’s dress when there are reports that one’s husband is on the wrong
side of the market; and so it is with conversation. All I ask is that I
should know beforehand what is to be talked about; then I feel sure of
being able to say the proper thing.”

“I quite agree with you,” Mrs. Ballinger anxiously assented; “but--”

And at that instant, heralded by the fluttered parlour-maid, Osric Dane
appeared upon the threshold.

Mrs. Leveret told her sister afterward that she had known at a glance
what was coming. She saw that Osric Dane was not going to meet them
half way. That distinguished personage had indeed entered with an air of
compulsion not calculated to promote the easy exercise of hospitality.
She looked as though she were about to be photographed for a new edition
of her books.

The desire to propitiate a divinity is generally in inverse ratio to its
responsiveness, and the sense of discouragement produced by Osric Dane’s
entrance visibly increased the Lunch Club’s eagerness to please her. Any
lingering idea that she might consider herself under an obligation to
her entertainers was at once dispelled by her manner: as Mrs. Leveret
said afterward to her sister, she had a way of looking at you that made
you feel as if there was something wrong with your hat. This evidence
of greatness produced such an immediate impression on the ladies that a
shudder of awe ran through them when Mrs. Roby, as their hostess led
the great personage into the dining-room, turned back to whisper to the
others: “What a brute she is!”

The hour about the table did not tend to correct this verdict. It was
passed by Osric Dane in the silent deglutition of Mrs. Ballinger’s menu,
and by the members of the Club in the emission of tentative platitudes
which their guest seemed to swallow as perfunctorily as the successive
courses of the luncheon.

Mrs. Ballinger’s deplorable delay in fixing a topic had thrown the
Club into a mental disarray which increased with the return to the
drawing-room, where the actual business of discussion was to open. Each
lady waited for the other to speak; and there was a general shock
of disappointment when their hostess opened the conversation by the
painfully commonplace inquiry: “Is this your first visit to Hillbridge?”

Even Mrs. Leveret was conscious that this was a bad beginning; and a
vague impulse of deprecation made Miss Glyde interject: “It is a very
small place indeed.”

Mrs. Plinth bristled. “We have a great many representative people,” she
said, in the tone of one who speaks for her order.

Osric Dane turned to her thoughtfully. “What do they represent?” she
asked.

Mrs. Plinth’s constitutional dislike to being questioned was intensified
by her sense of unpreparedness; and her reproachful glance passed the
question on to Mrs. Ballinger.

“Why,” said that lady, glancing in turn at the other members, “as a
community I hope it is not too much to say that we stand for culture.”

“For art--” Miss Glyde eagerly interjected.

“For art and literature,” Mrs. Ballinger emended.

“And for sociology, I trust,” snapped Miss Van Vluyck.

“We have a standard,” said Mrs. Plinth, feeling herself suddenly secure
on the vast expanse of a generalisation: and Mrs. Leveret, thinking
there must be room for more than one on so broad a statement, took
courage to murmur: “Oh, certainly; we have a standard.”

“The object of our little club,” Mrs. Ballinger continued, “is to
concentrate the highest tendencies of Hillbridge--to centralise and
focus its complex intellectual effort.”

This was felt to be so happy that the ladies drew an almost audible
breath of relief.

“We aspire,” the President went on, “to stand for what is highest in
art, literature and ethics.”

Osric Dane again turned to her. “What ethics?” she asked.

A tremor of apprehension encircled the room. None of the ladies required
any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals; but when they
were called ethics it was different. The club, when fresh from
the “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” the “Reader’s Handbook” or Smith’s
“Classical Dictionary,” could deal confidently with any subject; but
when taken unawares it had been known to define agnosticism as a heresy
of the Early Church and Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist;
and such minor members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as
something vaguely pagan.

Even to Mrs. Ballinger, Osric Dane’s question was unsettling, and there
was a general sense of gratitude when Laura Glyde leaned forward to say,
with her most sympathetic accent: “You must excuse us, Mrs. Dane, for
not being able, just at present, to talk of anything but ‘The Wings of
Death.’”

“Yes,” said Miss Van Vluyck, with a sudden resolve to carry the war into
the enemy’s camp. “We are so anxious to know the exact purpose you had
in mind in writing your wonderful book.”

“You will find,” Mrs. Plinth interposed, “that we are not superficial
readers.”

“We are eager to hear from you,” Miss Van Vluyck continued, “if
the pessimistic tendency of the book is an expression of your own
convictions or--”

“Or merely,” Miss Glyde hastily thrust in, “a sombre background brushed
in to throw your figures into more vivid relief. ARE you not primarily
plastic?”

“I have always maintained,” Mrs. Ballinger interposed, “that you
represent the purely objective method--”

Osric Dane helped herself critically to coffee. “How do you define
objective?” she then inquired.

There was a flurried pause before Laura Glyde intensely murmured: “In
reading YOU we don’t define, we feel.”

Osric Dane smiled. “The cerebellum,” she remarked, “is not infrequently
the seat of the literary emotions.” And she took a second lump of sugar.

The sting that this remark was vaguely felt to conceal was almost
neutralised by the satisfaction of being addressed in such technical
language.

“Ah, the cerebellum,” said Miss Van Vluyck complacently. “The Club took
a course in psychology last winter.”

“Which psychology?” asked Osric Dane.

There was an agonising pause, during which each member of the Club
secretly deplored the distressing inefficiency of the others. Only Mrs.
Roby went on placidly sipping her chartreuse. At last Mrs. Ballinger
said, with an attempt at a high tone: “Well, really, you know, it was
last year that we took psychology, and this winter we have been so
absorbed in--”

She broke off, nervously trying to recall some of the Club’s
discussions; but her faculties seemed to be paralysed by the petrifying
stare of Osric Dane. What HAD the club been absorbed in lately? Mrs.
Ballinger, with a vague purpose of gaining time, repeated slowly: “We’ve
been so intensely absorbed in--”

Mrs. Roby put down her liqueur glass and drew near the group with a
smile.

“In Xingu?” she gently prompted.

A thrill ran through the other members. They exchanged confused
glances, and then, with one accord, turned a gaze of mingled relief
and interrogation on their unexpected rescuer. The expression of each
denoted a different phase of the same emotion. Mrs. Plinth was the first
to compose her features to an air of reassurance: after a moment’s hasty
adjustment her look almost implied that it was she who had given the
word to Mrs. Ballinger.

“Xingu, of course!” exclaimed the latter with her accustomed promptness,
while Miss Van Vluyck and Laura Glyde seemed to be plumbing the depths
of memory, and Mrs. Leveret, feeling apprehensively for Appropriate
Allusions, was somehow reassured by the uncomfortable pressure of its
bulk against her person.

Osric Dane’s change of countenance was no less striking than that of
her entertainers. She too put down her coffee-cup, but with a look of
distinct annoyance: she too wore, for a brief moment, what Mrs. Roby
afterward described as the look of feeling for something in the back
of her head; and before she could dissemble these momentary signs of
weakness, Mrs. Roby, turning to her with a deferential smile, had said:
“And we’ve been so hoping that to-day you would tell us just what you
think of it.”

Osric Dane received the homage of the smile as a matter of course; but
the accompanying question obviously embarrassed her, and it became clear
to her observers that she was not quick at shifting her facial scenery.
It was as though her countenance had so long been set in an expression
of unchallenged superiority that the muscles had stiffened, and refused
to obey her orders.

“Xingu--” she murmured, as if seeking in her turn to gain time.

Mrs. Roby continued to press her. “Knowing how engrossing the subject
is, you will understand how it happens that the Club has let everything
else go to the wall for the moment. Since we took up Xingu I might
almost say--were it not for your books--that nothing else seems to us
worth remembering.”

Osric Dane’s stern features were darkened rather than lit up by an
uneasy smile. “I am glad to hear there is one exception,” she gave out
between narrowed lips.

“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Roby said prettily; “but as you have shown us
that--so very naturally!--you don’t care to talk about your own things,
we really can’t let you off from telling us exactly what you think about
Xingu; especially,” she added, with a persuasive smile, “as some people
say that one of your last books was simply saturated with it.”

It was an IT, then--the assurance sped like fire through the parched
minds of the other members. In their eagerness to gain the least
little clue to Xingu they almost forgot the joy of assisting at the
discomfiture of Mrs. Dane.

The latter reddened nervously under her antagonist’s direct assault.
“May I ask,” she faltered out in an embarrassed tone, “to which of my
books you refer?”

Mrs. Roby did not falter. “That’s just what I want you to tell us;
because, though I was present, I didn’t actually take part.”

“Present at what?” Mrs. Dane took her up; and for an instant the
trembling members of the Lunch Club thought that the champion Providence
had raised up for them had lost a point. But Mrs. Roby explained herself
gaily: “At the discussion, of course. And so we’re dreadfully anxious to
know just how it was that you went into the Xingu.”

There was a portentous pause, a silence so big with incalculable dangers
that the members with one accord checked the words on their lips, like
soldiers dropping their arms to watch a single combat between their
leaders. Then Mrs. Dane gave expression to their inmost dread by saying
sharply: “Ah--you say THE Xingu, do you?”

Mrs. Roby smiled undauntedly. “It IS a shade pedantic, isn’t it?
Personally, I always drop the article; but I don’t know how the other
members feel about it.”

The other members looked as though they would willingly have dispensed
with this deferential appeal to their opinion, and Mrs. Roby, after a
bright glance about the group, went on: “They probably think, as I do,
that nothing really matters except the thing itself--except Xingu.”

No immediate reply seemed to occur to Mrs. Dane, and Mrs. Ballinger
gathered courage to say: “Surely every one must feel that about Xingu.”

Mrs. Plinth came to her support with a heavy murmur of assent, and Laura
Glyde breathed emotionally: “I have known cases where it has changed a
whole life.”

“It has done me worlds of good,” Mrs. Leveret interjected, seeming
to herself to remember that she had either taken it or read it in the
winter before.

“Of course,” Mrs. Roby admitted, “the difficulty is that one must give
up so much time to it. It’s very long.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Miss Van Vluyck tartly, “grudging the time given
to such a subject.”

“And deep in places,” Mrs. Roby pursued; (so then it was a book!) “And
it isn’t easy to skip.”

“I never skip,” said Mrs. Plinth dogmatically.

“Ah, it’s dangerous to, in Xingu. Even at the start there are places
where one can’t. One must just wade through.”

“I should hardly call it WADING,” said Mrs. Ballinger sarcastically.

Mrs. Roby sent her a look of interest. “Ah--you always found it went
swimmingly?”

Mrs. Ballinger hesitated. “Of course there are difficult passages,” she
conceded modestly.

“Yes; some are not at all clear--even,” Mrs. Roby added, “if one is
familiar with the original.”

“As I suppose you are?” Osric Dane interposed, suddenly fixing her with
a look of challenge.

Mrs. Roby met it by a deprecating smile. “Oh, it’s really not difficult
up to a certain point; though some of the branches are very little
known, and it’s almost impossible to get at the source.”

“Have you ever tried?” Mrs. Plinth enquired, still distrustful of Mrs.
Roby’s thoroughness.

Mrs. Roby was silent for a moment; then she replied with lowered lids:
“No--but a friend of mine did; a very brilliant man; and he told me it
was best for women--not to...”

A shudder ran around the room. Mrs. Leveret coughed so that the
parlour-maid, who was handing the cigarettes, should not hear; Miss Van
Vluyck’s face took on a nauseated expression, and Mrs. Plinth looked as
if she were passing some one she did not care to bow to. But the most
remarkable result of Mrs. Roby’s words was the effect they produced on
the Lunch Club’s distinguished guest. Osric Dane’s impassive features
suddenly melted to an expression of the warmest human sympathy, and
edging her chair toward Mrs. Roby’s she asked: “Did he really? And--did
you find he was right?”

Mrs. Ballinger, in whom annoyance at Mrs. Roby’s unwonted assumption
of prominence was beginning to displace gratitude for the aid she had
rendered, could not consent to her being allowed, by such dubious means,
to monopolise the attention of their guest. If Osric Dane had not enough
self-respect to resent Mrs. Roby’s flippancy, at least the Lunch Club
would do so in the person of its President.

Mrs. Ballinger laid her hand on Mrs. Roby’s arm. “We must not forget,”
 she said with a frigid amiability, “that absorbing as Xingu is to US, it
may be less interesting to--”

“Oh, no, on the contrary, I assure you,” Osric Dane energetically
intervened.

“--to others,” Mrs. Ballinger finished firmly; “and we must not allow
our little meeting to end without persuading Mrs. Dane to say a few
words to us on a subject which, to-day, is much more present in all our
thoughts. I refer, of course, to ‘The Wings of Death.’”

The other members, animated by various degrees of the same sentiment,
and encouraged by the humanised mien of their redoubtable guest,
repeated after Mrs. Ballinger: “Oh, yes, you really MUST talk to us a
little about your book.”

Osric Dane’s expression became as bored, though not as haughty, as when
her work had been previously mentioned. But before she could respond
to Mrs. Ballinger’s request, Mrs. Roby had risen from her seat, and was
pulling her veil down over her frivolous nose.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, advancing toward her hostess with outstretched
hand, “but before Mrs. Dane begins I think I’d better run away.
Unluckily, as you know, I haven’t read her books, so I should be at a
terrible disadvantage among you all; and besides, I’ve an engagement to
play bridge.”

If Mrs. Roby had simply pleaded her ignorance of Osric Dane’s works as
a reason for withdrawing, the Lunch Club, in view of her recent prowess,
might have approved such evidence of discretion; but to couple this
excuse with the brazen announcement that she was foregoing the privilege
for the purpose of joining a bridge-party, was only one more instance of
her deplorable lack of discrimination.

The ladies were disposed, however, to feel that her departure--now
that she had performed the sole service she was ever likely to render
them--would probably make for greater order and dignity in the impending
discussion, besides relieving them of the sense of self-distrust which
her presence always mysteriously produced. Mrs. Ballinger therefore
restricted herself to a formal murmur of regret, and the other members
were just grouping themselves comfortably about Osric Dane when the
latter, to their dismay, started up from the sofa on which she had been
deferentially enthroned.

“Oh wait--do wait, and I’ll go with you!” she called out to Mrs. Roby;
and, seizing the hands of the disconcerted members, she administered
a series of farewell pressures with the mechanical haste of a
railway-conductor punching tickets.

“I’m so sorry--I’d quite forgotten--” she flung back at them from the
threshold; and as she joined Mrs. Roby, who had turned in surprise at
her appeal, the other ladies had the mortification of hearing her say,
in a voice which she did not take the pains to lower: “If you’ll let
me walk a little way with you, I should so like to ask you a few more
questions about Xingu...”




III


The incident had been so rapid that the door closed on the departing
pair before the other members had had time to understand what was
happening. Then a sense of the indignity put upon them by Osric Dane’s
unceremonious desertion began to contend with the confused feeling that
they had been cheated out of their due without exactly knowing how or
why.

There was an awkward silence, during which Mrs. Ballinger, with a
perfunctory hand, rearranged the skilfully grouped literature at which
her distinguished guest had not so much as glanced; then Miss Van Vluyck
tartly pronounced: “Well, I can’t say that I consider Osric Dane’s
departure a great loss.”

This confession crystallised the fluid resentment of the other members,
and Mrs. Leveret exclaimed: “I do believe she came on purpose to be
nasty!”

It was Mrs. Plinth’s private opinion that Osric Dane’s attitude toward
the Lunch Club might have been very different had it welcomed her in the
majestic setting of the Plinth drawing-rooms; but not liking to reflect
on the inadequacy of Mrs. Ballinger’s establishment she sought a
round-about satisfaction in depreciating her savoir faire.

“I said from the first that we ought to have had a subject ready. It’s
what always happens when you’re unprepared. Now if we’d only got up
Xingu--”

The slowness of Mrs. Plinth’s mental processes was always allowed for
by the Club; but this instance of it was too much for Mrs. Ballinger’s
equanimity.

“Xingu!” she scoffed. “Why, it was the fact of our knowing so much more
about it than she did--unprepared though we were--that made Osric Dane
so furious. I should have thought that was plain enough to everybody!”

This retort impressed even Mrs. Plinth, and Laura Glyde, moved by an
impulse of generosity, said: “Yes, we really ought to be grateful
to Mrs. Roby for introducing the topic. It may have made Osric Dane
furious, but at least it made her civil.”

“I am glad we were able to show her,” added Miss Van Vluyck, “that a
broad and up-to-date culture is not confined to the great intellectual
centres.”

This increased the satisfaction of the other members, and they began
to forget their wrath against Osric Dane in the pleasure of having
contributed to her defeat.

Miss Van Vluyck thoughtfully rubbed her spectacles. “What surprised me
most,” she continued, “was that Fanny Roby should be so up on Xingu.”

This frank admission threw a slight chill on the company, but Mrs.
Ballinger said with an air of indulgent irony: “Mrs. Roby always has the
knack of making a little go a long way; still, we certainly owe her a
debt for happening to remember that she’d heard of Xingu.” And this was
felt by the other members to be a graceful way of cancelling once for
all the Club’s obligation to Mrs. Roby.

Even Mrs. Leveret took courage to speed a timid shaft of irony: “I fancy
Osric Dane hardly expected to take a lesson in Xingu at Hillbridge!”

Mrs. Ballinger smiled. “When she asked me what we represented--do you
remember?--I wish I’d simply said we represented Xingu!”

All the ladies laughed appreciatively at this sally, except Mrs. Plinth,
who said, after a moment’s deliberation: “I’m not sure it would have
been wise to do so.”

Mrs. Ballinger, who was already beginning to feel as if she had
launched at Osric Dane the retort which had just occurred to her, looked
ironically at Mrs. Plinth. “May I ask why?” she enquired.

Mrs. Plinth looked grave. “Surely,” she said, “I understood from Mrs.
Roby herself that the subject was one it was as well not to go into too
deeply?”

Miss Van Vluyck rejoined with precision: “I think that applied only to
an investigation of the origin of the--of the--“; and suddenly she found
that her usually accurate memory had failed her. “It’s a part of the
subject I never studied myself,” she concluded lamely.

“Nor I,” said Mrs. Ballinger.

Laura Glyde bent toward them with widened eyes. “And yet it
seems--doesn’t it?--the part that is fullest of an esoteric
fascination?”

“I don’t know on what you base that,” said Miss Van Vluyck
argumentatively.

“Well, didn’t you notice how intensely interested Osric Dane became
as soon as she heard what the brilliant foreigner--he WAS a foreigner,
wasn’t he?--had told Mrs. Roby about the origin--the origin of the
rite--or whatever you call it?”

Mrs. Plinth looked disapproving, and Mrs. Ballinger visibly wavered.
Then she said in a decisive tone: “It may not be desirable to touch on
the--on that part of the subject in general conversation; but, from the
importance it evidently has to a woman of Osric Dane’s distinction,
I feel as if we ought not to be afraid to discuss it among
ourselves--without gloves--though with closed doors, if necessary.”

“I’m quite of your opinion,” Miss Van Vluyck came briskly to her
support; “on condition, that is, that all grossness of language is
avoided.”

“Oh, I’m sure we shall understand without that,” Mrs. Leveret tittered;
and Laura Glyde added significantly: “I fancy we can read between the
lines,” while Mrs. Ballinger rose to assure herself that the doors were
really closed.

Mrs. Plinth had not yet given her adhesion. “I hardly see,” she
began, “what benefit is to be derived from investigating such peculiar
customs--”

But Mrs. Ballinger’s patience had reached the extreme limit of tension.
“This at least,” she returned; “that we shall not be placed again in the
humiliating position of finding ourselves less up on our own subjects
than Fanny Roby!”

Even to Mrs. Plinth this argument was conclusive. She peered furtively
about the room and lowered her commanding tones to ask: “Have you got a
copy?”

“A--a copy?” stammered Mrs. Ballinger. She was aware that the other
members were looking at her expectantly, and that this answer was
inadequate, so she supported it by asking another question. “A copy of
what?”

Her companions bent their expectant gaze on Mrs. Plinth, who, in turn,
appeared less sure of herself than usual. “Why, of--of--the book,” she
explained.

“What book?” snapped Miss Van Vluyck, almost as sharply as Osric Dane.

Mrs. Ballinger looked at Laura Glyde, whose eyes were interrogatively
fixed on Mrs. Leveret. The fact of being deferred to was so new to
the latter that it filled her with an insane temerity. “Why, Xingu, of
course!” she exclaimed.

A profound silence followed this direct challenge to the resources
of Mrs. Ballinger’s library, and the latter, after glancing nervously
toward the Books of the Day, returned in a deprecating voice: “It’s not
a thing one cares to leave about.”

“I should think NOT!” exclaimed Mrs. Plinth.

“It IS a book, then?” said Miss Van Vluyck.

This again threw the company into disarray, and Mrs. Ballinger, with an
impatient sigh, rejoined: “Why--there IS a book--naturally...”

“Then why did Miss Glyde call it a religion?”

Laura Glyde started up. “A religion? I never--”

“Yes, you did,” Miss Van Vluyck insisted; “you spoke of rites; and Mrs.
Plinth said it was a custom.”

Miss Glyde was evidently making a desperate effort to reinforce her
statement; but accuracy of detail was not her strongest point. At length
she began in a deep murmur: “Surely they used to do something of the
kind at the Eleusinian mysteries--”

“Oh--” said Miss Van Vluyck, on the verge of disapproval; and Mrs.
Plinth protested: “I understood there was to be no indelicacy!”

Mrs. Ballinger could not control her irritation. “Really, it is too
bad that we should not be able to talk the matter over quietly among
ourselves. Personally, I think that if one goes into Xingu at all--”

“Oh, so do I!” cried Miss Glyde.

“And I don’t see how one can avoid doing so, if one wishes to keep up
with the Thought of the Day--”

Mrs. Leveret uttered an exclamation of relief. “There--that’s it!” she
interposed.

“What’s it?” the President curtly took her up.

“Why--it’s a--a Thought: I mean a philosophy.”

This seemed to bring a certain relief to Mrs. Ballinger and Laura Glyde,
but Miss Van Vluyck said dogmatically: “Excuse me if I tell you that
you’re all mistaken. Xingu happens to be a language.”

“A language!” the Lunch Club cried.

“Certainly. Don’t you remember Fanny Roby’s saying that there were
several branches, and that some were hard to trace? What could that
apply to but dialects?”

Mrs. Ballinger could no longer restrain a contemptuous laugh. “Really,
if the Lunch Club has reached such a pass that it has to go to Fanny
Roby for instruction on a subject like Xingu, it had almost better cease
to exist!”

“It’s really her fault for not being clearer,” Laura Glyde put in.

“Oh, clearness and Fanny Roby!” Mrs. Ballinger shrugged. “I daresay we
shall find she was mistaken on almost every point.”

“Why not look it up?” said Mrs. Plinth.

As a rule this recurrent suggestion of Mrs. Plinth’s was ignored in the
heat of discussion, and only resorted to afterward in the privacy of
each member’s home. But on the present occasion the desire to ascribe
their own confusion of thought to the vague and contradictory nature of
Mrs. Roby’s statements caused the members of the Lunch Club to utter a
collective demand for a book of reference.

At this point the production of her treasured volume gave Mrs. Leveret,
for a moment, the unusual experience of occupying the centre front; but
she was not able to hold it long, for Appropriate Allusions contained no
mention of Xingu.

“Oh, that’s not the kind of thing we want!” exclaimed Miss Van Vluyck.
She cast a disparaging glance over Mrs. Ballinger’s assortment of
literature, and added impatiently: “Haven’t you any useful books?”

“Of course I have,” replied Mrs. Ballinger indignantly; “but I keep them
in my husband’s dressing-room.”

From this region, after some difficulty and delay, the parlour-maid
produced the W-Z volume of an Encyclopaedia and, in deference to the
fact that the demand for it had come from Miss Van Vluyck, laid the
ponderous tome before her.

There was a moment of painful suspense while Miss Van Vluyck rubbed her
spectacles, adjusted them, and turned to Z; and a murmur of surprise
when she said: “It isn’t here.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Plinth, “it’s not fit to be put in a book of
reference.”

“Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Ballinger. “Try X.”

Miss Van Vluyck turned back through the volume, peering short-sightedly
up and down the pages, till she came to a stop and remained motionless,
like a dog on a point.

“Well, have you found it?” Mrs. Ballinger enquired, after a considerable
delay.

“Yes. I’ve found it,” said Miss Van Vluyck in a queer voice.

Mrs. Plinth hastily interposed: “I beg you won’t read it aloud if
there’s anything offensive.”

Miss Van Vluyck, without answering, continued her silent scrutiny.

“Well, what IS it?” exclaimed Laura Glyde excitedly.

“DO tell us!” urged Mrs. Leveret, feeling that she would have something
awful to tell her sister.

Miss Van Vluyck pushed the volume aside and turned slowly toward the
expectant group.

“It’s a river.”

“A RIVER?”

“Yes: in Brazil. Isn’t that where she’s been living?”

“Who? Fanny Roby? Oh, but you must be mistaken. You’ve been reading the
wrong thing,” Mrs. Ballinger exclaimed, leaning over her to seize the
volume.

“It’s the only XINGU in the Encyclopaedia; and she HAS been living in
Brazil,” Miss Van Vluyck persisted.

“Yes: her brother has a consulship there,” Mrs. Leveret eagerly
interposed.

“But it’s too ridiculous! I--we--why we ALL remember studying Xingu last
year--or the year before last,” Mrs. Ballinger stammered.

“I thought I did when YOU said so,” Laura Glyde avowed.

“I said so?” cried Mrs. Ballinger.

“Yes. You said it had crowded everything else out of your mind.”

“Well, YOU said it had changed your whole life!”

“For that matter, Miss Van Vluyck said she had never grudged the time
she’d given it.”

Mrs. Plinth interposed: “I made it clear that I knew nothing whatever of
the original.”

Mrs. Ballinger broke off the dispute with a groan. “Oh, what does it
all matter if she’s been making fools of us? I believe Miss Van Vluyck’s
right--she was talking of the river all the while!”

“How could she? It’s too preposterous,” Miss Glyde exclaimed.

“Listen.” Miss Van Vluyck had repossessed herself of the Encyclopaedia,
and restored her spectacles to a nose reddened by excitement. “‘The
Xingu, one of the principal rivers of Brazil, rises on the plateau of
Mato Grosso, and flows in a northerly direction for a length of no less
than one thousand one hundred and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon
near the mouth of the latter river. The upper course of the Xingu is
auriferous and fed by numerous branches. Its source was first discovered
in 1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult and
dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes still in the
Stone Age of culture.’”

The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied silence
from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally. “She certainly DID speak
of its having branches.”

The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity. “And of
its great length,” gasped Mrs. Ballinger.

“She said it was awfully deep, and you couldn’t skip--you just had to
wade through,” Miss Glyde subjoined.

The idea worked its way more slowly through Mrs. Plinth’s compact
resistances. “How could there be anything improper about a river?” she
inquired.

“Improper?”

“Why, what she said about the source--that it was corrupt?”

“Not corrupt, but hard to get at,” Laura Glyde corrected. “Some
one who’d been there had told her so. I daresay it was the explorer
himself--doesn’t it say the expedition was dangerous?”

“‘Difficult and dangerous,’” read Miss Van Vluyck.

Mrs. Ballinger pressed her hands to her throbbing temples. “There’s
nothing she said that wouldn’t apply to a river--to this river!” She
swung about excitedly to the other members. “Why, do you remember her
telling us that she hadn’t read ‘The Supreme Instant’ because she’d
taken it on a boating party while she was staying with her brother,
and some one had ‘shied’ it overboard--‘shied’ of course was her own
expression?”

The ladies breathlessly signified that the expression had not escaped
them.

“Well--and then didn’t she tell Osric Dane that one of her books was
simply saturated with Xingu? Of course it was, if some of Mrs. Roby’s
rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!”

This surprising reconstruction of the scene in which they had just
participated left the members of the Lunch Club inarticulate. At length
Mrs. Plinth, after visibly labouring with the problem, said in a heavy
tone: “Osric Dane was taken in too.”

Mrs. Leveret took courage at this. “Perhaps that’s what Mrs. Roby did
it for. She said Osric Dane was a brute, and she may have wanted to give
her a lesson.”

Miss Van Vluyck frowned. “It was hardly worth while to do it at our
expense.”

“At least,” said Miss Glyde with a touch of bitterness, “she succeeded
in interesting her, which was more than we did.”

“What chance had we?” rejoined Mrs. Ballinger. “Mrs. Roby monopolised
her from the first. And THAT, I’ve no doubt, was her purpose--to give
Osric Dane a false impression of her own standing in the Club. She would
hesitate at nothing to attract attention: we all know how she took in
poor Professor Foreland.”

“She actually makes him give bridge-teas every Thursday,” Mrs. Leveret
piped up.

Laura Glyde struck her hands together. “Why, this is Thursday, and it’s
THERE she’s gone, of course; and taken Osric with her!”

“And they’re shrieking over us at this moment,” said Mrs. Ballinger
between her teeth.

This possibility seemed too preposterous to be admitted. “She would
hardly dare,” said Miss Van Vluyck, “confess the imposture to Osric
Dane.”

“I’m not so sure: I thought I saw her make a sign as she left. If she
hadn’t made a sign, why should Osric Dane have rushed out after her?”

“Well, you know, we’d all been telling her how wonderful Xingu was, and
she said she wanted to find out more about it,” Mrs. Leveret said, with
a tardy impulse of justice to the absent.

This reminder, far from mitigating the wrath of the other members, gave
it a stronger impetus.

“Yes--and that’s exactly what they’re both laughing over now,” said
Laura Glyde ironically.

Mrs. Plinth stood up and gathered her expensive furs about her
monumental form. “I have no wish to criticise,” she said; “but unless
the Lunch Club can protect its members against the recurrence of
such--such unbecoming scenes, I for one--”

“Oh, so do I!” agreed Miss Glyde, rising also.

Miss Van Vluyck closed the Encyclopaedia and proceeded to button herself
into her jacket. “My time is really too valuable--” she began.

“I fancy we are all of one mind,” said Mrs. Ballinger, looking
searchingly at Mrs. Leveret, who looked at the others.

“I always deprecate anything like a scandal--” Mrs. Plinth continued.

“She has been the cause of one to-day!” exclaimed Miss Glyde.

Mrs. Leveret moaned: “I don’t see how she COULD!” and Miss Van Vluyck
said, picking up her note-book: “Some women stop at nothing.”

“--but if,” Mrs. Plinth took up her argument impressively, “anything
of the kind had happened in MY house” (it never would have, her tone
implied), “I should have felt that I owed it to myself either to ask for
Mrs. Roby’s resignation--or to offer mine.”

“Oh, Mrs. Plinth--” gasped the Lunch Club.

“Fortunately for me,” Mrs. Plinth continued with an awful magnanimity,
“the matter was taken out of my hands by our President’s decision that
the right to entertain distinguished guests was a privilege vested in
her office; and I think the other members will agree that, as she was
alone in this opinion, she ought to be alone in deciding on the best way
of effacing its--its really deplorable consequences.”

A deep silence followed this unexpected outbreak of Mrs. Plinth’s
long-stored resentment.

“I don’t see why I should be expected to ask her to resign--” Mrs.
Ballinger at length began; but Laura Glyde turned back to remind her:
“You know she made you say that you’d got on swimmingly in Xingu.”

An ill-timed giggle escaped from Mrs. Leveret, and Mrs. Ballinger
energetically continued “--but you needn’t think for a moment that I’m
afraid to!”

The door of the drawing-room closed on the retreating backs of the
Lunch Club, and the President of that distinguished association, seating
herself at her writing-table, and pushing away a copy of “The Wings
of Death” to make room for her elbow, drew forth a sheet of the club’s
note-paper, on which she began to write: “My dear Mrs. Roby--”


The End of Xingu





THE VERDICT

June 1908


I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius--though a good
fellow enough--so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the
height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow,
and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather
thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)

“The height of his glory”--that was what the women called it. I can hear
Mrs. Gideon Thwing--his last Chicago sitter--deploring his unaccountable
abdication. “Of course it’s going to send the value of my picture ‘way
up; but I don’t think of that, Mr. Rickham--the loss to Arrt is all I
think of.” The word, on Mrs. Thwing’s lips, multiplied its RS as though
they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And it was not only
the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the
last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn’s “Moon-dancers” to
say, with tears in her eyes: “We shall not look upon its like again”?

Well!--even through the prism of Hermia’s tears I felt able to face the
fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made him--it was
fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer regrets
were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional jealousy?
Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by little
Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the Burlington a
very handsome “obituary” on Jack--one of those showy articles stocked
with random technicalities that I have heard (I won’t say by whom)
compared to Gisburn’s painting. And so--his resolve being apparently
irrevocable--the discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had
predicted, the price of “Gisburns” went up.

It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few weeks’
idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why Gisburn
had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was a tempting
problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy--his fair sitters
had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn had “dragged him
down.” For Mrs. Gisburn--as such--had not existed till nearly a year
after Jack’s resolve had been taken. It might be that he had married
her--since he liked his ease--because he didn’t want to go on painting;
but it would have been hard to prove that he had given up his painting
because he had married her.

Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss
Croft contended, failed to “lift him up”--she had not led him back to
the easel. To put the brush into his hand again--what a vocation for
a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it--and I felt it
might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely academic
speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught a glimpse
of Jack’s balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself borne
thither the next day.

I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs. Gisburn’s
welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I claimed it
frequently. It was not that my hostess was “interesting”: on that point
I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just
because she was NOT interesting--if I may be pardoned the bull--that I
found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting
women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house
of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect
the “deadening atmosphere of mediocrity” (I quote Miss Croft) was having
on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately
perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a
delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who
scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack’s elegant disdain of
his wife’s big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect
good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the
latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was
buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a
discrimination that bespoke the amplest resources.

“Money’s only excuse is to put beauty into circulation,” was one of
the axioms he laid down across the Sèvres and silver of an exquisitely
appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over
from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my
enlightenment: “Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every form of beauty.”

Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things of
him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me now
was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen him, so
often, basking under similar tributes--was it the conjugal note that
robbed them of their savour? No--for, oddly enough, it became apparent
that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn--fond enough not to see her absurdity.
It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing under--his own attitude
as an object for garlands and incense.

“My dear, since I’ve chucked painting people don’t say that stuff about
me--they say it about Victor Grindle,” was his only protest, as he rose
from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in
fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself, one might put it,
had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to have formed
himself at my friend’s feet, and I wondered if a tinge of jealousy
underlay the latter’s mysterious abdication. But no--for it was not
till after that event that the rose Dubarry drawing-rooms had begun to
display their “Grindles.”

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar to
her spaniel in the dining-room.

“Why HAS he chucked painting?” I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

“Oh, he doesn’t HAVE to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself,”
 she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its FAMILLE-VERTE
vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and its
eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.

“Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven’t seen a single one in the
house.”

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn’s open countenance.
“It’s his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they’re not fit to have
about; he’s sent them all away except one--my portrait--and that I have
to keep upstairs.”

His ridiculous modesty--Jack’s modesty about his pictures? My curiosity
was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my hostess: “I
must really see your portrait, you know.”

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband,
lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian
deerhound’s head between his knees.

“Well, come while he’s not looking,” she said, with a laugh that tried
to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble Emperors
of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs poised among
flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate and
distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases, in the
inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame called up all
Gisburn’s past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a JARDINIÈRE
full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and said: “If you stand
here you can just manage to see it. I had it over the mantel-piece, but
he wouldn’t let it stay.”

Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack’s I
had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place
of honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose Dubarry
drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light
through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became the
picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, all
the characteristic qualities came out--all the hesitations disguised
as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by which, with such
consummate skill, he managed to divert attention from the real business
of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs. Gisburn,
presenting a neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were, so
inevitably the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an
unusual degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture
was one of Jack’s “strongest,” as his admirers would have put it--it
represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of
veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the
circus-clown’s ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at
every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted “strongly” because
she was tired of being painted “sweetly”--and yet not to lose an atom of
the sweetness.

“It’s the last he painted, you know,” Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable
pride. “The last but one,” she corrected herself--“but the other doesn’t
count, because he destroyed it.”

“Destroyed it?” I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a
footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.

As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat, the
thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead, his
lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of a
self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same
quality as his pictures--the quality of looking cleverer than he was.

His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past her
to the portrait.

“Mr. Rickham wanted to see it,” she began, as if excusing herself. He
shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

“Oh, Rickham found me out long ago,” he said lightly; then, passing his
arm through mine: “Come and see the rest of the house.”

He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bath-rooms,
the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-presses--all the
complex simplifications of the millionaire’s domestic economy. And
whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out
his chest a little: “Yes, I really don’t see how people manage to live
without that.”

Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he was,
through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been through, and in
spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming, so disarming, that one
longed to cry out: “Be dissatisfied with your leisure!” as once one had
longed to say: “Be dissatisfied with your work!”

But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected check.

“This is my own lair,” he said, leading me into a dark plain room at
the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no
“effects”; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in
a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of ever having been used as a
studio.

The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack’s break with
his old life.

“Don’t you ever dabble with paint any more?” I asked, still looking
about for a trace of such activity.

“Never,” he said briefly.

“Or water-colour--or etching?”

His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under their
handsome sunburn.

“Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I’d never touched a
brush.”

And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything else.

I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery; and
as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece--the
only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.

“Oh, by Jove!” I said.

It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the rain
under a wall.

“By Jove--a Stroud!” I cried.

He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little
quickly.

“What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting foundations.
You lucky chap, where did you get it?”

He answered slowly: “Mrs. Stroud gave it to me.”

“Ah--I didn’t know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an inflexible
hermit.”

“I didn’t--till after.... She sent for me to paint him when he was
dead.”

“When he was dead? You?”

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise,
for he answered with a deprecating laugh: “Yes--she’s an awful
simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by
a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way
of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a purblind public. And at
the moment I was THE fashionable painter.”

“Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was THAT his history?”

“That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or thought
she did. But she couldn’t bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with
her. She couldn’t bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could
always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She’s just a
fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever
knew.”

“You ever knew? But you just said--”

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

“Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was dead.”

I dropped my voice instinctively. “When she sent for you?”

“Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and by
me!”

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch
of the donkey. “There were days when I couldn’t look at that
thing--couldn’t face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it’s cured me--cured me. That’s the reason why I don’t dabble any more,
my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason.”

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a
serious desire to understand him better.

“I wish you’d tell me how it happened,” I said.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a
cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.

“I’d rather like to tell you--because I’ve always suspected you of
loathing my work.”

I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-humoured
shrug.

“Oh, I didn’t care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it’s an
added tie between us!”

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. “There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the
cigars you like.”

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the room,
stopping now and then beneath the picture.

“How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn’t take
much longer to happen.... I can remember now how surprised and pleased
I was when I got Mrs. Stroud’s note. Of course, deep down, I had always
FELT there was no one like him--only I had gone with the stream, echoed
the usual platitudes about him, till I half got to think he was a
failure, one of the kind that are left behind. By Jove, and he WAS left
behind--because he had come to stay! The rest of us had to let ourselves
be swept along or go under, but he was high above the current--on
everlasting foundations, as you say.

“Well, I went off to the house in my most egregious mood--rather moved,
Lord forgive me, at the pathos of poor Stroud’s career of failure being
crowned by the glory of my painting him! Of course I meant to do the
picture for nothing--I told Mrs. Stroud so when she began to stammer
something about her poverty. I remember getting off a prodigious phrase
about the honour being MINE--oh, I was princely, my dear Rickham! I was
posing to myself like one of my own sitters.

“Then I was taken up and left alone with him. I had sent all my traps in
advance, and I had only to set up the easel and get to work. He had been
dead only twenty-four hours, and he died suddenly, of heart disease,
so that there had been no preliminary work of destruction--his face
was clear and untouched. I had met him once or twice, years before, and
thought him insignificant and dingy. Now I saw that he was superb.

“I was glad at first, with a merely aesthetic satisfaction: glad to have
my hand on such a ‘subject.’ Then his strange life-likeness began
to affect me queerly--as I blocked the head in I felt as if he were
watching me do it. The sensation was followed by the thought: if he WERE
watching me, what would he say to my way of working? My strokes began to
go a little wild--I felt nervous and uncertain.

“Once, when I looked up, I seemed to see a smile behind his close
grayish beard--as if he had the secret, and were amusing himself by
holding it back from me. That exasperated me still more. The secret?
Why, I had a secret worth twenty of his! I dashed at the canvas
furiously, and tried some of my bravura tricks. But they failed me,
they crumbled. I saw that he wasn’t watching the showy bits--I couldn’t
distract his attention; he just kept his eyes on the hard passages
between. Those were the ones I had always shirked, or covered up with
some lying paint. And how he saw through my lies!

“I looked up again, and caught sight of that sketch of the donkey
hanging on the wall near his bed. His wife told me afterward it was the
last thing he had done--just a note taken with a shaking hand, when he
was down in Devonshire recovering from a previous heart attack. Just
a note! But it tells his whole history. There are years of patient
scornful persistence in every line. A man who had swum with the current
could never have learned that mighty up-stream stroke....

“I turned back to my work, and went on groping and muddling; then I
looked at the donkey again. I saw that, when Stroud laid in the first
stroke, he knew just what the end would be. He had possessed his
subject, absorbed it, recreated it. When had I done that with any of my
things? They hadn’t been born of me--I had just adopted them....

“Hang it, Rickham, with that face watching me I couldn’t do another
stroke. The plain truth was, I didn’t know where to put it--I HAD NEVER
KNOWN. Only, with my sitters and my public, a showy splash of colour
covered up the fact--I just threw paint into their faces.... Well, paint
was the one medium those dead eyes could see through--see straight to
the tottering foundations underneath. Don’t you know how, in talking
a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one
wants to but what one can? Well--that was the way I painted; and as he
lay there and watched me, the thing they called my ‘technique’ collapsed
like a house of cards. He didn’t sneer, you understand, poor Stroud--he
just lay there quietly watching, and on his lips, through the gray
beard, I seemed to hear the question: ‘Are you sure you know where
you’re coming out?’

“If I could have painted that face, with that question on it, I should
have done a great thing. The next greatest thing was to see that I
couldn’t--and that grace was given me. But, oh, at that minute, Rickham,
was there anything on earth I wouldn’t have given to have Stroud alive
before me, and to hear him say: ‘It’s not too late--I’ll show you how’?

“It WAS too late--it would have been, even if he’d been alive. I packed
up my traps, and went down and told Mrs. Stroud. Of course I didn’t
tell her THAT--it would have been Greek to her. I simply said I couldn’t
paint him, that I was too moved. She rather liked the idea--she’s so
romantic! It was that that made her give me the donkey. But she was
terribly upset at not getting the portrait--she did so want him ‘done’
by some one showy! At first I was afraid she wouldn’t let me off--and at
my wits’ end I suggested Grindle. Yes, it was I who started Grindle: I
told Mrs. Stroud he was the ‘coming’ man, and she told somebody else,
and so it got to be true.... And he painted Stroud without wincing; and
she hung the picture among her husband’s things....”

He flung himself down in the arm-chair near mine, laid back his head,
and clasping his arms beneath it, looked up at the picture above the
chimney-piece.

“I like to fancy that Stroud himself would have given it to me, if he’d
been able to say what he thought that day.”

And, in answer to a question I put half-mechanically--“Begin again?”
 he flashed out. “When the one thing that brings me anywhere near him is
that I knew enough to leave off?”

He stood up and laid his hand on my shoulder with a laugh. “Only the
irony of it is that I AM still painting--since Grindle’s doing it
for me! The Strouds stand alone, and happen once--but there’s no
exterminating our kind of art.”


The End of The Verdict





THE RECKONING

August, 1902




I


“The marriage law of the new dispensation will be: THOU SHALT NOT BE
UNFAITHFUL--TO THYSELF.”

A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of
cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his
improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies.
Westall’s informal talks on “The New Ethics” had drawn about him an
eager following of the mentally unemployed--those who, as he had once
phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The talks
had begun by accident. Westall’s ideas were known to be “advanced,” but
hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He
had been, in his wife’s opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not
to let his personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late,
however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down
the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the
relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few
admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner opinions a
larger circulation by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van
Sideren studio.

The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on
the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren’s pictures were chiefly
valuable as accessories to the MISE EN SCÈNE which differentiated his
wife’s “afternoons” from the blighting functions held in long New York
drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda
instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making
the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel
create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and
lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint,
she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some fresh
talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the “artistic” impression. It
was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him,
somewhat to his wife’s surprise, into a flattered participation in her
fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the
audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage
immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted
purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the
conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.

Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage;
she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early
days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to
proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax
him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions
for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the
first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her
disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly
account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her impulses
to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that she did not
care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In
this connection, she was beginning to think that almost every one was
vulgar; certainly there were few to whom she would have cared to intrust
the defence of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was precisely at this
point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had chosen to
descend from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking his convictions
at the street-corner!

It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focussed
upon herself Mrs. Westall’s wandering resentment. In the first place,
the girl had no business to be there. It was “horrid”--Mrs. Westall
found herself slipping back into the old feminine vocabulary--simply
“horrid” to think of a young girl’s being allowed to listen to such
talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and sipped an occasional
cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency which
made her appear the victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents’
vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something
ought to be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl’s mother. And
just then Una glided up.

“Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!” Una fixed her with large
limpid eyes. “You believe it all, I suppose?” she asked with seraphic
gravity.

“All--what, my dear child?”

The girl shone on her. “About the higher life--the freer expansion of
the individual--the law of fidelity to one’s self,” she glibly recited.

Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.

“My dear Una,” she said, “you don’t in the least understand what it’s
all about!”

Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. “Don’t YOU,
then?” she murmured.

Mrs. Westall laughed. “Not always--or altogether! But I should like some
tea, please.”

Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed. As
Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully. It was
not such a girlish face, after all--definite lines were forming under
the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty,
and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock of ideas she would
have as her dower! If THEY were to be a part of the modern girl’s
trousseau--

Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one
else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she
felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. Concluding
suddenly that the room was stifling and Una’s tea too sweet, she set
down her cup, and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes had long
been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but only,
as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger
flight. She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which
Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van Sideren
attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment later, had
overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl’s side. She bent
forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the
depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him
to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite.
Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.


On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his wife
by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. “Did I open their eyes a bit?
Did I tell them what you wanted me to?” he asked gaily.

Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. “What I wanted--?”

“Why, haven’t you--all this time?” She caught the honest wonder of his
tone. “I somehow fancied you’d rather blamed me for not talking more
openly--before-- You’ve made me feel, at times, that I was sacrificing
principles to expediency.”

She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: “What made
you decide not to--any longer?”

She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. “Why--the wish to
please you!” he answered, almost too simply.

“I wish you would not go on, then,” she said abruptly.

He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.

“Not go on--?”

“Call a hansom, please. I’m tired,” broke from her with a sudden rush of
physical weariness.

Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally
hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once or
twice that she looked pale--she mustn’t come to another Saturday. She
felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence of his
concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a
conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her
hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let
them fall. It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!

That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the subject
of his talk. He combined a man’s dislike of uncomfortable questions
with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew that if he
returned to the subject he must have some special reason for doing so.

“You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put
the case badly?”

“No--you put it very well.”

“Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go
on with it?”

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening
her sense of helplessness.

“I don’t think I care to hear such things discussed in public.”

“I don’t understand you,” he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She
was not sure that she understood herself.

“Won’t you explain?” he said with a tinge of impatience. Her eyes
wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the scene of so
many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the quiet-colored
walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers scattered here and
there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sèvres, recalled, she hardly
knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of her first marriage had
been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of
a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in “statuary
marble” between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It was a
room with which she had never been able to establish any closer relation
than that between a traveller and a railway station; and now, as
she looked about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest
affinities--the room for which she had left that other room--she was
startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints,
the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a
superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper significances
of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

“I don’t know that I can explain,” she faltered.

He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth.
The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face, which had
a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the surface-refinement of its
setting.

“Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?” he asked.

“In our ideas--?”

“The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
stand for.” He paused a moment. “The ideas on which our marriage was
founded.”

The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure now
that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
often had either of them stopped to consider the ideas on which it was
founded? How often does a man dig about the basement of his house to
examine its foundation? The foundation is there, of course--the house
rests on it--but one lives abovestairs and not in the cellar. It
was she, indeed, who in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the
situation now and then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified
her course, on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the
religion of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel
the need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage as
frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the primitive needs
of the heart, and needed no special sanction to explain or justify it.

“Of course I still believe in our ideas!” she exclaimed.

“Then I repeat that I don’t understand. It was a part of your theory
that the greatest possible publicity should be given to our view of
marriage. Have you changed your mind in that respect?”

She hesitated. “It depends on circumstances--on the public one is
addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about them don’t
care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They are attracted simply
by its novelty.”

“And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met, and
learned the truth from each other.”

“That was different.”

“In what way?”

“I was not a young girl, to begin with. It is perfectly unfitting that
young girls should be present at--at such times--should hear such things
discussed--”

“I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs that such
things never ARE discussed before young girls; but that is beside
the point, for I don’t remember seeing any young girl in my audience
to-day--”

“Except Una Van Sideren!”

He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.

“Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--”

“Why naturally?”

“The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with her
governess?”

“If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in my
house!”

Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile. “I fancy
Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of herself.”

“No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it’s too late.”

“And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
self-defence?”

“What do you call the surest means of self-defence?”

“Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to the
marriage tie.”

She made an impatient gesture. “How should you like to marry that kind
of a girl?”

“Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects.”

She took up the argument at another point.

“You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect young
girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--” She broke
off, wondering why she had spoken.

Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the beginning
of their discussion. “What you tell me is immensely flattering to my
oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its effect. I can assure you
that Miss Van Sideren doesn’t have to have her thinking done for her.
She’s quite capable of doing it herself.”

“You seem very familiar with her mental processes!” flashed unguardedly
from his wife.

He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.

“I should like to be,” he answered. “She interests me.”




II


If there be a distinction in being misunderstood, it was one denied to
Julia Westall when she left her first husband. Every one was ready to
excuse and even to defend her. The world she adorned agreed that John
Arment was “impossible,” and hostesses gave a sigh of relief at the
thought that it would no longer be necessary to ask him to dine.

There had been no scandal connected with the divorce: neither side
had accused the other of the offence euphemistically described as
“statutory.” The Arments had indeed been obliged to transfer their
allegiance to a State which recognized desertion as a cause for divorce,
and construed the term so liberally that the seeds of desertion were
shown to exist in every union. Even Mrs. Arment’s second marriage did
not make traditional morality stir in its sleep. It was known that she
had not met her second husband till after she had parted from the first,
and she had, moreover, replaced a rich man by a poor one. Though Clement
Westall was acknowledged to be a rising lawyer, it was generally felt
that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly as his reputation. The
Westalls would probably always have to live quietly and go out to
dinner in cabs. Could there be better evidence of Mrs. Arment’s complete
disinterestedness?

If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was somewhat
cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the matter, both
explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment was impossible. The
only difference was that, to his wife, his impossibility was something
deeper than a social disqualification. She had once said, in ironical
defence of her marriage, that it had at least preserved her from
the necessity of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not then
realized at what cost the immunity was purchased. John Arment was
impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact that he
made it impossible for those about him to be other than himself. By
an unconscious process of elimination he had excluded from the world
everything of which he did not feel a personal need: had become, as it
were, a climate in which only his own requirements survived. This might
seem to imply a deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing deliberate
about Arment. He was as instinctive as an animal or a child. It was this
childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment unsettled
his wife’s estimate of him. Was it possible that he was simply
undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than is usual, the
laborious process of growing up? He had the kind of sporadic shrewdness
which causes it to be said of a dull man that he is “no fool”; and it
was this quality that his wife found most trying. Even to the naturalist
it is annoying to have his deductions disturbed by some unforeseen
aberrancy of form or function; and how much more so to the wife whose
estimate of herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her
husband!

Arment’s shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent intellectual
power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of feeling, of suffering,
perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on which Julia’s sensibilities
naturally declined to linger. She so fully understood her own
reasons for leaving him that she disliked to think they were not as
comprehensible to her husband. She was haunted, in her analytic moments,
by the look of perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
acquiesced to her explanations.

These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been too
concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had been
unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as though it
had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than flesh, and Julia was
wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her husband’s personality seemed
to be closing gradually in on her, obscuring the sky and cutting off
the air, till she felt herself shut up among the decaying bodies of
her starved hopes. A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old
conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair.
If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in
ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature. She, for one,
would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which she had been a
victim: the pretence that a man and a woman, forced into the narrowest
of personal relations, must remain there till the end, though they
may have outgrown the span of each other’s natures as the mature tree
outgrows the iron brace about the sapling.

It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had met
Clement Westall. She had seen at once that he was “interested,” and had
fought off the discovery, dreading any influence that should draw her
back into the bondage of conventional relations. To ward off the peril
she had, with an almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to
him. To her surprise, she found that he shared them. She was attracted
by the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted that
he did not believe in marriage. Her worst audacities did not seem to
surprise him: he had thought out all that she had felt, and they had
reached the same conclusion. People grew at varying rates, and the yoke
that was an easy fit for the one might soon become galling to the other.
That was what divorce was for: the readjustment of personal relations.
As soon as their necessarily transitive nature was recognized they would
gain in dignity as well as in harmony. There would be no farther need
of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual sacrifice of
personal delicacy and moral pride, by means of which imperfect marriages
were now held together. Each partner to the contract would be on his
mettle, forced to live up to the highest standard of self-development,
on pain of losing the other’s respect and affection. The low nature
could no longer drag the higher down, but must struggle to rise, or
remain alone on its inferior level. The only necessary condition to a
harmonious marriage was a frank recognition of this truth, and a solemn
agreement between the contracting parties to keep faith with themselves,
and not to live together for a moment after complete accord had ceased
to exist between them. The new adultery was unfaithfulness to self.

It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding that
they had married. The ceremony was an unimportant concession to social
prejudice: now that the door of divorce stood open, no marriage need
be an imprisonment, and the contract therefore no longer involved any
diminution of self-respect. The nature of their attachment placed
them so far beyond the reach of such contingencies that it was easy to
discuss them with an open mind; and Julia’s sense of security made her
dwell with a tender insistence on Westall’s promise to claim his release
when he should cease to love her. The exchange of these vows seemed
to make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the
forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had somehow
achieved beatitude without martyrdom.

This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been her
theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously, insidiously,
that her ten years of happiness with Westall had developed another
conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to the old instinct of
passionate dependency and possessorship that now made her blood revolt
at the mere hint of change. Change? Renewal? Was that what they
had called it, in their foolish jargon? Destruction, extermination
rather--this rending of a myriad fibres interwoven with another’s being!
Another? But he was not other! He and she were one, one in the mystic
sense which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law was not
for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery of
union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no bearing on
her own case.... She sent for the doctor and told him she was sure she
needed a nerve tonic.

She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a sedative
to her fears. She did not know what she feared; but that made her
anxiety the more pervasive. Her husband had not reverted to the subject
of his Saturday talks. He was unusually kind and considerate, with a
softening of his quick manner, a touch of shyness in his consideration,
that sickened her with new fears. She told herself that it was because
she looked badly--because he knew about the doctor and the nerve
tonic--that he showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to
screen her from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the
way for fresh inferences.

The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday. On Saturday
the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren. Would dear Julia
ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier than usual, as there was to
be some music after his “talk”? Westall was just leaving for his office
when his wife read the note. She opened the drawing-room door and called
him back to deliver the message.

He glanced at the note and tossed it aside. “What a bore! I shall have
to cut my game of racquets. Well, I suppose it can’t be helped. Will you
write and say it’s all right?”

Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back against
which she leaned.

“You mean to go on with these talks?” she asked.

“I--why not?” he returned; and this time it struck her that his surprise
was not quite unfeigned. The discovery helped her to find words.

“You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me--”

“Well?”

“I told you last week that they didn’t please me.”

“Last week? Oh--” He seemed to make an effort of memory. “I thought you
were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next day.”

“It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance--”

“My assurance?”

Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her. She sank into the chair with
a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away from her like
straws down a whirling flood.

“Clement,” she cried, “isn’t it enough for you to know that I hate it?”

He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward her and
sat down. “What is it that you hate?” he asked gently.

She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.

“I can’t bear to have you speak as if--as if--our marriage--were like
the other kind--the wrong kind. When I heard you there, the other
afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people, proclaiming
that husbands and wives had a right to leave each other whenever they
were tired--or had seen some one else--”

Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the carpet.

“You HAVE ceased to take this view, then?” he said as she broke
off. “You no longer believe that husbands and wives ARE justified in
separating--under such conditions?”

“Under such conditions?” she stammered. “Yes--I still believe that--but
how can we judge for others? What can we know of the circumstances--?”

He interrupted her. “I thought it was a fundamental article of our
creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage were not to
interfere with the full assertion of individual liberty.” He paused a
moment. “I thought that was your reason for leaving Arment.”

She flushed to the forehead. It was not like him to give a personal turn
to the argument.

“It was my reason,” she said simply.

“Well, then--why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?”

“I don’t--I don’t--I only say that one can’t judge for others.”

He made an impatient movement. “This is mere hair-splitting. What you
mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose when you needed
it, you now repudiate it.”

“Well,” she exclaimed, flushing again, “what if I do? What does it
matter to us?”

Westall rose from his chair. He was excessively pale, and stood before
his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.

“It matters to me,” he said in a low voice, “because I do NOT repudiate
it.”

“Well--?”

“And because I had intended to invoke it as”--

He paused and drew his breath deeply. She sat silent, almost deafened by
her heart-beats.

--“as a complete justification of the course I am about to take.”

Julia remained motionless. “What course is that?” she asked.

He cleared his throat. “I mean to claim the fulfilment of your promise.”

For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered a
torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her surroundings pressed
upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall, the
hardness of the chair-arms that she grasped, were a separate wound to
each sense.

“My promise--” she faltered.

“Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one or the
other should wish to be released.”

She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position
nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: “You acknowledge
the agreement?”

The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head to it
proudly. “I acknowledge the agreement,” she said.

“And--you don’t mean to repudiate it?”

A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced and
pushed it back.

“No,” she answered slowly, “I don’t mean to repudiate it.”

There was a pause. He remained near the hearth, his elbow resting on the
mantel-shelf. Close to his hand stood a little cup of jade that he had
given her on one of their wedding anniversaries. She wondered vaguely if
he noticed it.

“You intend to leave me, then?” she said at length.

His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.

“To marry some one else?”

Again his eye and hand protested. She rose and stood before him.

“Why should you be afraid to tell me? Is it Una Van Sideren?”

He was silent.

“I wish you good luck,” she said.




III


She looked up, finding herself alone. She did not remember when or how
he had left the room, or how long afterward she had sat there. The fire
still smouldered on the hearth, but the slant of sunlight had left the
wall.

Her first conscious thought was that she had not broken her word, that
she had fulfilled the very letter of their bargain. There had been no
crying out, no vain appeal to the past, no attempt at temporizing or
evasion. She had marched straight up to the guns.

Now that it was over, she sickened to find herself alive. She looked
about her, trying to recover her hold on reality. Her identity seemed to
be slipping from her, as it disappears in a physical swoon. “This is my
room--this is my house,” she heard herself saying. Her room? Her house?
She could almost hear the walls laugh back at her.

She stood up, a dull ache in every bone. The silence of the room
frightened her. She remembered, now, having heard the front door close
a long time ago: the sound suddenly re-echoed through her brain. Her
husband must have left the house, then--her HUSBAND? She no longer knew
in what terms to think: the simplest phrases had a poisoned edge. She
sank back into her chair, overcome by a strange weakness. The clock
struck ten--it was only ten o’clock! Suddenly she remembered that
she had not ordered dinner... or were they dining out that evening?
DINNER--DINING OUT--the old meaningless phraseology pursued her! She
must try to think of herself as she would think of some one else, a some
one dissociated from all the familiar routine of the past, whose wants
and habits must gradually be learned, as one might spy out the ways of a
strange animal...

The clock struck another hour--eleven. She stood up again and walked
to the door: she thought she would go up stairs to her room. HER room?
Again the word derided her. She opened the door, crossed the narrow
hall, and walked up the stairs. As she passed, she noticed Westall’s
sticks and umbrellas: a pair of his gloves lay on the hall table. The
same stair-carpet mounted between the same walls; the same old French
print, in its narrow black frame, faced her on the landing. This visual
continuity was intolerable. Within, a gaping chasm; without, the same
untroubled and familiar surface. She must get away from it before she
could attempt to think. But, once in her room, she sat down on the
lounge, a stupor creeping over her...

Gradually her vision cleared. A great deal had happened in the
interval--a wild marching and countermarching of emotions, arguments,
ideas--a fury of insurgent impulses that fell back spent upon
themselves. She had tried, at first, to rally, to organize these chaotic
forces. There must be help somewhere, if only she could master the inner
tumult. Life could not be broken off short like this, for a whim, a
fancy; the law itself would side with her, would defend her. The law?
What claim had she upon it? She was the prisoner of her own choice: she
had been her own legislator, and she was the predestined victim of
the code she had devised. But this was grotesque, intolerable--a mad
mistake, for which she could not be held accountable! The law she had
despised was still there, might still be invoked... invoked, but to what
end? Could she ask it to chain Westall to her side? SHE had been
allowed to go free when she claimed her freedom--should she show less
magnanimity than she had exacted? Magnanimity? The word lashed her with
its irony--one does not strike an attitude when one is fighting for
life! She would threaten, grovel, cajole... she would yield anything to
keep her hold on happiness. Ah, but the difficulty lay deeper! The law
could not help her--her own apostasy could not help her. She was the
victim of the theories she renounced. It was as though some giant
machine of her own making had caught her up in its wheels and was
grinding her to atoms...

It was afternoon when she found herself out-of-doors. She walked with
an aimless haste, fearing to meet familiar faces. The day was radiant,
metallic: one of those searching American days so calculated to
reveal the shortcomings of our street-cleaning and the excesses of our
architecture. The streets looked bare and hideous; everything stared
and glittered. She called a passing hansom, and gave Mrs. Van Sideren’s
address. She did not know what had led up to the act; but she found
herself suddenly resolved to speak, to cry out a warning. It was too
late to save herself--but the girl might still be told. The hansom
rattled up Fifth Avenue; she sat with her eyes fixed, avoiding
recognition. At the Van Siderens’ door she sprang out and rang the bell.
Action had cleared her brain, and she felt calm and self-possessed. She
knew now exactly what she meant to say.

The ladies were both out... the parlor-maid stood waiting for a card.
Julia, with a vague murmur, turned away from the door and lingered a
moment on the sidewalk. Then she remembered that she had not paid the
cab-driver. She drew a dollar from her purse and handed it to him.
He touched his hat and drove off, leaving her alone in the long empty
street. She wandered away westward, toward strange thoroughfares, where
she was not likely to meet acquaintances. The feeling of aimlessness had
returned. Once she found herself in the afternoon torrent of Broadway,
swept past tawdry shops and flaming theatrical posters, with a
succession of meaningless faces gliding by in the opposite direction...

A feeling of faintness reminded her that she had not eaten since
morning. She turned into a side street of shabby houses, with rows of
ash-barrels behind bent area railings. In a basement window she saw the
sign LADIES’ RESTAURANT: a pie and a dish of doughnuts lay against the
dusty pane like petrified food in an ethnological museum. She entered,
and a young woman with a weak mouth and a brazen eye cleared a table for
her near the window. The table was covered with a red and white cotton
cloth and adorned with a bunch of celery in a thick tumbler and a
salt-cellar full of grayish lumpy salt. Julia ordered tea, and sat a
long time waiting for it. She was glad to be away from the noise and
confusion of the streets. The low-ceilinged room was empty, and two or
three waitresses with thin pert faces lounged in the background staring
at her and whispering together. At last the tea was brought in a
discolored metal teapot. Julia poured a cup and drank it hastily. It was
black and bitter, but it flowed through her veins like an elixir. She
was almost dizzy with exhilaration. Oh, how tired, how unutterably tired
she had been!

She drank a second cup, blacker and bitterer, and now her mind was once
more working clearly. She felt as vigorous, as decisive, as when she had
stood on the Van Siderens’ door-step--but the wish to return there had
subsided. She saw now the futility of such an attempt--the humiliation
to which it might have exposed her... The pity of it was that she did
not know what to do next. The short winter day was fading, and she
realized that she could not remain much longer in the restaurant without
attracting notice. She paid for her tea and went out into the street.
The lamps were alight, and here and there a basement shop cast an
oblong of gas-light across the fissured pavement. In the dusk there was
something sinister about the aspect of the street, and she hastened back
toward Fifth Avenue. She was not used to being out alone at that hour.

At the corner of Fifth Avenue she paused and stood watching the stream
of carriages. At last a policeman caught sight of her and signed to her
that he would take her across. She had not meant to cross the street,
but she obeyed automatically, and presently found herself on the
farther corner. There she paused again for a moment; but she fancied the
policeman was watching her, and this sent her hastening down the nearest
side street... After that she walked a long time, vaguely... Night had
fallen, and now and then, through the windows of a passing carriage, she
caught the expanse of an evening waistcoat or the shimmer of an opera
cloak...

Suddenly she found herself in a familiar street. She stood still a
moment, breathing quickly. She had turned the corner without noticing
whither it led; but now, a few yards ahead of her, she saw the house
in which she had once lived--her first husband’s house. The blinds were
drawn, and only a faint translucence marked the windows and the transom
above the door. As she stood there she heard a step behind her, and a
man walked by in the direction of the house. He walked slowly, with a
heavy middle-aged gait, his head sunk a little between the shoulders,
the red crease of his neck visible above the fur collar of his overcoat.
He crossed the street, went up the steps of the house, drew forth a
latch-key, and let himself in...

There was no one else in sight. Julia leaned for a long time against the
area-rail at the corner, her eyes fixed on the front of the house. The
feeling of physical weariness had returned, but the strong tea still
throbbed in her veins and lit her brain with an unnatural clearness.
Presently she heard another step draw near, and moving quickly away, she
too crossed the street and mounted the steps of the house. The impulse
which had carried her there prolonged itself in a quick pressure of the
electric bell--then she felt suddenly weak and tremulous, and grasped
the balustrade for support. The door opened and a young footman with
a fresh inexperienced face stood on the threshold. Julia knew in an
instant that he would admit her.

“I saw Mr. Arment going in just now,” she said. “Will you ask him to see
me for a moment?”

The footman hesitated. “I think Mr. Arment has gone up to dress for
dinner, madam.”

Julia advanced into the hall. “I am sure he will see me--I will not
detain him long,” she said. She spoke quietly, authoritatively, in the
tone which a good servant does not mistake. The footman had his hand on
the drawing-room door.

“I will tell him, madam. What name, please?”

Julia trembled: she had not thought of that. “Merely say a lady,” she
returned carelessly.

The footman wavered and she fancied herself lost; but at that instant
the door opened from within and John Arment stepped into the hall. He
drew back sharply as he saw her, his florid face turning sallow with
the shock; then the blood poured back to it, swelling the veins on his
temples and reddening the lobes of his thick ears.

It was long since Julia had seen him, and she was startled at the change
in his appearance. He had thickened, coarsened, settled down into
the enclosing flesh. But she noted this insensibly: her one conscious
thought was that, now she was face to face with him, she must not let
him escape till he had heard her. Every pulse in her body throbbed with
the urgency of her message.

She went up to him as he drew back. “I must speak to you,” she said.

Arment hesitated, red and stammering. Julia glanced at the footman, and
her look acted as a warning. The instinctive shrinking from a “scene”
 predominated over every other impulse, and Arment said slowly: “Will you
come this way?”

He followed her into the drawing-room and closed the door. Julia, as she
advanced, was vaguely aware that the room at least was unchanged: time
had not mitigated its horrors. The contadina still lurched from the
chimney-breast, and the Greek slave obstructed the threshold of the
inner room. The place was alive with memories: they started out from
every fold of the yellow satin curtains and glided between the angles of
the rosewood furniture. But while some subordinate agency was carrying
these impressions to her brain, her whole conscious effort was centred
in the act of dominating Arment’s will. The fear that he would refuse
to hear her mounted like fever to her brain. She felt her purpose melt
before it, words and arguments running into each other in the heat of
her longing. For a moment her voice failed her, and she imagined herself
thrust out before she could speak; but as she was struggling for a word,
Arment pushed a chair forward, and said quietly: “You are not well.”

The sound of his voice steadied her. It was neither kind nor unkind--a
voice that suspended judgment, rather, awaiting unforeseen developments.
She supported herself against the back of the chair and drew a deep
breath. “Shall I send for something?” he continued, with a cold
embarrassed politeness.

Julia raised an entreating hand. “No--no--thank you. I am quite well.”

He paused midway toward the bell and turned on her. “Then may I ask--?”

“Yes,” she interrupted him. “I came here because I wanted to see you.
There is something I must tell you.”

Arment continued to scrutinize her. “I am surprised at that,” he said.
“I should have supposed that any communication you may wish to make
could have been made through our lawyers.”

“Our lawyers!” She burst into a little laugh. “I don’t think they could
help me--this time.”

Arment’s face took on a barricaded look. “If there is any question of
help--of course--”

It struck her, whimsically, that she had seen that look when some shabby
devil called with a subscription-book. Perhaps he thought she wanted him
to put his name down for so much in sympathy--or even in money...
The thought made her laugh again. She saw his look change slowly to
perplexity. All his facial changes were slow, and she remembered,
suddenly, how it had once diverted her to shift that lumbering scenery
with a word. For the first time it struck her that she had been cruel.
“There IS a question of help,” she said in a softer key: “you can help
me; but only by listening... I want to tell you something...”

Arment’s resistance was not yielding. “Would it not be easier
to--write?” he suggested.

She shook her head. “There is no time to write... and it won’t take
long.” She raised her head and their eyes met. “My husband has left me,”
 she said.

“Westall--?” he stammered, reddening again.

“Yes. This morning. Just as I left you. Because he was tired of me.”

The words, uttered scarcely above a whisper, seemed to dilate to the
limit of the room. Arment looked toward the door; then his embarrassed
glance returned to Julia.

“I am very sorry,” he said awkwardly.

“Thank you,” she murmured.

“But I don’t see--”

“No--but you will--in a moment. Won’t you listen to me? Please!”
 Instinctively she had shifted her position putting herself between
him and the door. “It happened this morning,” she went on in short
breathless phrases. “I never suspected anything--I thought we
were--perfectly happy... Suddenly he told me he was tired of me... there
is a girl he likes better... He has gone to her...” As she spoke, the
lurking anguish rose upon her, possessing her once more to the exclusion
of every other emotion. Her eyes ached, her throat swelled with it, and
two painful tears burnt a way down her face.

Arment’s constraint was increasing visibly. “This--this is very
unfortunate,” he began. “But I should say the law--”

“The law?” she echoed ironically. “When he asks for his freedom?”

“You are not obliged to give it.”

“You were not obliged to give me mine--but you did.”

He made a protesting gesture.

“You saw that the law couldn’t help you--didn’t you?” she went on.
“That is what I see now. The law represents material rights--it can’t go
beyond. If we don’t recognize an inner law... the obligation that love
creates... being loved as well as loving... there is nothing to
prevent our spreading ruin unhindered... is there?” She raised her head
plaintively, with the look of a bewildered child. “That is what I see
now... what I wanted to tell you. He leaves me because he’s tired... but
I was not tired; and I don’t understand why he is. That’s the dreadful
part of it--the not understanding: I hadn’t realized what it meant.
But I’ve been thinking of it all day, and things have come back to
me--things I hadn’t noticed... when you and I...” She moved closer to
him, and fixed her eyes on his with the gaze that tries to reach beyond
words. “I see now that YOU didn’t understand--did you?”

Their eyes met in a sudden shock of comprehension: a veil seemed to be
lifted between them. Arment’s lip trembled.

“No,” he said, “I didn’t understand.”

She gave a little cry, almost of triumph. “I knew it! I knew it! You
wondered--you tried to tell me--but no words came... You saw your life
falling in ruins... the world slipping from you... and you couldn’t
speak or move!”

She sank down on the chair against which she had been leaning. “Now I
know--now I know,” she repeated.

“I am very sorry for you,” she heard Arment stammer.

She looked up quickly. “That’s not what I came for. I don’t want you to
be sorry. I came to ask you to forgive me... for not understanding that
YOU didn’t understand... That’s all I wanted to say.” She rose with a
vague sense that the end had come, and put out a groping hand toward the
door.

Arment stood motionless. She turned to him with a faint smile.

“You forgive me?”

“There is nothing to forgive--”

“Then will you shake hands for good-by?” She felt his hand in hers: it
was nerveless, reluctant.

“Good-by,” she repeated. “I understand now.”

She opened the door and passed out into the hall. As she did so, Arment
took an impulsive step forward; but just then the footman, who was
evidently alive to his obligations, advanced from the background to let
her out. She heard Arment fall back. The footman threw open the door,
and she found herself outside in the darkness.

The End of The Reckoning





VERSE




BOTTICELLI’S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE.


     WHAT strange presentiment, O Mother, lies
     On thy waste brow and sadly-folded lips,
     Forefeeling the Light’s terrible eclipse
     On Calvary, as if love made thee wise,
     And thou couldst read in those dear infant eyes
     The sorrow that beneath their smiling sleeps,
     And guess what bitter tears a mother weeps
     When the cross darkens her unclouded skies?

     Sad Lady, if some mother, passing thee,
     Should feel a throb of thy foreboding pain,
     And think--“My child at home clings so to me,
     With the same smile... and yet in vain, in vain,
     Since even this Jesus died on Calvary”--
     Say to her then: “He also rose again.”




THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI.


     ILARIA, thou that wert so fair and dear
     That death would fain disown thee, grief made wise
     With prophecy thy husband’s widowed eyes
     And bade him call the master’s art to rear
     Thy perfect image on the sculptured bier,
     With dreaming lids, hands laid in peaceful guise
     Beneath the breast that seems to fall and rise,
     And lips that at love’s call should answer, “Here!”

     First-born of the Renascence, when thy soul
     Cast the sweet robing of the flesh aside,
     Into these lovelier marble limbs it stole,
     Regenerate in art’s sunrise clear and wide
     As saints who, having kept faith’s raiment whole,
     Change it above for garments glorified.




THE SONNET.

     PURE form, that like some chalice of old time
        Contain’st the liquid of the poet’s thought
        Within thy curving hollow, gem-enwrought
        With interwoven traceries of rhyme,
     While o’er thy brim the bubbling fancies climb,
        What thing am I, that undismayed have sought
        To pour my verse with trembling hand untaught
        Into a shape so small yet so sublime?
     Because perfection haunts the hearts of men,
        Because thy sacred chalice gathered up
        The wine of Petrarch, Shakspere, Shelley--then
     Receive these tears of failure as they drop
        (Sole vintage of my life), since I am fain
        To pour them in a consecrated cup.




TWO BACKGROUNDS.


     I. LA VIERGE AU DONATEUR.


     HERE  by the ample river’s argent sweep,
     Bosomed in tilth and vintage to her walls,
     A tower-crowned Cybele in armored sleep
     The city lies, fat plenty in her halls,
     With calm, parochial spires that hold in fee
     The friendly gables clustered at their base,
     And, equipoised o’er tower and market-place,
     The Gothic minster’s winged immensity;
     And in that narrow burgh, with equal mood,
     Two placid hearts, to all life’s good resigned,
     Might, from the altar to the lych-gate, find
     Long years of peace and dreamless plenitude.


     II. MONA LISA.


     Yon strange blue city crowns a scarped steep
     No mortal foot hath bloodlessly essayed;
     Dreams and illusions beacon from its keep,
     But at the gate an Angel bares his blade;
     And tales are told of those who thought to gain
     At dawn its ramparts; but when evening fell
     Far off they saw each fading pinnacle
     Lit with wild lightnings from the heaven of pain;
     Yet there two souls, whom life’s perversities
     Had mocked with want in plenty, tears in mirth,
     Might meet in dreams, ungarmented of earth,
     And drain Joy’s awful chalice to the lees.




EXPERIENCE.


     I.

     LIKE Crusoe with the bootless gold we stand
     Upon the desert verge of death, and say:
     “What shall avail the woes of yesterday
     To buy to-morrow’s wisdom, in the land
     Whose currency is strange unto our hand?
     In life’s small market they have served to pay
     Some late-found rapture, could we but delay
     Till Time hath matched our means to our demand.”

     But otherwise Fate wills it, for, behold,
     Our gathered strength of individual pain,
     When Time’s long alchemy hath made it gold,
     Dies with us--hoarded all these years in vain,
     Since those that might be heir to it the mould
     Renew, and coin themselves new griefs again.


     II.

     O, Death, we come full-handed to thy gate,
     Rich with strange burden of the mingled years,
     Gains and renunciations, mirth and tears,
     And love’s oblivion, and remembering hate,
     Nor know we what compulsion laid such freight
     Upon our souls--and shall our hopes and fears
     Buy nothing of thee, Death?  Behold our wares,
     And sell us the one joy for which we wait.
     Had we lived longer, life had such for sale,
     With the last coin of sorrow purchased cheap,
     But now we stand before thy shadowy pale,
     And all our longings lie within thy keep--
     Death, can it be the years shall naught avail?

     “Not so,” Death answered, “they shall purchase sleep.”




CHARTRES.


     I.

     IMMENSE, august, like some Titanic bloom,
        The mighty choir unfolds its lithic core,
     Petalled with panes of azure, gules and or,
        Splendidly lambent in the Gothic gloom,
     And stamened with keen flamelets that illume
        The pale high-altar.  On the prayer-worn floor,
     By surging worshippers thick-thronged of yore,
        A few brown crones, familiars of the tomb,
     The stranded driftwood of Faith’s ebbing sea--
        For these alone the finials fret the skies,
     The topmost bosses shake their blossoms free,
        While from the triple portals, with grave eyes,
     Tranquil, and fixed upon eternity,
        The cloud of witnesses still testifies.


     II.

     The crimson panes like blood-drops stigmatize
        The western floor.  The aisles are mute and cold.
     A rigid fetich in her robe of gold
        The Virgin of the Pillar, with blank eyes,
     Enthroned beneath her votive canopies,
        Gathers a meagre remnant to her fold.
     The rest is solitude; the church, grown old,
        Stands stark and gray beneath the burning skies.
     Wellnigh again its mighty frame-work grows
        To be a part of nature’s self, withdrawn
     From hot humanity’s impatient woes;
        The floor is ridged like some rude mountain lawn,
     And in the east one giant window shows
        The roseate coldness of an Alp at dawn.




LIFE.


     LIFE, like a marble block, is given to all,
     A blank, inchoate mass of years and days,
     Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays
     Some shape of strength or symmetry to call;
     One shatters it in bits to mend a wall;
     One in a craftier hand the chisel lays,
     And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze,
     Carves it apace in toys fantastical.

     But least is he who, with enchanted eyes
     Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be,
     Muses which god he shall immortalize
     In the proud Parian’s perpetuity,
     Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies
     That the night cometh wherein none shall see.




AN AUTUMN SUNSET


     I

     LEAGUERED in fire
     The wild black promontories of the coast extend
     Their savage silhouettes;
     The sun in universal carnage sets,
     And, halting higher,
     The motionless storm-clouds mass their sullen threats,
     Like an advancing mob in sword-points penned,
     That, balked, yet stands at bay.
     Mid-zenith hangs the fascinated day
     In wind-lustrated hollows crystalline,
     A wan valkyrie whose wide pinions shine
     Across the ensanguined ruins of the fray,
     And in her lifted hand swings high o’erhead,
     Above the waste of war,
     The silver torch-light of the evening star
     Wherewith to search the faces of the dead.


     II

     Lagooned in gold,
     Seem not those jetty promontories rather
     The outposts of some ancient land forlorn,
     Uncomforted of morn,
     Where old oblivions gather,
     The melancholy, unconsoling fold
     Of all things that go utterly to death
     And mix no more, no more
     With life’s perpetually awakening breath?
     Shall Time not ferry me to such a shore,
     Over such sailless seas,
     To walk with hope’s slain importunities
     In miserable marriage?  Nay, shall not
     All things be there forgot,
     Save the sea’s golden barrier and the black
     Closecrouching promontories?
     Dead to all shames, forgotten of all glories,
     Shall I not wander there, a shadow’s shade,
     A spectre self-destroyed,
     So purged of all remembrance and sucked back
     Into the primal void,
     That should we on that shore phantasmal meet
     I should not know the coming of your feet?
The Complete Works of Edith Wharton - Part 8
