Bot-S: The Complete Works of Edith Wharton


THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner’s Sons




I

It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the
shivering young traveller from Boston, who had counted on jumping into
it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing
alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of night-fall
and winter.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung
forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen
silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge
against the same bitter black-and-white landscape. Dark, searching
and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a
bull-fighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts. This
analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had
no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively
temperate air of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the
bleak heights of Northridge. George Faxon said to himself that the place
was uncommonly well-named. It clung to an exposed ledge over the valley
from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it with teeth
of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping against the wooden
sides of the station. Other building there was none: the village lay far
down the road, and thither--since the Weymore sleigh had not come--Faxon
saw himself under the necessity of plodding through several feet of
snow.

He understood well enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten
that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had
been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the
visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those
whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs. Culme had
forgotten him was too crude a way of putting it Similar incidents led
him to think that she had probably told her maid to tell the butler to
telephone the coachman to tell one of the grooms (if no one else needed
him) to drive over to Northridge to fetch the new secretary; but on
a night like this, what groom who respected his rights would fail to
forget the order?

Faxon’s obvious course was to struggle through the drifts to the
village, and there rout out a sleigh to convey him to Weymore; but what
if, on his arrival at Mrs. Culme’s, no one remembered to ask him
what this devotion to duty had cost? That, again, was one of the
contingencies he had expensively learned to look out for, and the
perspicacity so acquired told him it would be cheaper to spend the night
at the Northridge inn, and advise Mrs. Culme of his presence there by
telephone. He had reached this decision, and was about to entrust his
luggage to a vague man with a lantern, when his hopes were raised by the
sound of bells.

Two sleighs were just dashing up to the station, and from the foremost
there sprang a young man muffled in furs.

“Weymore?--No, these are not the Weymore sleighs.”

The voice was that of the youth who had jumped to the platform--a voice
so agreeable that, in spite of the words, it fell consolingly on Faxon’s
ears. At the same moment the wandering station-lantern, casting a
transient light on the speaker, showed his features to be in the
pleasantest harmony with his voice. He was very fair and very
young--hardly in the twenties, Faxon thought--but his face, though full
of a morning freshness, was a trifle too thin and fine-drawn, as though
a vivid spirit contended in him with a strain of physical weakness.
Faxon was perhaps the quicker to notice such delicacies of balance
because his own temperament hung on lightly quivering nerves, which yet,
as he believed, would never quite swing him beyond a normal sensibility.

“You expected a sleigh from Weymore?” the newcomer continued, standing
beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.

Mrs. Culme’s secretary explained his difficulty, and the other brushed
it aside with a contemptuous “Oh, _Mrs. Culme!_” that carried both
speakers a long way toward reciprocal understanding.

“But then you must be--” The youth broke off with a smile of
interrogation.

“The new secretary? Yes. But apparently there are no notes to be
answered this evening.” Faxon’s laugh deepened the sense of solidarity
which had so promptly established itself between the two.

His friend laughed also. “Mrs. Culme,” he explained, “was lunching at my
uncle’s to-day, and she said you were due this evening. But seven hours
is a long time for Mrs. Culme to remember anything.”

“Well,” said Faxon philosophically, “I suppose that’s one of the reasons
why she needs a secretary. And I’ve always the inn at Northridge,” he
concluded.

“Oh, but you haven’t, though! It burned down last week.”

“The deuce it did!” said Faxon; but the humour of the situation struck
him before its inconvenience. His life, for years past, had been mainly
a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing
practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a
small tribute of amusement.

“Oh, well, there’s sure to be somebody in the place who can put me up.”

“No one _you_ could put up with. Besides, Northridge is three miles off,
and our place--in the opposite direction--is a little nearer.”
 Through the darkness, Faxon saw his friend sketch a gesture of
self-introduction. “My name’s Frank Rainer, and I’m staying with my
uncle at Overdale. I’ve driven over to meet two friends of his, who are
due in a few minutes from New York. If you don’t mind waiting till they
arrive I’m sure Overdale can do you better than Northridge. We’re only
down from town for a few days, but the house is always ready for a lot
of people.”

“But your uncle--?” Faxon could only object, with the odd sense, through
his embarrassment, that it would be magically dispelled by his invisible
friend’s next words.

“Oh, my uncle--you’ll see! I answer for _him!_ I daresay you’ve heard of
him--John Lavington?”

John Lavington! There was a certain irony in asking if one had heard of
John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as obscure as that of
Mrs. Culme’s secretary the rumour of John Lavington’s money, of his
pictures, his politics, his charities and his hospitality, was as
difficult to escape as the roar of a cataract in a mountain solitude.
It might almost have been said that the one place in which one would
not have expected to come upon him was in just such a solitude as
now surrounded the speakers--at least in this deepest hour of its
desertedness. But it was just like Lavington’s brilliant ubiquity to put
one in the wrong even there.

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of your uncle.”

“Then you _will_ come, won’t you? We’ve only five minutes to wait.”
 young Rainer urged, in the tone that dispels scruples by ignoring them;
and Faxon found himself accepting the invitation as simply as it was
offered.

A delay in the arrival of the New York train lengthened their five
minutes to fifteen; and as they paced the icy platform Faxon began to
see why it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to accede to
his new acquaintance’s suggestion. It was because Frank Rainer was
one of the privileged beings who simplify human intercourse by the
atmosphere of confidence and good humour they diffuse. He produced this
effect, Faxon noted, by the exercise of no gift but his youth, and of no
art but his sincerity; and these qualities were revealed in a smile of
such sweetness that Faxon felt, as never before, what Nature can achieve
when she deigns to match the face with the mind.

He learned that the young man was the ward, and the only nephew, of John
Lavington, with whom he had made his home since the death of his mother,
the great man’s sister. Mr. Lavington, Rainer said, had been “a regular
brick” to him--“But then he is to every one, you know”--and the young
fellow’s situation seemed in fact to be perfectly in keeping with his
person. Apparently the only shade that had ever rested on him was cast
by the physical weakness which Faxon had already detected. Young Rainer
had been threatened with tuberculosis, and the disease was so far
advanced that, according to the highest authorities, banishment to
Arizona or New Mexico was inevitable. “But luckily my uncle didn’t pack
me off, as most people would have done, without getting another opinion.
Whose? Oh, an awfully clever chap, a young doctor with a lot of new
ideas, who simply laughed at my being sent away, and said I’d do
perfectly well in New York if I didn’t dine out too much, and if I
dashed off occasionally to Northridge for a little fresh air. So it’s
really my uncle’s doing that I’m not in exile--and I feel no end better
since the new chap told me I needn’t bother.” Young Rainer went on to
confess that he was extremely fond of dining out, dancing and similar
distractions; and Faxon, listening to him, was inclined to think that
the physician who had refused to cut him off altogether from these
pleasures was probably a better psychologist than his seniors.

“All the same you ought to be careful, you know.” The sense of
elder-brotherly concern that forced the words from Faxon made him, as he
spoke, slip his arm through Frank Rainer ‘s.

The latter met the movement with a responsive pressure. “Oh, I _am_:
awfully, awfully. And then my uncle has such an eye on me!”

“But if your uncle has such an eye on you, what does he say to your
swallowing knives out here in this Siberian wild?”

Rainer raised his fur collar with a careless gesture. “It’s not that
that does it--the cold’s good for me.”

“And it’s not the dinners and dances? What is it, then?” Faxon
good-humouredly insisted; to which his companion answered with a laugh:
“Well, my uncle says it’s being bored; and I rather think he’s right!”

His laugh ended in a spasm of coughing and a struggle for breath that
made Faxon, still holding his arm, guide him hastily into the shelter of
the fireless waiting-room.

Young Rainer had dropped down on the bench against the wall and pulled
off one of his fur gloves to grope for a handkerchief. He tossed
aside his cap and drew the handkerchief across his forehead, which was
intensely white, and beaded with moisture, though his face retained
a healthy glow. But Faxon’s gaze remained fastened to the hand he had
uncovered: it was so long, so colourless, so wasted, so much older than
the brow he passed it over.

“It’s queer--a healthy face but dying hands,” the secretary mused: he
somehow wished young Rainer had kept on his glove.

The whistle of the express drew the young men to their feet, and the
next moment two heavily-furred gentlemen had descended to the platform
and were breasting the rigour of the night. Frank Rainer introduced them
as Mr. Grisben and Mr. Balch, and Faxon, while their luggage was
being lifted into the second sleigh, discerned them, by the roving
lantern-gleam, to be an elderly greyheaded pair, of the average
prosperous business cut.

They saluted their host’s nephew with friendly familiarity, and Mr.
Grisben, who seemed the spokesman of the two, ended his greeting with a
genial--“and many many more of them, dear boy!” which suggested to Faxon
that their arrival coincided with an anniversary. But he could not press
the enquiry, for the seat allotted him was at the coachman’s side, while
Frank Rainer joined his uncle’s guests inside the sleigh.

A swift flight (behind such horses as one could be sure of John
Lavington’s having) brought them to tall gateposts, an illuminated
lodge, and an avenue on which the snow had been levelled to the
smoothness of marble. At the end of the avenue the long house loomed up,
its principal bulk dark, but one wing sending out a ray of welcome; and
the next moment Faxon was receiving a violent impression of warmth and
light, of hot-house plants, hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak
hall like a stage-setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small
figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly unlike
his rather florid conception of the great John Lavington.

The surprise of the contrast remained with him through his hurried
dressing in the large luxurious bedroom to which he had been shown.
“I don’t see where he comes in,” was the only way he could put it, so
difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington’s public personality
into his host’s contracted frame and manner. Mr. Laving ton, to whom
Faxon’s case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed
him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched
his narrow face, his stiff hand, and the whiff of scent on his evening
handkerchief. “Make yourself at home--at home!” he had repeated, in a
tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform
the feat he urged on his visitor. “Any friend of Frank’s... delighted...
make yourself thoroughly at home!”




II

In spite of the balmy temperature and complicated conveniences of
Faxon’s bedroom, the injunction was not easy to obey. It was wonderful
luck to have found a night’s shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale,
and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place,
for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming.
He couldn’t have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington’s
intense personality--intensely negative, but intense all the same--must,
in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling.
Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry,
more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold,
and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of
perpetually treading other people’s stairs.

“I hope you’re not famished?” Rainer’s slim figure was in the doorway.
“My uncle has a little business to attend to with Mr. Grisben, and we
don’t dine for half an hour. Shall I fetch you, or can you find your way
down? Come straight to the dining-room--the second door on the left of
the long gallery.”

He disappeared, leaving a ray of warmth behind him, and Faxon, relieved,
lit a cigarette and sat down by the fire.

Looking about with less haste, he was struck by a detail that had
escaped him. The room was full of flowers--a mere “bachelor’s room,” in
the wing of a house opened only for a few days, in the dead middle of
a New Hampshire winter! Flowers were everywhere, not in senseless
profusion, but placed with the same conscious art that he had remarked
in the grouping of the blossoming shrubs in the hall. A vase of arums
stood on the writing-table, a cluster of strange-hued carnations on
the stand at his elbow, and from bowls of glass and porcelain clumps of
freesia-bulbs diffused their melting fragrance. The fact implied acres
of glass--but that was the least interesting part of it. The flowers
themselves, their quality, selection and arrangement, attested on
some one’s part--and on whose but John Lavington’s?--a solicitous and
sensitive passion for that particular form of beauty. Well, it simply
made the man, as he had appeared to Faxon, all the harder to understand!

The half-hour elapsed, and Faxon, rejoicing at the prospect of food, set
out to make his way to the dining-room. He had not noticed the direction
he had followed in going to his room, and was puzzled, when he left it,
to find that two staircases, of apparently equal importance, invited
him. He chose the one to his right, and reached, at its foot, a long
gallery such as Rainer had described. The gallery was empty, the doors
down its length were closed; but Rainer had said: “The second to the
left,” and Faxon, after pausing for some chance enlightenment which did
not come, laid his hand on the second knob to the left.

The room he entered was square, with dusky picture-hung walls. In its
centre, about a table lit by veiled lamps, he fancied Mr. Lavington and
his guests to be already seated at dinner; then he perceived that the
table was covered not with viands but with papers, and that he had
blundered into what seemed to be his host’s study. As he paused Frank
Rainer looked up.

“Oh, here’s Mr. Faxon. Why not ask him--?”

Mr. Lavington, from the end of the table, reflected his nephew’s smile
in a glance of impartial benevolence.

“Certainly. Come in, Mr. Faxon. If you won’t think it a liberty--”

Mr. Grisben, who sat opposite his host, turned his head toward the door.
“Of course Mr. Faxon’s an American citizen?”

Frank Rainer laughed. “That’s all right!... Oh, no, not one of your
pin-pointed pens, Uncle Jack! Haven’t you got a quill somewhere?”

Mr. Balch, who spoke slowly and as if reluctantly, in a muffled voice of
which there seemed to be very little left, raised his hand to say: “One
moment: you acknowledge this to be--?”

“My last will and testament?” Rainer’s laugh redoubled. “Well, I won’t
answer for the ‘last.’ It’s the first, anyway.”

“It’s a mere formula,” Mr. Balch explained.

“Well, here goes.” Rainer dipped his quill in the inkstand his uncle
had pushed in his direction, and dashed a gallant signature across the
document.

Faxon, understanding what was expected of him, and conjecturing that the
young man was signing his will on the attainment of his majority, had
placed himself behind Mr. Grisben, and stood awaiting his turn to affix
his name to the instrument. Rainer, having signed, was about to push the
paper across the table to Mr. Balch; but the latter, again raising his
hand, said in his sad imprisoned voice: “The seal--?”

“Oh, does there have to be a seal?”

Faxon, looking over Mr. Grisben at John Lavington, saw a faint frown
between his impassive eyes. “Really, Frank!” He seemed, Faxon thought,
slightly irritated by his nephew’s frivolity.

“Who’s got a seal?” Frank Rainer continued, glancing about the table.
“There doesn’t seem to be one here.”

Mr. Grisben interposed. “A wafer will do. Lavington, you have a wafer?”

Mr. Lavington had recovered his serenity. “There must be some in one
of the drawers. But I’m ashamed to say I don’t know where my secretary
keeps these things. He ought to have seen to it that a wafer was sent
with the document.”

“Oh, hang it--” Frank Rainer pushed the paper aside: “It’s the hand of
God--and I’m as hungry as a wolf. Let’s dine first, Uncle Jack.”

“I think I’ve a seal upstairs,” said Faxon.

Mr. Lavington sent him a barely perceptible smile. “So sorry to give you
the trouble--”

“Oh, I say, don’t send him after it now. Let’s wait till after dinner!”

Mr. Lavington continued to smile on _his_ guest, and the latter, as
if under the faint coercion of the smile, turned from the room and
ran upstairs. Having taken the seal from his writing-case he came down
again, and once more opened the door of the study. No one was speaking
when he entered--they were evidently awaiting his return with the mute
impatience of hunger, and he put the seal in Rainer’s reach, and stood
watching while Mr. Grisben struck a match and held it to one of the
candles flanking the inkstand. As the wax descended on the paper Faxon
remarked again the strange emaciation, the premature physical weariness,
of the hand that held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed
his nephew’s hand, and if it were not poignantly visible to him now.

With this thought in his mind, Faxon raised his eyes to look at
Mr. Lavington. The great man’s gaze rested on Frank Rainer with an
expression of untroubled benevolence; and at the same instant Faxon’s
attention was attracted by the presence in the room of another person,
who must have joined the group while he was upstairs searching for the
seal. The new-comer was a man of about Mr. Lavington’s age and figure,
who stood just behind his chair, and who, at the moment when Faxon
first saw him, was gazing at young Rainer with an equal intensity of
attention. The likeness between the two men--perhaps increased by the
fact that the hooded lamps on the table left the figure behind the
chair in shadow--struck Faxon the more because of the contrast in their
expression. John Lavington, during his nephew’s clumsy attempt to
drop the wax and apply the seal, continued to fasten on him a look
of half-amused affection; while the man behind the chair, so oddly
reduplicating the lines of his features and figure, turned on the boy a
face of pale hostility.

The impression was so startling that Faxon forgot what was going on
about him. He was just dimly aware of young Rainer’s exclaiming; “Your
turn, Mr. Grisben!” of Mr. Grisben’s protesting: “No--no; Mr. Faxon
first,” and of the pen’s being thereupon transferred to his own hand.
He received it with a deadly sense of being unable to move, or even to
understand what was expected of him, till he became conscious of Mr.
Grisben’s paternally pointing out the precise spot on which he was to
leave his autograph. The effort to fix his attention and steady his hand
prolonged the process of signing, and when he stood up--a strange weight
of fatigue on all his limbs--the figure behind Mr. Lavington’s chair was
gone.

Faxon felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man’s
exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door behind Mr.
Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon concluded that
the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to pass out. At any
rate he was gone, and with his withdrawal the strange weight was lifted.
Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette, Mr. Balch inscribing his name
at the foot of the document, Mr. Lavington--his eyes no longer on his
nephew--examining a strange white-winged orchid in the vase at his
elbow. Every thing suddenly seemed to have grown natural and simple
again, and Faxon found himself responding with a smile to the affable
gesture with which his host declared: “And now, Mr. Faxon, we’ll dine.”




III

“I wonder how I blundered into the wrong room just now; I thought you
told me to take the second door to the left,” Faxon said to Frank Rainer
as they followed the older men down the gallery.

“So I did; but I probably forgot to tell you which staircase to take.
Coming from your bedroom, I ought to have said the fourth door to the
right. It’s a puzzling house, because my uncle keeps adding to it from
year to year. He built this room last summer for his modern pictures.”

Young Rainer, pausing to open another door, touched an electric button
which sent a circle of light about the walls of a long room hung with
canvases of the French impressionist school.

Faxon advanced, attracted by a shimmering Monet, but Rainer laid a hand
on his arm.

“He bought that last week. But come along--I’ll show you all this after
dinner. Or _he_ will, rather--he loves it.”

“Does he really love things?”

Rainer stared, clearly perplexed at the question. “Rather! Flowers and
pictures especially! Haven’t you noticed the flowers? I suppose you
think his manner’s cold; it seems so at first; but he’s really awfully
keen about things.”

Faxon looked quickly at the speaker. “Has your uncle a brother?”

“Brother? No--never had. He and my mother were the only ones.”

“Or any relation who--who looks like him? Who might be mistaken for
him?”

“Not that I ever heard of. Does he remind you of some one?”

“Yes.”

“That’s queer. We’ll ask him if he’s got a double. Come on!”

But another picture had arrested Faxon, and some minutes elapsed before
he and his young host reached the dining-room. It was a large room,
with the same conventionally handsome furniture and delicately grouped
flowers; and Faxon’s first glance showed him that only three men
were seated about the dining-table. The man who had stood behind Mr.
Lavington’s chair was not present, and no seat awaited him.

When the young men entered, Mr. Grisben was speaking, and his host, who
faced the door, sat looking down at his untouched soup-plate and turning
the spoon about in his small dry hand.

“It’s pretty late to call them rumours--they were devilish close to
facts when we left town this morning,” Mr. Grisben was saying, with an
unexpected incisiveness of tone.

Mr. Lavington laid down his spoon and smiled interrogatively. “Oh,
facts--what _are_ facts? Just the way a thing happens to look at a given
minute....”

“You haven’t heard anything from town?” Mr. Grisben persisted.

“Not a syllable. So you see.... Balch, a little more of that _petite
marmite_. Mr. Faxon... between Frank and Mr. Grisben, please.”

The dinner progressed through a series of complicated courses,
ceremoniously dispensed by a prelatical butler attended by three
tall footmen, and it was evident that Mr. Lavington took a certain
satisfaction in the pageant. That, Faxon reflected, was probably
the joint in his armour--that and the flowers. He had changed the
subject--not abruptly but firmly--when the young men entered, but
Faxon perceived that it still possessed the thoughts of the two elderly
visitors, and Mr. Balch presently observed, in a voice that seemed to
come from the last survivor down a mine-shaft: “If it _does_ come, it
will be the biggest crash since ‘93.”

Mr. Lavington looked bored but polite. “Wall Street can stand crashes
better than it could then. It’s got a robuster constitution.”

“Yes; but--”

“Speaking of constitutions,” Mr. Grisben intervened: “Frank, are you
taking care of yourself?”

A flush rose to young Rainer’s cheeks.

“Why, of course! Isn’t that what I’m here for?”

“You’re here about three days in the month, aren’t you? And the rest of
the time it’s crowded restaurants and hot ballrooms in town. I thought
you were to be shipped off to New Mexico?”

“Oh, I’ve got a new man who says that’s rot.”

“Well, you don’t look as if your new man were right,” said Mr. Grisben
bluntly.

Faxon saw the lad’s colour fade, and the rings of shadow deepen under
his gay eyes. At the same moment his uncle turned to him with a renewed
intensity of attention. There was such solicitude in Mr. Lavington’s
gaze that it seemed almost to fling a shield between his nephew and Mr.
Grisben’s tactless scrutiny.

“We think Frank’s a good deal better,” he began; “this new doctor--”

The butler, coming up, bent to whisper a word in his ear, and the
communication caused a sudden change in Mr. Lavington’s expression. His
face was naturally so colourless that it seemed not so much to pale as
to fade, to dwindle and recede into something blurred and blotted-out. He
half rose, sat down again and sent a rigid smile about the table.

“Will you excuse me? The telephone. Peters, go on with the dinner.” With
small precise steps he walked out of the door which one of the footmen
had thrown open.

A momentary silence fell on the group; then Mr. Grisben once more
addressed himself to Rainer. “You ought to have gone, my boy; you ought
to have gone.”

The anxious look returned to the youth’s eyes. “My uncle doesn’t think
so, really.”

“You’re not a baby, to be always governed by your uncle’s opinion. You
came of age to-day, didn’t you? Your uncle spoils you.... that’s what’s
the matter....”

The thrust evidently went home, for Rainer laughed and looked down with
a slight accession of colour.

“But the doctor--”

“Use your common sense, Frank! You had to try twenty doctors to find one
to tell you what you wanted to be told.”

A look of apprehension overshadowed Rainer’, gaiety. “Oh, come--I
say!... What would _you_ do?” he stammered.

“Pack up and jump on the first train.” Mr. Grisben leaned forward and
laid his hand kindly on the young man’s arm. “Look here: my nephew Jim
Grisben is out there ranching on a big scale. He’ll take you in and be
glad to have you. You say your new doctor thinks it won’t do you any
good; but he doesn’t pretend to say it will do you harm, does he? Well,
then--give it a trial. It’ll take you out of hot theatres and night
restaurants, anyhow.... And all the rest of it.... Eh, Balch?”

“Go!” said Mr. Balch hollowly. “Go _at once_,” he added, as if a closer
look at the youth’s face had impressed on him the need of backing up his
friend.

Young Rainer had turned ashy-pale. He tried to stiffen his mouth into a
smile. “Do I look as bad as all that?”

Mr. Grisben was helping himself to terrapin. “You look like the day
after an earthquake,” he said.

The terrapin had encircled the table, and been deliberately enjoyed by
Mr. Lavington’s three visitors (Rainer, Faxon noticed, left his plate
untouched) before the door was thrown open to re-admit their host.
Mr. Lavington advanced with an air of recovered composure. He seated
himself, picked up his napkin and consulted the gold-monogrammed menu.
“No, don’t bring back the filet.... Some terrapin; yes....” He looked
affably about the table. “Sorry to have deserted you, but the storm has
played the deuce with the wires, and I had to wait a long time before I
could get a good connection. It must be blowing up for a blizzard.”

“Uncle Jack,” young Rainer broke out, “Mr. Grisben’s been lecturing me.”

Mr. Lavington was helping himself to terrapin. “Ah--what about?”

“He thinks I ought to have given New Mexico a show.”

“I want him to go straight out to my nephew at Santa Paz and stay there
till his next birthday.” Mr. Lavington signed to the butler to hand the
terrapin to Mr. Grisben, who, as he took a second helping, addressed
himself again to Rainer. “Jim’s in New York now, and going back the day
after tomorrow in Olyphant’s private car. I’ll ask Olyphant to squeeze
you in if you’ll go. And when you’ve been out there a week or two, in
the saddle all day and sleeping nine hours a night, I suspect you won’t
think much of the doctor who prescribed New York.”

Faxon spoke up, he knew not why. “I was out there once: it’s a splendid
life. I saw a fellow--oh, a really _bad_ case--who’d been simply made
over by it.”

“It _does_ sound jolly,” Rainer laughed, a sudden eagerness in his tone.

His uncle looked at him gently. “Perhaps Grisben’s right. It’s an
opportunity--”

Faxon glanced up with a start: the figure dimly perceived in the study
was now more visibly and tangibly planted behind Mr. Lavington’s chair.

“That’s right, Frank: you see your uncle approves. And the trip out
there with Olyphant isn’t a thing to be missed. So drop a few dozen
dinners and be at the Grand Central the day after tomorrow at five.”

Mr. Grisben’s pleasant grey eye sought corroboration of his host, and
Faxon, in a cold anguish of suspense, continued to watch him as he
turned his glance on Mr. Lavington. One could not look at Lavington
without seeing the presence at his back, and it was clear that, the next
minute, some change in Mr. Grisben’s expression must give his watcher a
clue.

But Mr. Grisben’s expression did not change: the gaze he fixed on his
host remained unperturbed, and the clue he gave was the startling one of
not seeming to see the other figure.

Faxon’s first impulse was to look away, to look anywhere else, to resort
again to the champagne glass the watchful butler had already brimmed;
but some fatal attraction, at war in him with an overwhelming physical
resistance, held his eyes upon the spot they feared.

The figure was still standing, more distinctly, and therefore more
resemblingly, at Mr. Lavington’s back; and while the latter continued
to gaze affectionately at his nephew, his counterpart, as before, fixed
young Rainer with eyes of deadly menace.

Faxon, with what felt like an actual wrench of the muscles, dragged his
own eyes from the sight to scan the other countenances about the table;
but not one revealed the least consciousness of what he saw, and a sense
of mortal isolation sank upon him.

“It’s worth considering, certainly--” he heard Mr. Lavington continue;
and as Rainer’s face lit up, the face behind his uncle’s chair seemed to
gather into its look all the fierce weariness of old unsatisfied hates.
That was the thing that, as the minutes laboured by, Faxon was becoming
most conscious of. The watcher behind the chair was no longer merely
malevolent: he had grown suddenly, unutterably tired. His hatred seemed
to well up out of the very depths of balked effort and thwarted hopes,
and the fact made him more pitiable, and yet more dire.

Faxon’s look reverted to Mr. Lavington, as if to surprise in him a
corresponding change. At first none was visible: his pinched smile was
screwed to his blank face like a gas-light to a white-washed wall. Then
the fixity of the smile became ominous: Faxon saw that its wearer was
afraid to let it go. It was evident that Mr. Lavington was unutterably
tired too, and the discovery sent a colder current through Faxon’s
veins. Looking down at his untouched plate, he caught the soliciting
twinkle of the champagne glass; but the sight of the wine turned him
sick.

“Well, we’ll go into the details presently,” he heard Mr. Lavington say,
still on the question of his nephew’s future. “Let’s have a cigar first.
No--not here, Peters.” He turned his smile on Faxon. “When we’ve had
coffee I want to show you my pictures.”

“Oh, by the way, Uncle Jack--Mr. Faxon wants to know if you’ve got a
double?”

“A double?” Mr. Lavington, still smiling, continued to address himself
to his guest. “Not that I know of. Have you seen one, Mr. Faxon?”

Faxon thought: “My God, if I look up now they’ll _both_ be looking at
me!” To avoid raising his eyes he made as though to lift the glass to
his lips; but his hand sank inert, and he looked up. Mr. Lavington’s
glance was politely bent on him, but with a loosening of the strain
about his heart he saw that the figure behind the chair still kept its
gaze on Rainer.

“Do you think you’ve seen my double, Mr. Faxon?”

Would the other face turn if he said yes? Faxon felt a dryness in his
throat. “No,” he answered.

“Ah? It’s possible I’ve a dozen. I believe I’m extremely usual-looking,”
 Mr. Lavington went on conversationally; and still the other face watched
Rainer.

“It was... a mistake... a confusion of memory....” Faxon heard himself
stammer. Mr. Lavington pushed back his chair, and as he did so Mr.
Grisben suddenly leaned forward.

“Lavington! What have we been thinking of? We haven’t drunk Frank’s
health!”

Mr. Lavington reseated himself. “My dear boy!... Peters, another
bottle....” He turned to his nephew. “After such a sin of omission I
don’t presume to propose the toast myself... but Frank knows.... Go
ahead, Grisben!”

The boy shone on his uncle. “No, no, Uncle Jack! Mr. Grisben won’t mind.
Nobody but _you_--to-day!”

The butler was replenishing the glasses. He filled Mr. Lavington’s last,
and Mr. Lavington put out his small hand to raise it.... As he did so,
Faxon looked away.

“Well, then--All the good I’ve wished you in all the past years.... I
put it into the prayer that the coming ones may be healthy and happy and
many... and _many_, dear boy!”

Faxon saw the hands about him reach out for their glasses.
Automatically, he reached for his. His eyes were still on the table, and
he repeated to himself with a trembling vehemence: “I won’t look up! I
won’t.... I won’t....”

His fingers clasped the glass and raised it to the level of his lips.
He saw the other hands making the same motion. He heard Mr. Grisben’s
genial “Hear! Hear!” and Mr. Batch’s hollow echo. He said to himself,
as the rim of the glass touched his lips: “I won’t look up! I swear I
won’t!--” and he looked.

The glass was so full that it required an extraordinary effort to hold
it there, brimming and suspended, during the awful interval before he
could trust his hand to lower it again, untouched, to the table. It was
this merciful preoccupation which saved him, kept him from crying out,
from losing his hold, from slipping down into the bottomless blackness
that gaped for him. As long as the problem of the glass engaged him he
felt able to keep his seat, manage his muscles, fit unnoticeably into
the group; but as the glass touched the table his last link with safety
snapped. He stood up and dashed out of the room.




IV

In the gallery, the instinct of self-preservation helped him to turn
back and sign to young Rainer not to follow. He stammered out something
about a touch of dizziness, and joining them presently; and the boy
nodded sympathetically and drew back.

At the foot of the stairs Faxon ran against a servant. “I should like to
telephone to Weymore,” he said with dry lips.

“Sorry, sir; wires all down. We’ve been trying the last hour to get New
York again for Mr. Lavington.”

Faxon shot on to his room, burst into it, and bolted the door. The
lamplight lay on furniture, flowers, books; in the ashes a log still
glimmered. He dropped down on the sofa and hid his face. The room was
profoundly silent, the whole house was still: nothing about him gave a
hint of what was going on, darkly and dumbly, in the room he had flown
from, and with the covering of his eyes oblivion and reassurance seemed
to fall on him. But they fell for a moment only; then his lids opened
again to the monstrous vision. There it was, stamped on his pupils, a
part of him forever, an indelible horror burnt into his body and brain.
But why into his--just his? Why had he alone been chosen to see what he
had seen? What business was it of _his_, in God’s name? Any one of the
others, thus enlightened, might have exposed the horror and defeated
it; but _he_, the one weaponless and defenceless spectator, the one whom
none of the others would believe or understand if he attempted to reveal
what he knew--_he_ alone had been singled out as the victim of this
dreadful initiation!

Suddenly he sat up, listening: he had heard a step on the stairs. Some
one, no doubt, was coming to see how he was--to urge him, if he felt
better, to go down and join the smokers. Cautiously he opened his
door; yes, it was young Rainer’s step. Faxon looked down the passage,
remembered the other stairway and darted to it. All he wanted was to get
out of the house. Not another instant would he breathe its abominable
air! What business was it of _his_, in God’s name?

He reached the opposite end of the lower gallery, and beyond it saw
the hall by which he had entered. It was empty, and on a long table he
recognized his coat and cap. He got into his coat, unbolted the door,
and plunged into the purifying night.

The darkness was deep, and the cold so intense that for an instant
it stopped his breathing. Then he perceived that only a thin snow was
falling, and resolutely he set his face for flight. The trees along the
avenue marked his way as he hastened with long strides over the beaten
snow. Gradually, while he walked, the tumult in his brain subsided. The
impulse to fly still drove him forward, but he began feel that he was
flying from a terror of his own creating, and that the most urgent
reason for escape was the need of hiding his state, of shunning other
eyes till he should regain his balance.

He had spent the long hours in the train in fruitless broodings on a
discouraging situation, and he remembered how his bitterness had turned
to exasperation when he found that the Weymore sleigh was not awaiting
him. It was absurd, of course; but, though he had joked with Rainer over
Mrs. Culme’s forgetfulness, to confess it had cost a pang. That was what
his rootless life had brought him to: for lack of a personal stake in
things his sensibility was at the mercy of such trifles.... Yes; that,
and the cold and fatigue, the absence of hope and the haunting sense of
starved aptitudes, all these had brought him to the perilous verge over
which, once or twice before, his terrified brain had hung.

Why else, in the name of any imaginable logic, human or devilish,
should he, a stranger, be singled out for this experience? What could
it mean to him, how was he related to it, what bearing had it on his
case?... Unless, indeed, it was just because he was a stranger--a
stranger everywhere--because he had no personal life, no warm screen of
private egotisms to shield him from exposure, that he had developed this
abnormal sensitiveness to the vicissitudes of others. The thought pulled
him up with a shudder. No! Such a fate was too abominable; all that
was strong and sound in him rejected it. A thousand times better regard
himself as ill, disorganized, deluded, than as the predestined victim of
such warnings!

He reached the gates and paused before the darkened lodge. The wind had
risen and was sweeping the snow into his race. The cold had him in its
grasp again, and he stood uncertain. Should he put his sanity to the
test and go back? He turned and looked down the dark drive to the house.
A single ray shone through the trees, evoking a picture of the lights,
the flowers, the faces grouped about that fatal room. He turned and
plunged out into the road....

He remembered that, about a mile from Overdale, the coachman had pointed
out the road to Northridge; and he began to walk in that direction.
Once in the road he had the gale in his face, and the wet snow on his
moustache and eye-lashes instantly hardened to ice. The same ice seemed
to be driving a million blades into his throat and lungs, but he pushed
on, the vision of the warm room pursuing him.

The snow in the road was deep and uneven. He stumbled across ruts and
sank into drifts, and the wind drove against him like a granite cliff.
Now and then he stopped, gasping, as if an invisible hand had tightened
an iron band about his body; then he started again, stiffening himself
against the stealthy penetration of the cold. The snow continued to
descend out of a pall of inscrutable darkness, and once or twice he
paused, fearing he had missed the road to Northridge; but, seeing no
sign of a turn, he ploughed on.

At last, feeling sure that he had walked for more than a mile, he halted
and looked back. The act of turning brought immediate relief, first
because it put his back to the wind, and then because, far down the
road, it showed him the gleam of a lantern. A sleigh was coming--a
sleigh that might perhaps give him a lift to the village! Fortified by
the hope, he began to walk back toward the light. It came forward very
slowly, with unaccountable sigsags and waverings; and even when he was
within a few yards of it he could catch no sound of sleigh-bells. Then
it paused and became stationary by the roadside, as though carried by
a pedestrian who had stopped, exhausted by the cold. The thought made
Faxon hasten on, and a moment later he was stooping over a motionless
figure huddled against the snow-bank. The lantern had dropped from its
bearer’s hand, and Faxon, fearfully raising it, threw its light into the
face of Frank Rainer.

“Rainer! What on earth are you doing here?”

The boy smiled back through his pallour. “What are _you_, I’d like to
know?” he retorted; and, scrambling to his feet with a clutch oh Faxon’s
arm, he added gaily: “Well, I’ve run you down!”

Faxon stood confounded, his heart sinking. The lad’s face was grey.

“What madness--” he began.

“Yes, it _is_. What on earth did you do it for?”

“I? Do what?... Why I.... I was just taking a walk.... I often walk at
night....”

Frank Rainer burst into a laugh. “On such nights? Then you hadn’t
bolted?”

“Bolted?”

“Because I’d done something to offend you? My uncle thought you had.”

Faxon grasped his arm. “Did your uncle send you after me?”

“Well, he gave me an awful rowing for not going up to your room with
you when you said you were ill. And when we found you’d gone we were
frightened--and he was awfully upset--so I said I’d catch you.... You’re
_not_ ill, are you?”

“Ill? No. Never better.” Faxon picked up the lantern. “Come; let’s go
back. It was awfully hot in that dining-room.”

“Yes; I hoped it was only that.”

They trudged on in silence for a few minutes; then Faxon questioned:
“You’re not too done up?”

“Oh, no. It’s a lot easier with the wind behind us.”

“All right. Don’t talk any more.”

They pushed ahead, walking, in spite of the light that guided them,
more slowly than Faxon had walked alone into the gale. The fact of his
companion’s stumbling against a drift gave Faxon a pretext for saying:
“Take hold of my arm,” and Rainer obeying, gasped out: “I’m blown!”

“So am I. Who wouldn’t be?”

“What a dance you led me! If it hadn’t been for one of the servants
happening to see you--”

“Yes; all right. And now, won’t you kindly shut up?”

Rainer laughed and hung on him. “Oh, the cold doesn’t hurt me....”

For the first few minutes after Rainer had overtaken him, anxiety
for the lad had been Faxon’s only thought. But as each labouring step
carried them nearer to the spot he had been fleeing, the reasons for his
flight grew more ominous and more insistent. No, he was not ill, he was
not distraught and deluded--he was the instrument singled out to warn
and save; and here he was, irresistibly driven, dragging the victim back
to his doom!

The intensity of the conviction had almost checked his steps. But what
could he do or say? At all costs he must get Rainer out of the cold,
into the house and into his bed. After that he would act.

The snow-fall was thickening, and as they reached a stretch of the road
between open fields the wind took them at an angle, lashing their faces
with barbed thongs. Rainer stopped to take breath, and Faxon felt the
heavier pressure of his arm.

“When we get to the lodge, can’t we telephone to the stable for a
sleigh?”

“If they’re not all asleep at the lodge.”

“Oh, I’ll manage. Don’t talk!” Faxon ordered; and they plodded on....

At length the lantern ray showed ruts that curved away from the road
under tree-darkness.

Faxon’s spirits rose. “There’s the gate! We’ll be there in five
minutes.”

As he spoke he caught, above the boundary hedge, the gleam of a light at
the farther end of the dark avenue. It was the same light that had shone
on the scene of which every detail was burnt into his brain; and he felt
again its overpowering reality. No--he couldn’t let the boy go back!

They were at the lodge at last, and Faxon was hammering on the door. He
said to himself: “I’ll get him inside first, and make them give him a
hot drink. Then I’ll see--I’ll find an argument....”

There was no answer to his knocking, and after an interval Rainer said:
“Look here--we’d better go on.”

“No!”

“I can, perfectly--”

“You sha’n’t go to the house, I say!” Faxon redoubled his blows, and
at length steps sounded on the stairs. Rainer was leaning against the
lintel, and as the door opened the light from the hall flashed on his
pale face and fixed eyes. Faxon caught him by the arm and drew him in.

“It _was_ cold out there.” he sighed; and then, abruptly, as if
invisible shears at a single stroke had cut every muscle in his body, he
swerved, drooped on Faxon’s arm, and seemed to sink into nothing at his
feet.

The lodge-keeper and Faxon bent over him, and somehow, between them,
lifted him into the kitchen and laid him on a sofa by the stove.

The lodge-keeper, stammering: “I’ll ring up the house,” dashed out of
the room. But Faxon heard the words without heeding them: omens mattered
nothing now, beside this woe fulfilled. He knelt down to undo the fur
collar about Rainer’s throat, and as he did so he felt a warm moisture
on his hands. He held them up, and they were red....




V

The palms threaded their endless line along the yellow river. The little
steamer lay at the wharf, and George Faxon, sitting in the verandah of
the wooden hotel, idly watched the coolies carrying the freight across
the gang-plank.

He had been looking at such scenes for two months. Nearly five had
elapsed since he had descended from the train at Northridge and strained
his eyes for the sleigh that was to take him to Weymore: Weymore, which
he was never to behold!... Part of the interval--the first part--was
still a great grey blur. Even now he could not be quite sure how he
had got back to Boston, reached the house of a cousin, and been thence
transferred to a quiet room looking out on snow under bare trees. He
looked out a long time at the same scene, and finally one day a man
he had known at Harvard came to see him and invited him to go out on a
business trip to the Malay Peninsula.

“You’ve had a bad shake-up, and it’ll do you no end of good to get away
from things.”

When the doctor came the next day it turned out that he knew of the plan
and approved it. “You ought to be quiet for a year. Just loaf and look
at the landscape,” he advised.

Faxon felt the first faint stirrings of curiosity.

“What’s been the matter with me, anyway?”

“Well, over-work, I suppose. You must have been bottling up for a bad
breakdown before you started for New Hampshire last December. And the
shock of that poor boy’s death did the rest.”

Ah, yes--Rainer had died. He remembered....

He started for the East, and gradually, by imperceptible degrees, life
crept back into his weary bones and leaden brain. His friend was patient
and considerate, and they travelled slowly and talked little. At first
Faxon had felt a great shrinking from whatever touched on familiar
things. He seldom looked at a newspaper and he never opened a letter
without a contraction of the heart. It was not that he had any special
cause for apprehension, but merely that a great trail of darkness lay on
everything. He had looked too deep down into the abyss.... But little
by little health and energy returned to him, and with them the common
promptings of curiosity. He was beginning to wonder how the world was
going, and when, presently, the hotel-keeper told him there were no
letters for him in the steamer’s mail-bag, he felt a distinct sense of
disappointment. His friend had gone into the jungle on a long excursion,
and he was lonely, unoccupied and wholesomely bored. He got up and
strolled into the stuffy reading-room.

There he found a game of dominoes, a mutilated picture-puzzle, some
copies of _Zion’s Herald_ and a pile of New York and London newspapers.

He began to glance through the papers, and was disappointed to find that
they were less recent than he had hoped. Evidently the last numbers had
been carried off by luckier travellers. He continued to turn them over,
picking out the American ones first. These, as it happened, were the
oldest: they dated back to December and January. To Faxon, however, they
had all the flavour of novelty, since they covered the precise period
during which he had virtually ceased to exist. It had never before
occurred to him to wonder what had happened in the world during that
interval of obliteration; but now he felt a sudden desire to know.

To prolong the pleasure, he began by sorting the papers chronologically,
and as he found and spread out the earliest number, the date at the top
of the page entered into his consciousness like a key slipping into a
lock. It was the seventeenth of December: the date of the day after his
arrival at Northridge. He glanced at the first page and read in blazing
characters: “Reported Failure of Opal Cement Company. Lavington’s name
involved. Gigantic Exposure of Corruption Shakes Wall Street to Its
Foundations.”

He read on, and when he had finished the first paper he turned to the
next. There was a gap of three days, but the Opal Cement “Investigation”
 still held the centre of the stage. From its complex revelations of
greed and ruin his eye wandered to the death notices, and he read:
“Rainer. Suddenly, at Northridge, New Hampshire, Francis John, only son
of the late....”

His eyes clouded, and he dropped the newspaper and sat for a long time
with his face in his hands. When he looked up again he noticed that his
gesture had pushed the other papers from the table and scattered them at
his feet. The uppermost lay spread out before him, and heavily his eyes
began their search again. “John Lavington comes forward with plan for
reconstructing Company. Offers to put in ten millions of his own--The
proposal under consideration by the District Attorney.”

Ten millions... ten millions of his own. But if John Lavington was
ruined?... Faxon stood up with a cry. That was it, then--that was what
the warning meant! And if he had not fled from it, dashed wildly away
from it into the night, he might have broken the spell of iniquity, the
powers of darkness might not have prevailed! He caught up the pile of
newspapers and began to glance through each in turn for the head-line:
“Wills Admitted to Probate.” In the last of all he found the paragraph
he sought, and it stared up at him as if with Rainer’s dying eyes.

That--_that_ was what he had done! The powers of pity had singled him
out to warn and save, and he had closed his ears to their call, and
washed his hands of it, and fled. Washed his hands of it! That was
the word. It caught him back to the dreadful moment in the lodge when,
raising himself up from Rainer’s side, he had looked at his hands and
seen that they were red....





              CRUCIAL INSTANCES

                      BY

                 EDITH WHARTON




TABLE OF CONTENTS


I _The Duchess at Prayer_

II _The Angel at the Grave_

III _The Recovery_

IV _“Copy”: A Dialogue_

V _The Rembrandt_

VI _The Moving Finger_

VII _The Confessional_




THE DUCHESS AT PRAYER


Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house,
that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest
behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the
activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life
flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the
villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall
windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there
may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the
arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the
disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors....


II

From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue
barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated
vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes
and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored lichen had sheeted
the balustrade as with fine _laminae_ of gold, vineyards stooped to
the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white
villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on
fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was
lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the
shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I
hugged the sunshine.

“The Duchess’s apartments are beyond,” said the old man.

He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he
seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him
with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the
pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a _lira_ to the gate-keeper’s
child. He went on, without removing his eye:

“For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the
Duchess.”

“And no one lives here now?”

“No one, sir. The Duke, goes to Como for the summer season.”

I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging
groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.

“And that’s Vicenza?”

“_Proprio_!” The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading
from the walls behind us. “You see the palace roof over there, just to the
left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking
flight? That’s the Duke’s town palace, built by Palladio.”

“And does the Duke come there?”

“Never. In winter he goes to Rome.”

“And the palace and the villa are always closed?”

“As you see--always.”

“How long has this been?”

“Since I can remember.”

I looked into his eyes: they were like tarnished metal mirrors reflecting
nothing. “That must be a long time,” I said involuntarily.

“A long time,” he assented.

I looked down on the gardens. An opulence of dahlias overran the
box-borders, between cypresses that cut the sunshine like basalt shafts.
Bees hung above the lavender; lizards sunned themselves on the benches and
slipped through the cracks of the dry basins. Everywhere were vanishing
traces of that fantastic horticulture of which our dull age has lost the
art. Down the alleys maimed statues stretched their arms like rows of
whining beggars; faun-eared terms grinned in the thickets, and above the
laurustinus walls rose the mock ruin of a temple, falling into real ruin
in the bright disintegrating air. The glare was blinding.

“Let us go in,” I said.

The old man pushed open a heavy door, behind which the cold lurked like a
knife.

“The Duchess’s apartments,” he said.

Overhead and around us the same evanescent frescoes, under foot the same
scagliola volutes, unrolled themselves interminably. Ebony cabinets, with
inlay of precious marbles in cunning perspective, alternated down the
room with the tarnished efflorescence of gilt consoles supporting Chinese
monsters; and from the chimney-panel a gentleman in the Spanish habit
haughtily ignored us.

“Duke Ercole II.,” the old man explained, “by the Genoese Priest.”

It was a narrow-browed face, sallow as a wax effigy, high-nosed and
cautious-lidded, as though modelled by priestly hands; the lips weak and
vain rather than cruel; a quibbling mouth that would have snapped at verbal
errors like a lizard catching flies, but had never learned the shape of a
round yes or no. One of the Duke’s hands rested on the head of a dwarf, a
simian creature with pearl ear-rings and fantastic dress; the other turned
the pages of a folio propped on a skull.

“Beyond is the Duchess’s bedroom,” the old man reminded me.

Here the shutters admitted but two narrow shafts of light, gold bars
deepening the subaqueous gloom. On a dais the bedstead, grim, nuptial,
official, lifted its baldachin; a yellow Christ agonized between the
curtains, and across the room a lady smiled at us from the chimney-breast.

The old man unbarred a shutter and the light touched her face. Such a face
it was, with a flicker of laughter over it like the wind on a June meadow,
and a singular tender pliancy of mien, as though one of Tiepolo’s lenient
goddesses had been busked into the stiff sheath of a seventeenth century
dress!

“No one has slept here,” said the old man, “since the Duchess Violante.”

“And she was--?”

“The lady there--first Duchess of Duke Ercole II.”

He drew a key from his pocket and unlocked a door at the farther end of the
room. “The chapel,” he said. “This is the Duchess’s balcony.” As I turned
to follow him the Duchess tossed me a sidelong smile.

I stepped into a grated tribune above a chapel festooned with stucco.
Pictures of bituminous saints mouldered between the pilasters; the
artificial roses in the altar-vases were gray with dust and age, and under
the cobwebby rosettes of the vaulting a bird’s nest clung. Before the altar
stood a row of tattered arm-chairs, and I drew back at sight of a figure
kneeling near them.

“The Duchess,” the old man whispered. “By the Cavaliere Bernini.”

It was the image of a woman in furred robes and spreading fraise, her hand
lifted, her face addressed to the tabernacle. There was a strangeness in
the sight of that immovable presence locked in prayer before an abandoned
shrine. Her face was hidden, and I wondered whether it were grief or
gratitude that raised her hands and drew her eyes to the altar, where no
living prayer joined her marble invocation. I followed my guide down the
tribune steps, impatient to see what mystic version of such terrestrial
graces the ingenious artist had found--the Cavaliere was master of such
arts. The Duchess’s attitude was one of transport, as though heavenly airs
fluttered her laces and the love-locks escaping from her coif. I saw how
admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope
of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face--it was a
frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human
countenance....

The old man crossed himself and shuffled his feet on the marble.

“The Duchess Violante,” he repeated.

“The same as in the picture?”

“Eh--the same.”

“But the face--what does it mean?”

He shrugged his shoulders and turned deaf eyes on me. Then he shot a glance
round the sepulchral place, clutched my sleeve and said, close to my ear:
“It was not always so.”

“What was not?”

“The face--so terrible.”

“The Duchess’s face?”

“The statue’s. It changed after--“

“After?”

“It was put here.”

“The statue’s face _changed_--?”

He mistook my bewilderment for incredulity and his confidential finger
dropped from my sleeve. “Eh, that’s the story. I tell what I’ve heard. What
do I know?” He resumed his senile shuffle across the marble. “This is a bad
place to stay in--no one comes here. It’s too cold. But the gentleman said,
_I must see everything_!”

I let the _lire_ sound. “So I must--and hear everything. This story,
now--from whom did you have it?”

His hand stole back. “One that saw it, by God!”

“That saw it?”

“My grandmother, then. I’m a very old man.”

“Your grandmother? Your grandmother was--?”

“The Duchess’s serving girl, with respect to you.”

“Your grandmother? Two hundred years ago?”

“Is it too long ago? That’s as God pleases. I am a very old man and she
was a very old woman when I was born. When she died she was as black as a
miraculous Virgin and her breath whistled like the wind in a keyhole. She
told me the story when I was a little boy. She told it to me out there in
the garden, on a bench by the fish-pond, one summer night of the year she
died. It must be true, for I can show you the very bench we sat on....”


III

Noon lay heavier on the gardens; not our live humming warmth but the stale
exhalation of dead summers. The very statues seemed to drowse like watchers
by a death-bed. Lizards shot out of the cracked soil like flames and the
bench in the laurustinus-niche was strewn with the blue varnished bodies of
dead flies. Before us lay the fish-pond, a yellow marble slab above rotting
secrets. The villa looked across it, composed as a dead face, with the
cypresses flanking it for candles....


IV

“Impossible, you say, that my mother’s mother should have been the
Duchess’s maid? What do I know? It is so long since anything has happened
here that the old things seem nearer, perhaps, than to those who live in
cities.... But how else did she know about the statue then? Answer me that,
sir! That she saw with her eyes, I can swear to, and never smiled again,
so she told me, till they put her first child in her arms ... for she was
taken to wife by the steward’s son, Antonio, the same who had carried
the letters.... But where am I? Ah, well ... she was a mere slip, you
understand, my grandmother, when the Duchess died, a niece of the upper
maid, Nencia, and suffered about the Duchess because of her pranks and the
funny songs she knew. It’s possible, you think, she may have heard from
others what she afterward fancied she had seen herself? How that is, it’s
not for an unlettered man to say; though indeed I myself seem to have seen
many of the things she told me. This is a strange place. No one comes here,
nothing changes, and the old memories stand up as distinct as the statues
in the garden....

“It began the summer after they came back from the Brenta. Duke Ercole had
married the lady from Venice, you must know; it was a gay city, then, I’m
told, with laughter and music on the water, and the days slipped by like
boats running with the tide. Well, to humor her he took her back the first
autumn to the Brenta. Her father, it appears, had a grand palace there,
with such gardens, bowling-alleys, grottoes and casinos as never were;
gondolas bobbing at the water-gates, a stable full of gilt coaches, a
theatre full of players, and kitchens and offices full of cooks and
lackeys to serve up chocolate all day long to the fine ladies in masks
and furbelows, with their pet dogs and their blackamoors and their
_abates_. Eh! I know it all as if I’d been there, for Nencia, you see,
my grandmother’s aunt, travelled with the Duchess, and came back with her
eyes round as platters, and not a word to say for the rest of the year to
any of the lads who’d courted her here in Vicenza.

“What happened there I don’t know--my grandmother could never get at
the rights of it, for Nencia was mute as a fish where her lady was
concerned--but when they came back to Vicenza the Duke ordered the villa
set in order; and in the spring he brought the Duchess here and left her.
She looked happy enough, my grandmother said, and seemed no object for
pity. Perhaps, after all, it was better than being shut up in Vicenza,
in the tall painted rooms where priests came and went as softly as cats
prowling for birds, and the Duke was forever closeted in his library,
talking with learned men. The Duke was a scholar; you noticed he was
painted with a book? Well, those that can read ’em make out that they’re
full of wonderful things; as a man that’s been to a fair across the
mountains will always tell his people at home it was beyond anything
_they’ll_ ever see. As for the Duchess, she was all for music,
play-acting and young company. The Duke was a silent man, stepping quietly,
with his eyes down, as though he’d just come from confession; when the
Duchess’s lap-dog yapped at his heels he danced like a man in a swarm of
hornets; when the Duchess laughed he winced as if you’d drawn a diamond
across a window-pane. And the Duchess was always laughing.

“When she first came to the villa she was very busy laying out the gardens,
designing grottoes, planting groves and planning all manner of agreeable
surprises in the way of water-jets that drenched you unexpectedly, and
hermits in caves, and wild men that jumped at you out of thickets. She had
a very pretty taste in such matters, but after a while she tired of it, and
there being no one for her to talk to but her maids and the chaplain--a
clumsy man deep in his books--why, she would have strolling players out
from Vicenza, mountebanks and fortune-tellers from the market-place,
travelling doctors and astrologers, and all manner of trained animals.
Still it could be seen that the poor lady pined for company, and her
waiting women, who loved her, were glad when the Cavaliere Ascanio, the
Duke’s cousin, came to live at the vineyard across the valley--you see
the pinkish house over there in the mulberries, with a red roof and a
pigeon-cote?

“The Cavaliere Ascanio was a cadet of one of the great Venetian houses,
_pezzi grossi_ of the Golden Book. He had been meant for the Church,
I believe, but what! he set fighting above praying and cast in his lot with
the captain of the Duke of Mantua’s _bravi_, himself a Venetian of
good standing, but a little at odds with the law. Well, the next I know,
the Cavaliere was in Venice again, perhaps not in good odor on account of
his connection with the gentleman I speak of. Some say he tried to carry
off a nun from the convent of Santa Croce; how that may be I can’t say; but
my grandmother declared he had enemies there, and the end of it was that on
some pretext or other the Ten banished him to Vicenza. There, of course,
the Duke, being his kinsman, had to show him a civil face; and that was how
he first came to the villa.

“He was a fine young man, beautiful as a Saint Sebastian, a rare musician,
who sang his own songs to the lute in a way that used to make my
grandmother’s heart melt and run through her body like mulled wine. He
had a good word for everybody, too, and was always dressed in the French
fashion, and smelt as sweet as a bean-field; and every soul about the place
welcomed the sight of him.

“Well, the Duchess, it seemed, welcomed it too; youth will have youth,
and laughter turns to laughter; and the two matched each other like the
candlesticks on an altar. The Duchess--you’ve seen her portrait--but to
hear my grandmother, sir, it no more approached her than a weed comes up to
a rose. The Cavaliere, indeed, as became a poet, paragoned her in his song
to all the pagan goddesses of antiquity; and doubtless these were finer
to look at than mere women; but so, it seemed, was she; for, to believe
my grandmother, she made other women look no more than the big French
fashion-doll that used to be shown on Ascension days in the Piazza. She
was one, at any rate, that needed no outlandish finery to beautify her;
whatever dress she wore became her as feathers fit the bird; and her hair
didn’t get its color by bleaching on the housetop. It glittered of itself
like the threads in an Easter chasuble, and her skin was whiter than fine
wheaten bread and her mouth as sweet as a ripe fig....

“Well, sir, you could no more keep them apart than the bees and the
lavender. They were always together, singing, bowling, playing cup and
ball, walking in the gardens, visiting the aviaries and petting her grace’s
trick-dogs and monkeys. The Duchess was as gay as a foal, always playing
pranks and laughing, tricking out her animals like comedians, disguising
herself as a peasant or a nun (you should have seen her one day pass
herself off to the chaplain as a mendicant sister), or teaching the lads
and girls of the vineyards to dance and sing madrigals together. The
Cavaliere had a singular ingenuity in planning such entertainments and the
days were hardly long enough for their diversions. But toward the end of
the summer the Duchess fell quiet and would hear only sad music, and the
two sat much together in the gazebo at the end of the garden. It was there
the Duke found them one day when he drove out from Vicenza in his gilt
coach. He came but once or twice a year to the villa, and it was, as my
grandmother said, just a part of her poor lady’s ill-luck to be wearing
that day the Venetian habit, which uncovered the shoulders in a way the
Duke always scowled at, and her curls loose and powdered with gold. Well,
the three drank chocolate in the gazebo, and what happened no one knew,
except that the Duke, on taking leave, gave his cousin a seat in his
carriage; but the Cavaliere never returned.

“Winter approaching, and the poor lady thus finding herself once more
alone, it was surmised among her women that she must fall into a deeper
depression of spirits. But far from this being the case, she displayed such
cheerfulness and equanimity of humor that my grandmother, for one, was
half-vexed with her for giving no more thought to the poor young man who,
all this time, was eating his heart out in the house across the valley. It
is true she quitted her gold-laced gowns and wore a veil over her head; but
Nencia would have it she looked the lovelier for the change and so gave the
Duke greater displeasure. Certain it is that the Duke drove out oftener to
the villa, and though he found his lady always engaged in some innocent
pursuit, such as embroidery or music, or playing games with her young
women, yet he always went away with a sour look and a whispered word to
the chaplain. Now as to the chaplain, my grandmother owned there had been
a time when her grace had not handled him over-wisely. For, according to
Nencia, it seems that his reverence, who seldom approached the Duchess,
being buried in his library like a mouse in a cheese--well, one day he made
bold to appeal to her for a sum of money, a large sum, Nencia said, to buy
certain tall books, a chest full of them, that a foreign pedlar had brought
him; whereupon the Duchess, who could never abide a book, breaks out at
him with a laugh and a flash of her old spirit--‘Holy Mother of God, must
I have more books about me? I was nearly smothered with them in the first
year of my marriage;’ and the chaplain turning red at the affront, she
added: ‘You may buy them and welcome, my good chaplain, if you can find
the money; but as for me, I am yet seeking a way to pay for my turquoise
necklace, and the statue of Daphne at the end of the bowling-green, and
the Indian parrot that my black boy brought me last Michaelmas from the
Bohemians--so you see I’ve no money to waste on trifles;’ and as he backs
out awkwardly she tosses at him over her shoulder: ‘You should pray to
Saint Blandina to open the Duke’s pocket!’ to which he returned, very
quietly, ‘Your excellency’s suggestion is an admirable one, and I have
already entreated that blessed martyr to open the Duke’s understanding.’

“Thereat, Nencia said (who was standing by), the Duchess flushed
wonderfully red and waved him out of the room; and then ‘Quick!’ she cried
to my grandmother (who was too glad to run on such errands), ‘Call me
Antonio, the gardener’s boy, to the box-garden; I’ve a word to say to him
about the new clove-carnations....’

“Now I may not have told you, sir, that in the crypt under the chapel there
has stood, for more generations than a man can count, a stone coffin
containing a thighbone of the blessed Saint Blandina of Lyons, a relic
offered, I’ve been told, by some great Duke of France to one of our own
dukes when they fought the Turk together; and the object, ever since, of
particular veneration in this illustrious family. Now, since the Duchess
had been left to herself, it was observed she affected a fervent devotion
to this relic, praying often in the chapel and even causing the stone slab
that covered the entrance to the crypt to be replaced by a wooden one,
that she might at will descend and kneel by the coffin. This was matter of
edification to all the household and should have been peculiarly pleasing
to the chaplain; but, with respect to you, he was the kind of man who
brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple.

“However that may be, the Duchess, when she dismissed him, was seen running
to the garden, where she talked earnestly with the boy Antonio about the
new clove-carnations; and the rest of the day she sat indoors and played
sweetly on the virginal. Now Nencia always had it in mind that her grace
had made a mistake in refusing that request of the chaplain’s; but she said
nothing, for to talk reason to the Duchess was of no more use than praying
for rain in a drought.

“Winter came early that year, there was snow on the hills by All Souls,
the wind stripped the gardens, and the lemon-trees were nipped in the
lemon-house. The Duchess kept her room in this black season, sitting over
the fire, embroidering, reading books of devotion (which was a thing she
had never done) and praying frequently in the chapel. As for the chaplain,
it was a place he never set foot in but to say mass in the morning,
with the Duchess overhead in the tribune, and the servants aching with
rheumatism on the marble floor. The chaplain himself hated the cold, and
galloped through the mass like a man with witches after him. The rest of
the day he spent in his library, over a brazier, with his eternal books....

“You’ll wonder, sir, if I’m ever to get to the gist of the story; and I’ve
gone slowly, I own, for fear of what’s coming. Well, the winter was long
and hard. When it fell cold the Duke ceased to come out from Vicenza,
and not a soul had the Duchess to speak to but her maid-servants and the
gardeners about the place. Yet it was wonderful, my grandmother said, how
she kept her brave colors and her spirits; only it was remarked that she
prayed longer in the chapel, where a brazier was kept burning for her all
day. When the young are denied their natural pleasures they turn often
enough to religion; and it was a mercy, as my grandmother said, that she,
who had scarce a live sinner to speak to, should take such comfort in a
dead saint.

“My grandmother seldom saw her that winter, for though she showed a brave
front to all she kept more and more to herself, choosing to have only
Nencia about her and dismissing even her when she went to pray. For
her devotion had that mark of true piety, that she wished it not to be
observed; so that Nencia had strict orders, on the chaplain’s approach, to
warn her mistress if she happened to be in prayer.

“Well, the winter passed, and spring was well forward, when my grandmother
one evening had a bad fright. That it was her own fault I won’t deny, for
she’d been down the lime-walk with Antonio when her aunt fancied her to be
stitching in her chamber; and seeing a sudden light in Nencia’s window, she
took fright lest her disobedience be found out, and ran up quickly through
the laurel-grove to the house. Her way lay by the chapel, and as she crept
past it, meaning to slip in through the scullery, and groping her way, for
the dark had fallen and the moon was scarce up, she heard a crash close
behind her, as though someone had dropped from a window of the chapel. The
young fool’s heart turned over, but she looked round as she ran, and there,
sure enough, was a man scuttling across the terrace; and as he doubled
the corner of the house my grandmother swore she caught the whisk of the
chaplain’s skirts. Now that was a strange thing, certainly; for why should
the chaplain be getting out of the chapel window when he might have passed
through the door? For you may have noticed, sir, there’s a door leads from
the chapel into the saloon on the ground floor; the only other way out
being through the Duchess’s tribune.

“Well, my grandmother turned the matter over, and next time she met Antonio
in the lime-walk (which, by reason of her fright, was not for some days)
she laid before him what had happened; but to her surprise he only laughed
and said, ‘You little simpleton, he wasn’t getting out of the window, he
was trying to look in’; and not another word could she get from him.

“So the season moved on to Easter, and news came the Duke had gone to Rome
for that holy festivity. His comings and goings made no change at the
villa, and yet there was no one there but felt easier to think his yellow
face was on the far side of the Apennines, unless perhaps it was the
chaplain.

“Well, it was one day in May that the Duchess, who had walked long with
Nencia on the terrace, rejoicing at the sweetness of the prospect and the
pleasant scent of the gilly-flowers in the stone vases, the Duchess toward
midday withdrew to her rooms, giving orders that her dinner should be
served in her bed-chamber. My grandmother helped to carry in the dishes,
and observed, she said, the singular beauty of the Duchess, who in honor
of the fine weather had put on a gown of shot-silver and hung her bare
shoulders with pearls, so that she looked fit to dance at court with an
emperor. She had ordered, too, a rare repast for a lady that heeded so
little what she ate--jellies, game-pasties, fruits in syrup, spiced cakes
and a flagon of Greek wine; and she nodded and clapped her hands as the
women set it before her, saying again and again, ‘I shall eat well to-day.’

“But presently another mood seized her; she turned from the table, called
for her rosary, and said to Nencia: ‘The fine weather has made me neglect
my devotions. I must say a litany before I dine.’

“She ordered the women out and barred the door, as her custom was; and
Nencia and my grandmother went down-stairs to work in the linen-room.

“Now the linen-room gives on the court-yard, and suddenly my grandmother
saw a strange sight approaching. First up the avenue came the Duke’s
carriage (whom all thought to be in Rome), and after it, drawn by a long
string of mules and oxen, a cart carrying what looked like a kneeling
figure wrapped in death-clothes. The strangeness of it struck the girl dumb
and the Duke’s coach was at the door before she had the wit to cry out that
it was coming. Nencia, when she saw it, went white and ran out of the room.
My grandmother followed, scared by her face, and the two fled along the
corridor to the chapel. On the way they met the chaplain, deep in a book,
who asked in surprise where they were running, and when they said, to
announce the Duke’s arrival, he fell into such astonishment and asked them
so many questions and uttered such ohs and ahs, that by the time he let
them by the Duke was at their heels. Nencia reached the chapel-door first
and cried out that the Duke was coming; and before she had a reply he was
at her side, with the chaplain following.

“A moment later the door opened and there stood the Duchess. She held her
rosary in one hand and had drawn a scarf over her shoulders; but they shone
through it like the moon in a mist, and her countenance sparkled with
beauty.

“The Duke took her hand with a bow. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I could have had no
greater happiness than thus to surprise you at your devotions.’

“‘My own happiness,’ she replied, ‘would have been greater had your
excellency prolonged it by giving me notice of your arrival.’

“‘Had you expected me, Madam,’ said he, ‘your appearance could scarcely
have been more fitted to the occasion. Few ladies of your youth and beauty
array themselves to venerate a saint as they would to welcome a lover.’

“‘Sir,’ she answered, ‘having never enjoyed the latter opportunity, I am
constrained to make the most of the former.--What’s that?’ she cried,
falling back, and the rosary dropped from her hand.

“There was a loud noise at the other end of the saloon, as of a heavy
object being dragged down the passage; and presently a dozen men were seen
haling across the threshold the shrouded thing from the oxcart. The Duke
waved his hand toward it. ‘That,’ said he, ‘Madam, is a tribute to your
extraordinary piety. I have heard with peculiar satisfaction of your
devotion to the blessed relics in this chapel, and to commemorate a zeal
which neither the rigors of winter nor the sultriness of summer could abate
I have ordered a sculptured image of you, marvellously executed by the
Cavaliere Bernini, to be placed before the altar over the entrance to the
crypt.’

“The Duchess, who had grown pale, nevertheless smiled playfully at this.
‘As to commemorating my piety,” she said, ‘I recognize there one of your
excellency’s pleasantries--’

“‘A pleasantry?’ the Duke interrupted; and he made a sign to the men, who
had now reached the threshold of the chapel. In an instant the wrappings
fell from the figure, and there knelt the Duchess to the life. A cry of
wonder rose from all, but the Duchess herself stood whiter than the marble.

“‘You will see,’ says the Duke, ‘this is no pleasantry, but a triumph
of the incomparable Bernini’s chisel. The likeness was done from your
miniature portrait by the divine Elisabetta Sirani, which I sent to the
master some six months ago, with what results all must admire.’

“‘Six months!’ cried the Duchess, and seemed about to fall; but his
excellency caught her by the hand.

“‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘could better please me than the excessive emotion you
display, for true piety is ever modest, and your thanks could not take a
form that better became you. And now,’ says he to the men, ‘let the image
be put in place.’

“By this, life seemed to have returned to the Duchess, and she answered him
with a deep reverence. ‘That I should be overcome by so unexpected a grace,
your excellency admits to be natural; but what honors you accord it is my
privilege to accept, and I entreat only that in mercy to my modesty the
image be placed in the remotest part of the chapel.’

“At that the Duke darkened. ‘What! You would have this masterpiece of a
renowned chisel, which, I disguise not, cost me the price of a good
vineyard in gold pieces, you would have it thrust out of sight like the
work of a village stonecutter?’

“‘It is my semblance, not the sculptor’s work, I desire to conceal.’

“‘It you are fit for my house, Madam, you are fit for God’s, and entitled
to the place of honor in both. Bring the statue forward, you dawdlers!’ he
called out to the men.

“The Duchess fell back submissively. ‘You are right, sir, as always; but I
would at least have the image stand on the left of the altar, that, looking
up, it may behold your excellency’s seat in the tribune.’

“‘A pretty thought, Madam, for which I thank you; but I design before long
to put my companion image on the other side of the altar; and the wife’s
place, as you know, is at her husband’s right hand.’

“‘True, my lord--but, again, if my poor presentment is to have the
unmerited honor of kneeling beside yours, why not place both before the
altar, where it is our habit to pray in life?’

“‘And where, Madam, should we kneel if they took our places? Besides,’ says
the Duke, still speaking very blandly, ‘I have a more particular purpose
in placing your image over the entrance to the crypt; for not only would I
thereby mark your special devotion to the blessed saint who rests there,
but, by sealing up the opening in the pavement, would assure the perpetual
preservation of that holy martyr’s bones, which hitherto have been too
thoughtlessly exposed to sacrilegious attempts.’

“‘What attempts, my lord?’ cries the Duchess. ‘No one enters this chapel
without my leave.’

“‘So I have understood, and can well believe from what I have learned of
your piety; yet at night a malefactor might break in through a window,
Madam, and your excellency not know it.’

“‘I’m a light sleeper,’ said the Duchess.

“The Duke looked at her gravely. ‘Indeed?’ said he. ‘A bad sign at your
age. I must see that you are provided with a sleeping-draught.’

“The Duchess’s eyes filled. ‘You would deprive me, then, of the consolation
of visiting those venerable relics?’

“‘I would have you keep eternal guard over them, knowing no one to whose
care they may more fittingly be entrusted.’

“By this the image was brought close to the wooden slab that covered the
entrance to the crypt, when the Duchess, springing forward, placed herself
in the way.

“‘Sir, let the statue be put in place to-morrow, and suffer me, to-night,
to say a last prayer beside those holy bones.’

“The Duke stepped instantly to her side. ‘Well thought, Madam; I will go
down with you now, and we will pray together.’

“‘Sir, your long absences have, alas! given me the habit of solitary
devotion, and I confess that any presence is distracting.’

“‘Madam, I accept your rebuke. Hitherto, it is true, the duties of my
station have constrained me to long absences; but henceforward I remain
with you while you live. Shall we go down into the crypt together?”

“‘No; for I fear for your excellency’s ague. The air there is excessively
damp.’

“‘The more reason you should no longer be exposed to it; and to prevent the
intemperance of your zeal I will at once make the place inaccessible.’

“The Duchess at this fell on her knees on the slab, weeping excessively and
lifting her hands to heaven.

“‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘you are cruel, sir, to deprive me of access to the
sacred relics that have enabled me to support with resignation the solitude
to which your excellency’s duties have condemned me; and if prayer and
meditation give me any authority to pronounce on such matters, suffer me to
warn you, sir, that I fear the blessed Saint Blandina will punish us for
thus abandoning her venerable remains!’

“The Duke at this seemed to pause, for he was a pious man, and my
grandmother thought she saw him exchange a glance with the chaplain; who,
stepping timidly forward, with his eyes on the ground, said, ‘There is
indeed much wisdom in her excellency’s words, but I would suggest, sir,
that her pious wish might be met, and the saint more conspicuously honored,
by transferring the relics from the crypt to a place beneath the altar.’

“‘True!’ cried the Duke, ‘and it shall be done at once.’

“But thereat the Duchess rose to her feet with a terrible look.

“‘No,’ she cried, ‘by the body of God! For it shall not be said that, after
your excellency has chosen to deny every request I addressed to him, I owe
his consent to the solicitation of another!’

“The chaplain turned red and the Duke yellow, and for a moment neither
spoke.

“Then the Duke said, ‘Here are words enough, Madam. Do you wish the relics
brought up from the crypt?’

“‘I wish nothing that I owe to another’s intervention!’

“‘Put the image in place then,’ says the Duke furiously; and handed her
grace to a chair.

“She sat there, my grandmother said, straight as an arrow, her hands
locked, her head high, her eyes on the Duke, while the statue was dragged
to its place; then she stood up and turned away. As she passed by Nencia,
‘Call me Antonio,’ she whispered; but before the words were out of her
mouth the Duke stepped between them.

“‘Madam,’ says he, all smiles now, ‘I have travelled straight from Rome to
bring you the sooner this proof of my esteem. I lay last night at Monselice
and have been on the road since daybreak. Will you not invite me to
supper?’

“‘Surely, my lord,’ said the Duchess. ‘It shall be laid in the
dining-parlor within the hour.’

“‘Why not in your chamber and at once, Madam? Since I believe it is your
custom to sup there.’

“‘In my chamber?’ says the Duchess, in disorder.

“‘Have you anything against it?’ he asked.

“‘Assuredly not, sir, if you will give me time to prepare myself.’

“‘I will wait in your cabinet,’ said the Duke.

“At that, said my grandmother, the Duchess gave one look, as the souls in
hell may have looked when the gates closed on our Lord; then she called
Nencia and passed to her chamber.

“What happened there my grandmother could never learn, but that the
Duchess, in great haste, dressed herself with extraordinary splendor,
powdering her hair with gold, painting her face and bosom, and covering
herself with jewels till she shone like our Lady of Loreto; and hardly
were these preparations complete when the Duke entered from the cabinet,
followed by the servants carrying supper. Thereupon the Duchess dismissed
Nencia, and what follows my grandmother learned from a pantry-lad who
brought up the dishes and waited in the cabinet; for only the Duke’s
body-servant entered the bed-chamber.

“Well, according to this boy, sir, who was looking and listening with his
whole body, as it were, because he had never before been suffered so near
the Duchess, it appears that the noble couple sat down in great good humor,
the Duchess playfully reproving her husband for his long absence, while the
Duke swore that to look so beautiful was the best way of punishing him.
In this tone the talk continued, with such gay sallies on the part of the
Duchess, such tender advances on the Duke’s, that the lad declared they
were for all the world like a pair of lovers courting on a summer’s night
in the vineyard; and so it went till the servant brought in the mulled
wine.

“‘Ah,’ the Duke was saying at that moment, ‘this agreeable evening repays
me for the many dull ones I have spent away from you; nor do I remember
to have enjoyed such laughter since the afternoon last year when we drank
chocolate in the gazebo with my cousin Ascanio. And that reminds me,’ he
said, ‘is my cousin in good health?’

“‘I have no reports of it,’ says the Duchess. ‘But your excellency should
taste these figs stewed in malmsey--’

“‘I am in the mood to taste whatever you offer,’ said he; and as she helped
him to the figs he added, ‘If my enjoyment were not complete as it is,
I could almost wish my cousin Ascanio were with us. The fellow is rare
good company at supper. What do you say, Madam? I hear he’s still in the
country; shall we send for him to join us?’

“‘Ah,’ said the Duchess, with a sigh and a languishing look, ‘I see your
excellency wearies of me already.’

“‘I, Madam? Ascanio is a capital good fellow, but to my mind his chief
merit at this moment is his absence. It inclines me so tenderly to him
that, by God, I could empty a glass to his good health.’

“With that the Duke caught up his goblet and signed to the servant to fill
the Duchess’s.

“‘Here’s to the cousin,’ he cried, standing, ‘who has the good taste to
stay away when he’s not wanted. I drink to his very long life--and you,
Madam?’

“At this the Duchess, who had sat staring at him with a changed face, rose
also and lifted her glass to her lips.

“‘And I to his happy death,’ says she in a wild voice; and as she spoke the
empty goblet dropped from her hand and she fell face down on the floor.

“The Duke shouted to her women that she had swooned, and they came and
lifted her to the bed.... She suffered horribly all night, Nencia said,
twisting herself like a heretic at the stake, but without a word escaping
her. The Duke watched by her, and toward daylight sent for the chaplain;
but by this she was unconscious and, her teeth being locked, our Lord’s
body could not be passed through them.

       *       *       *       *       *

“The Duke announced to his relations that his lady had died after partaking
too freely of spiced wine and an omelet of carp’s roe, at a supper she had
prepared in honor of his return; and the next year he brought home a new
Duchess, who gave him a son and five daughters....”


V

The sky had turned to a steel gray, against which the villa stood out
sallow and inscrutable. A wind strayed through the gardens, loosening here
and there a yellow leaf from the sycamores; and the hills across the valley
were purple as thunder-clouds.

       *       *       *       *       *

“And the statue--?” I asked.

“Ah, the statue. Well, sir, this is what my grandmother told me, here on
this very bench where we’re sitting. The poor child, who worshipped the
Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress,
spent a night of horror, you may fancy, shut out from her lady’s room,
hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her
corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke’s lean face in
the door, and the chaplain skulking in the antechamber with his eyes on
his breviary. No one minded her that night or the next morning; and toward
dusk, when it became known the Duchess was no more, the poor girl felt the
pious wish to say a prayer for her dead mistress. She crept to the chapel
and stole in unobserved. The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced
she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that
its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you
know--and the moaning seemed to come from its lips. My grandmother turned
cold, but something, she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking
out, and she turned and ran from the place. In the passage she fell in a
swoon; and when she came to her senses, in her own chamber, she heard that
the Duke had locked the chapel door and forbidden any to set foot there....
The place was never opened again till the Duke died, some ten years later;
and then it was that the other servants, going in with the new heir,
saw for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her
bosom....”

“And the crypt?” I asked. “Has it never been opened?”

“Heaven forbid, sir!” cried the old man, crossing himself. “Was it not the
Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?”




THE ANGEL AT THE GRAVE


The House stood a few yards back from the elm-shaded village street,
in that semi-publicity sometimes cited as a democratic protest against
old-world standards of domestic exclusiveness. This candid exposure to
the public eye is more probably a result of the gregariousness which, in
the New England bosom, oddly coexists with a shrinking from direct social
contact; most of the inmates of such houses preferring that furtive
intercourse which is the result of observations through shuttered windows
and a categorical acquaintance with the neighboring clothes-lines. The
House, however, faced its public with a difference. For sixty years it had
written itself with a capital letter, had self-consciously squared itself
in the eye of an admiring nation. The most searching inroads of village
intimacy hardly counted in a household that opened on the universe; and a
lady whose door-bell was at any moment liable to be rung by visitors from
London or Vienna was not likely to flutter up-stairs when she observed a
neighbor “stepping over.”

The solitary inmate of the Anson House owed this induration of the social
texture to the most conspicuous accident in her annals: the fact that she
was the only granddaughter of the great Orestes Anson. She had been born,
as it were, into a museum, and cradled in a glass case with a label;
the first foundations of her consciousness being built on the rock of
her grandfather’s celebrity. To a little girl who acquires her earliest
knowledge of literature through a _Reader_ embellished with fragments
of her ancestor’s prose, that personage necessarily fills an heroic space
in the foreground of life. To communicate with one’s past through the
impressive medium of print, to have, as it were, a footing in every library
in the country, and an acknowledged kinship with that world-diffused clan,
the descendants of the great, was to be pledged to a standard of manners
that amazingly simplified the lesser relations of life. The village street
on which Paulina Anson’s youth looked out led to all the capitals of
Europe; and over the roads of intercommunication unseen caravans bore back
to the elm-shaded House the tribute of an admiring world.

Fate seemed to have taken a direct share in fitting Paulina for her part as
the custodian of this historic dwelling. It had long been secretly regarded
as a “visitation” by the great man’s family that he had left no son and
that his daughters were not “intellectual.” The ladies themselves were the
first to lament their deficiency, to own that nature had denied them the
gift of making the most of their opportunities. A profound veneration for
their parent and an unswerving faith in his doctrines had not amended their
congenital incapacity to understand what he had written. Laura, who had her
moments of mute rebellion against destiny, had sometimes thought how much
easier it would have been if their progenitor had been a poet; for she
could recite, with feeling, portions of _The Culprit Fay_ and of the
poems of Mrs. Hemans; and Phoebe, who was more conspicuous for memory than
imagination, kept an album filled with “selections.” But the great man
was a philosopher; and to both daughters respiration was difficult on the
cloudy heights of metaphysic. The situation would have been intolerable
but for the fact that, while Phoebe and Laura were still at school,
their father’s fame had passed from the open ground of conjecture to the
chill privacy of certitude. Dr. Anson had in fact achieved one of those
anticipated immortalities not uncommon at a time when people were apt to
base their literary judgments on their emotions, and when to affect plain
food and despise England went a long way toward establishing a man’s
intellectual pre-eminence. Thus, when the daughters were called on to
strike a filial attitude about their parent’s pedestal, there was little
to do but to pose gracefully and point upward; and there are spines to
which the immobility of worship is not a strain. A legend had by this time
crystallized about the great Orestes, and it was of more immediate interest
to the public to hear what brand of tea he drank, and whether he took off
his boots in the hall, than to rouse the drowsy echo of his dialectic. A
great man never draws so near his public as when it has become unnecessary
to read his books and is still interesting to know what he eats for
breakfast.

As recorders of their parent’s domestic habits, as pious scavengers of his
waste-paper basket, the Misses Anson were unexcelled. They always had an
interesting anecdote to impart to the literary pilgrim, and the tact with
which, in later years, they intervened between the public and the growing
inaccessibility of its idol, sent away many an enthusiast satisfied to have
touched the veil before the sanctuary. Still it was felt, especially by old
Mrs. Anson, who survived her husband for some years, that Phoebe and Laura
were not worthy of their privileges. There had been a third daughter so
unworthy of hers that she had married a distant cousin, who had taken her
to live in a new Western community where the _Works of Orestes Anson_
had not yet become a part of the civic consciousness; but of this daughter
little was said, and she was tacitly understood to be excluded from the
family heritage of fame. In time, however, it appeared that the traditional
penny with which she had been cut off had been invested to unexpected
advantage; and the interest on it, when she died, returned to the Anson
House in the shape of a granddaughter who was at once felt to be what Mrs.
Anson called a “compensation.” It was Mrs. Anson’s firm belief that the
remotest operations of nature were governed by the centripetal force of her
husband’s greatness and that Paulina’s exceptional intelligence could be
explained only on the ground that she was designed to act as the guardian
of the family temple.

The House, by the time Paulina came to live in it, had already acquired
the publicity of a place of worship; not the perfumed chapel of a romantic
idolatry but the cold clean empty meeting-house of ethical enthusiasms. The
ladies lived on its outskirts, as it were, in cells that left the central
fane undisturbed. The very position of the furniture had come to have a
ritual significance: the sparse ornaments were the offerings of kindred
intellects, the steel engravings by Raphael Morghen marked the Via Sacra
of a European tour, and the black-walnut desk with its bronze inkstand
modelled on the Pantheon was the altar of this bleak temple of thought.

To a child compact of enthusiasms, and accustomed to pasture them on the
scanty herbage of a new social soil, the atmosphere of the old house was
full of floating nourishment. In the compressed perspective of Paulina’s
outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white
portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive
to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw “residence” of a
raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their panelled
walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors
and of ringleted “females” in crayon, furnished the child with the historic
scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the
past. To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have
suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and
sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the
coloring-matter, and Paulina’s brimmed with the richest hues.

Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her. She had her
confused out-reachings toward other centres of sensation, her vague
intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady
pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her
neck to the yoke. Vanity had a share in her subjugation; for it had early
been discovered that she was the only person in the family who could read
her grandfather’s works. The fact that she had perused them with delight at
an age when (even presupposing a metaphysical bias) it was impossible for
her to understand them, seemed to her aunts and grandmother sure evidence
of predestination. Paulina was to be the interpreter of the oracle, and the
philosophic fumes so vertiginous to meaner minds would throw her into the
needed condition of clairvoyance. Nothing could have been more genuine than
the emotion on which this theory was based. Paulina, in fact, delighted in
her grandfather’s writings. His sonorous periods, his mystic vocabulary,
his bold flights into the rarefied air of the abstract, were thrilling to
a fancy unhampered by the need of definitions. This purely verbal pleasure
was supplemented later by the excitement of gathering up crumbs of meaning
from the rhetorical board. What could have been more stimulating than
to construct the theory of a girlish world out of the fragments of this
Titanic cosmogony? Before Paulina’s opinions had reached the stage when
ossification sets in their form was fatally predetermined.

The fact that Dr. Anson had died and that his apotheosis had taken
place before his young priestess’s induction to the temple, made her
ministrations easier and more inspiring. There were no little personal
traits--such as the great man’s manner of helping himself to salt, or the
guttural cluck that started the wheels of speech--to distract the eye
of young veneration from the central fact of his divinity. A man whom
one knows only through a crayon portrait and a dozen yellowing, tomes on
free-will and intuition is at least secure from the belittling effects of
intimacy.

Paulina thus grew up in a world readjusted to the fact of her grandfather’s
greatness; and as each organism draws from its surroundings the kind of
nourishment most needful to its growth, so from this somewhat colorless
conception she absorbed warmth, brightness and variety. Paulina was the
type of woman who transmutes thought into sensation and nurses a theory in
her bosom like a child.

In due course Mrs. Anson “passed away”--no one died in the Anson
vocabulary--and Paulina became more than ever the foremost figure of the
commemorative group. Laura and Phoebe, content to leave their father’s
glory in more competent hands, placidly lapsed into needlework and fiction,
and their niece stepped into immediate prominence as the chief “authority”
on the great man. Historians who were “getting up” the period wrote to
consult her and to borrow documents; ladies with inexplicable yearnings
begged for an interpretation of phrases which had “influenced” them, but
which they had not quite understood; critics applied to her to verify some
doubtful citation or to decide some disputed point in chronology; and the
great tide of thought and investigation kept up a continuous murmur on the
quiet shores of her life.

An explorer of another kind disembarked there one day in the shape
of a young man to whom Paulina was primarily a kissable girl, with an
after-thought in the shape of a grandfather. From the outset it had been
impossible to fix Hewlett Winsloe’s attention on Dr. Anson. The young man
behaved with the innocent profanity of infants sporting on a tomb. His
excuse was that he came from New York, a Cimmerian outskirt which survived
in Paulina’s geography only because Dr. Anson had gone there once or twice
to lecture. The curious thing was that she should have thought it worth
while to find excuses for young Winsloe. The fact that she did so had not
escaped the attention of the village; but people, after a gasp of awe, said
it was the most natural thing in the world that a girl like Paulina Anson
should think of marrying. It would certainly seem a little odd to see a
man in the House, but young Winsloe would of course understand that the
Doctor’s books were not to be disturbed, and that he must go down to the
orchard to smoke--. The village had barely framed this _modus vivendi_
when it was convulsed by the announcement that young Winsloe declined to
live in the House on any terms. Hang going down to the orchard to smoke!
He meant to take his wife to New York. The village drew its breath and
watched.

Did Persephone, snatched from the warm fields of Enna, peer
half-consentingly down the abyss that opened at her feet? Paulina, it must
be owned, hung a moment over the black gulf of temptation. She would have
found it easy to cope with a deliberate disregard of her grandfather’s
rights; but young Winsloe’s unconsciousness of that shadowy claim was as
much a natural function as the falling of leaves on a grave. His love was
an embodiment of the perpetual renewal which to some tender spirits seems a
crueller process than decay.

On women of Paulina’s mould this piety toward implicit demands, toward
the ghosts of dead duties walking unappeased among usurping passions,
has a stronger hold than any tangible bond. People said that she gave up
young Winsloe because her aunts disapproved of her leaving them; but such
disapproval as reached her was an emanation from the walls of the House,
from the bare desk, the faded portraits, the dozen yellowing tomes that no
hand but hers ever lifted from the shelf.


II

After that the House possessed her. As if conscious of its victory, it
imposed a conqueror’s claims. It had once been suggested that she should
write a life of her grandfather, and the task from which she had shrunk as
from a too-oppressive privilege now shaped itself into a justification of
her course. In a burst of filial pantheism she tried to lose herself in the
vast ancestral consciousness. Her one refuge from scepticism was a blind
faith in the magnitude and the endurance of the idea to which she had
sacrificed her life, and with a passionate instinct of self-preservation
she labored to fortify her position.

The preparations for the _Life_ led her through by-ways that the most
scrupulous of the previous biographers had left unexplored. She accumulated
her material with a blind animal patience unconscious of fortuitous risks.
The years stretched before her like some vast blank page spread out to
receive the record of her toil; and she had a mystic conviction that she
would not die till her work was accomplished.

The aunts, sustained by no such high purpose, withdrew in turn to their
respective divisions of the Anson “plot,” and Paulina remained alone with
her task. She was forty when the book was completed. She had travelled
little in her life, and it had become more and more difficult to her to
leave the House even for a day; but the dread of entrusting her document to
a strange hand made her decide to carry it herself to the publisher. On the
way to Boston she had a sudden vision of the loneliness to which this last
parting condemned her. All her youth, all her dreams, all her renunciations
lay in that neat bundle on her knee. It was not so much her grandfather’s
life as her own that she had written; and the knowledge that it would come
back to her in all the glorification of print was of no more help than, to
a mother’s grief, the assurance that the lad she must part with will return
with epaulets.

She had naturally addressed herself to the firm which had published her
grandfather’s works. Its founder, a personal friend of the philosopher’s,
had survived the Olympian group of which he had been a subordinate member,
long enough to bestow his octogenarian approval on Paulina’s pious
undertaking. But he had died soon afterward; and Miss Anson found herself
confronted by his grandson, a person with a brisk commercial view of his
trade, who was said to have put “new blood” into the firm.

This gentleman listened attentively, fingering her manuscript as though
literature were a tactile substance; then, with a confidential twist of his
revolving chair, he emitted the verdict: “We ought to have had this ten
years sooner.”

Miss Anson took the words as an allusion to the repressed avidity of her
readers. “It has been a long time for the public to wait,” she solemnly
assented.

The publisher smiled. “They haven’t waited,” he said.

She looked at him strangely. “Haven’t waited?”

“No--they’ve gone off; taken another train. Literature’s like a big
railway-station now, you know: there’s a train starting every minute.
People are not going to hang round the waiting-room. If they can’t get
to a place when they want to they go somewhere else.”

The application of this parable cost Miss Anson several minutes of
throbbing silence. At length she said: “Then I am to understand that the
public is no longer interested in--in my grandfather?” She felt as though
heaven must blast the lips that risked such a conjecture.

“Well, it’s this way. He’s a name still, of course. People don’t exactly
want to be caught not knowing who he is; but they don’t want to spend
two dollars finding out, when they can look him up for nothing in any
biographical dictionary.”

Miss Anson’s world reeled. She felt herself adrift among mysterious forces,
and no more thought of prolonging the discussion than of opposing an
earthquake with argument. She went home carrying the manuscript like a
wounded thing. On the return journey she found herself travelling straight
toward a fact that had lurked for months in the background of her life,
and that now seemed to await her on the very threshold: the fact that
fewer visitors came to the House. She owned to herself that for the last
four or five years the number had steadily diminished. Engrossed in her
work, she had noted the change only to feel thankful that she had fewer
interruptions. There had been a time when, at the travelling season, the
bell rang continuously, and the ladies of the House lived in a chronic
state of “best silks” and expectancy. It would have been impossible then to
carry on any consecutive work; and she now saw that the silence which had
gathered round her task had been the hush of death.

Not of _his_ death! The very walls cried out against the implication.
It was the world’s enthusiasm, the world’s faith, the world’s loyalty that
had died. A corrupt generation that had turned aside to worship the brazen
serpent. Her heart yearned with a prophetic passion over the lost sheep
straying in the wilderness. But all great glories had their interlunar
period; and in due time her grandfather would once more flash full-orbed
upon a darkling world.

The few friends to whom she confided her adventure reminded her with
tender indignation that there were other publishers less subject to the
fluctuations of the market; but much as she had braved for her grandfather
she could not again brave that particular probation. She found herself,
in fact, incapable of any immediate effort. She had lost her way in a
labyrinth of conjecture where her worst dread was that she might put her
hand upon the clue.

She locked up the manuscript and sat down to wait. If a pilgrim had come
just then the priestess would have fallen on his neck; but she continued
to celebrate her rites alone. It was a double solitude; for she had always
thought a great deal more of the people who came to see the House than of
the people who came to see her. She fancied that the neighbors kept a keen
eye on the path to the House; and there were days when the figure of a
stranger strolling past the gate seemed to focus upon her the scorching
sympathies of the village. For a time she thought of travelling; of going
to Europe, or even to Boston; but to leave the House now would have
seemed like deserting her post. Gradually her scattered energies centred
themselves in the fierce resolve to understand what had happened. She was
not the woman to live long in an unmapped country or to accept as final
her private interpretation of phenomena. Like a traveller in unfamiliar
regions she began to store for future guidance the minutest natural signs.
Unflinchingly she noted the accumulating symptoms of indifference that
marked her grandfather’s descent toward posterity. She passed from the
heights on which he had been grouped with the sages of his day to the lower
level where he had come to be “the friend of Emerson,” “the correspondent
of Hawthorne,” or (later still) “the Dr. Anson” mentioned in their letters.
The change had taken place as slowly and imperceptibly as a natural
process. She could not say that any ruthless hand had stripped the leaves
from the tree: it was simply that, among the evergreen glories of his
group, her grandfather’s had proved deciduous.

She had still to ask herself why. If the decay had been a natural process,
was it not the very pledge of renewal? It was easier to find such arguments
than to be convinced by them. Again and again she tried to drug her
solicitude with analogies; but at last she saw that such expedients were
but the expression of a growing incredulity. The best way of proving her
faith in her grandfather was not to be afraid of his critics. She had no
notion where these shadowy antagonists lurked; for she had never heard of
the great man’s doctrine being directly combated. Oblique assaults there
must have been, however, Parthian shots at the giant that none dared face;
and she thirsted to close with such assailants. The difficulty was to
find them. She began by re-reading the _Works_; thence she passed to
the writers of the same school, those whose rhetoric bloomed perennial
in _First Readers_ from which her grandfather’s prose had long
since faded. Amid that clamor of far-off enthusiasms she detected no
controversial note. The little knot of Olympians held their views in common
with an early-Christian promiscuity. They were continually proclaiming
their admiration for each other, the public joining as chorus in this
guileless antiphon of praise; and she discovered no traitor in their midst.

What then had happened? Was it simply that the main current of thought
had set another way? Then why did the others survive? Why were they still
marked down as tributaries to the philosophic stream? This question carried
her still farther afield, and she pressed on with the passion of a champion
whose reluctance to know the worst might be construed into a doubt of his
cause. At length--slowly but inevitably--an explanation shaped itself.
Death had overtaken the doctrines about which her grandfather had draped
his cloudy rhetoric. They had disintegrated and been re-absorbed, adding
their little pile to the dust drifted about the mute lips of the Sphinx.
The great man’s contemporaries had survived not by reason of what they
taught, but of what they were; and he, who had been the mere mask through
which they mouthed their lesson, the instrument on which their tune was
played, lay buried deep among the obsolete tools of thought.

The discovery came to Paulina suddenly. She looked up one evening from her
reading and it stood before her like a ghost. It had entered her life with
stealthy steps, creeping close before she was aware of it. She sat in the
library, among the carefully-tended books and portraits; and it seemed to
her that she had been walled alive into a tomb hung with the effigies of
dead ideas. She felt a desperate longing to escape into the outer air,
where people toiled and loved, and living sympathies went hand in hand. It
was the sense of wasted labor that oppressed her; of two lives consumed in
that ruthless process that uses generations of effort to build a single
cell. There was a dreary parallel between her grandfather’s fruitless
toil and her own unprofitable sacrifice. Each in turn had kept vigil by a
corpse.


III

The bell rang--she remembered it afterward--with a loud thrilling note. It
was what they used to call the “visitor’s ring”; not the tentative tinkle
of a neighbor dropping in to borrow a sauce-pan or discuss parochial
incidents, but a decisive summons from the outer world.

Miss Anson put down her knitting and listened. She sat up-stairs now,
making her rheumatism an excuse for avoiding the rooms below. Her interests
had insensibly adjusted themselves to the perspective of her neighbors’
lives, and she wondered--as the bell re-echoed--if it could mean that Mrs.
Heminway’s baby had come. Conjecture had time to ripen into certainty, and
she was limping toward the closet where her cloak and bonnet hung, when her
little maid fluttered in with the announcement: “A gentleman to see the
house.”

“The _House_?”

“Yes, m’m. I don’t know what he means,” faltered the messenger, whose
memory did not embrace the period when such announcements were a daily part
of the domestic routine.

Miss Anson glanced at the proffered card. The name it bore--_Mr. George
Corby_--was unknown to her, but the blood rose to her languid cheek.
“Hand me my Mechlin cap, Katy,” she said, trembling a little, as she laid
aside her walking stick. She put her cap on before the mirror, with rapid
unsteady touches. “Did you draw up the library blinds?” she breathlessly
asked.

She had gradually built up a wall of commonplace between herself and her
illusions, but at the first summons of the past filial passion swept away
the frail barriers of expediency.

She walked down-stairs so hurriedly that her stick clicked like a girlish
heel; but in the hall she paused, wondering nervously if Katy had put a
match to the fire. The autumn air was cold and she had the reproachful
vision of a visitor with elderly ailments shivering by her inhospitable
hearth. She thought instinctively of the stranger as a survivor of the days
when such a visit was a part of the young enthusiast’s itinerary.

The fire was unlit and the room forbiddingly cold; but the figure which, as
Miss Anson entered, turned from a lingering scrutiny of the book-shelves,
was that of a fresh-eyed sanguine youth clearly independent of any
artificial caloric. She stood still a moment, feeling herself the victim of
some anterior impression that made this robust presence an insubstantial
thing; but the young man advanced with an air of genial assurance which
rendered him at once more real and more reminiscent.

“Why this, you know,” he exclaimed, “is simply immense!”

The words, which did not immediately present themselves as slang to Miss
Anson’s unaccustomed ear, echoed with an odd familiarity through the
academic silence.

“The room, you know, I mean,” he explained with a comprehensive gesture.
“These jolly portraits, and the books--that’s the old gentleman himself
over the mantelpiece, I suppose?--and the elms outside, and--and the whole
business. I do like a congruous background--don’t you?”

His hostess was silent. No one but Hewlett Winsloe had ever spoken of her
grandfather as “the old gentleman.”

“It’s a hundred times better than I could have hoped,” her visitor
continued, with a cheerful disregard of her silence. “The seclusion, the
remoteness, the philosophic atmosphere--there’s so little of that kind
of flavor left! I should have simply hated to find that he lived over
a grocery, you know.--I had the deuce of a time finding out where he
_did_ live,” he began again, after another glance of parenthetical
enjoyment. “But finally I got on the trail through some old book on Brook
Farm. I was bound I’d get the environment right before I did my article.”

Miss Anson, by this time, had recovered sufficient self-possession to seat
herself and assign a chair to her visitor.

“Do I understand,” she asked slowly, following his rapid eye about the
room, “that you intend to write an article about my grandfather?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Mr. Corby genially responded; “that is, if
you’re willing to help me; for I can’t get on without your help,” he added
with a confident smile.

There was another pause, during which Miss Anson noticed a fleck of dust on
the faded leather of the writing-table and a fresh spot of discoloration in
the right-hand upper corner of Raphael Morghen’s “Parnassus.”

“Then you believe in him?” she said, looking up. She could not tell what
had prompted her; the words rushed out irresistibly.

“Believe in him?” Corby cried, springing to his feet. “Believe in Orestes
Anson? Why, I believe he’s simply the greatest--the most stupendous--the
most phenomenal figure we’ve got!”

The color rose to Miss Anson’s brow. Her heart was beating passionately.
She kept her eyes fixed on the young man’s face, as though it might vanish
if she looked away.

“You--you mean to say this in your article?” she asked.

“Say it? Why, the facts will say it,” he exulted. “The baldest kind of a
statement would make it clear. When a man is as big as that he doesn’t need
a pedestal!”

Miss Anson sighed. “People used to say that when I was young,” she
murmured. “But now--“

Her visitor stared. “When you were young? But how did they know--when the
thing hung fire as it did? When the whole edition was thrown back on his
hands?”

“The whole edition--what edition?” It was Miss Anson’s turn to stare.

“Why, of his pamphlet--_the_ pamphlet--the one thing that counts, that
survives, that makes him what he is! For heaven’s sake,” he tragically
adjured her, “don’t tell me there isn’t a copy of it left!”

Miss Anson was trembling slightly. “I don’t think I understand what you
mean,” she faltered, less bewildered by his vehemence than by the strange
sense of coming on an unexplored region in the very heart of her dominion.

“Why, his account of the _amphioxus_, of course! You can’t mean that
his family didn’t know about it--that _you_ don’t know about it? I came
across it by the merest accident myself, in a letter of vindication that
he wrote in 1830 to an old scientific paper; but I understood there were
journals--early journals; there must be references to it somewhere in the
‘twenties. He must have been at least ten or twelve years ahead of Yarrell;
and he saw the whole significance of it, too--he saw where it led to. As
I understand it, he actually anticipated in his pamphlet Saint Hilaire’s
theory of the universal type, and supported the hypothesis by describing
the notochord of the _amphioxus_ as a cartilaginous vertebral column.
The specialists of the day jeered at him, of course, as the specialists in
Goethe’s time jeered at the plant-metamorphosis. As far as I can make out,
the anatomists and zoologists were down on Dr. Anson to a man; that was why
his cowardly publishers went back on their bargain. But the pamphlet must
be here somewhere--he writes as though, in his first disappointment, he had
destroyed the whole edition; but surely there must be at least one copy
left?”

His scientific jargon was as bewildering as his slang; and there were even
moments in his discourse when Miss Anson ceased to distinguish between
them; but the suspense with which he continued to gaze on her acted as a
challenge to her scattered thoughts.

“The _amphioxus_,” she murmured, half-rising. “It’s an animal, isn’t
it--a fish? Yes, I think I remember.” She sank back with the inward look of
one who retraces some lost line of association.

Gradually the distance cleared, the details started into life. In her
researches for the biography she had patiently followed every ramification
of her subject, and one of these overgrown paths now led her back to
the episode in question. The great Orestes’s title of “Doctor” had in
fact not been merely the spontaneous tribute of a national admiration;
he had actually studied medicine in his youth, and his diaries, as his
granddaughter now recalled, showed that he had passed through a brief phase
of anatomical ardor before his attention was diverted to super-sensual
problems. It had indeed seemed to Paulina, as she scanned those early
pages, that they revealed a spontaneity, a freshness of feeling somehow
absent from his later lucubrations--as though this one emotion had reached
him directly, the others through some intervening medium. In the excess of
her commemorative zeal she had even struggled through the unintelligible
pamphlet to which a few lines in the journal had bitterly directed her. But
the subject and the phraseology were alien to her and unconnected with her
conception of the great man’s genius; and after a hurried perusal she had
averted her thoughts from the episode as from a revelation of failure.
At length she rose a little unsteadily, supporting herself against the
writing-table. She looked hesitatingly about the room; then she drew a key
from her old-fashioned reticule and unlocked a drawer beneath one of the
book-cases. Young Corby watched her breathlessly. With a tremulous hand she
turned over the dusty documents that seemed to fill the drawer. “Is this
it?” she said, holding out a thin discolored volume.

He seized it with a gasp. “Oh, by George,” he said, dropping into the
nearest chair.

She stood observing him strangely as his eye devoured the mouldy pages.

“Is this the only copy left?” he asked at length, looking up for a moment
as a thirsty man lifts his head from his glass.

“I think it must be. I found it long ago, among some old papers that my
aunts were burning up after my grandmother’s death. They said it was of no
use--that he’d always meant to destroy the whole edition and that I ought
to respect his wishes. But it was something he had written; to burn it was
like shutting the door against his voice--against something he had once
wished to say, and that nobody had listened to. I wanted him to feel that I
was always here, ready to listen, even when others hadn’t thought it worth
while; and so I kept the pamphlet, meaning to carry out his wish and
destroy it before my death.”

Her visitor gave a groan of retrospective anguish. “And but for me--but for
to-day--you would have?”

“I should have thought it my duty.”

“Oh, by George--by George,” he repeated, subdued afresh by the inadequacy
of speech.

She continued to watch him in silence. At length he jumped up and
impulsively caught her by both hands.

“He’s bigger and bigger!” he almost shouted. “He simply leads the field!
You’ll help me go to the bottom of this, won’t you? We must turn out all
the papers--letters, journals, memoranda. He must have made notes. He
must have left some record of what led up to this. We must leave nothing
unexplored. By Jove,” he cried, looking up at her with his bright
convincing smile, “do you know you’re the granddaughter of a Great Man?”

Her color flickered like a girl’s. “Are you--sure of him?” she whispered,
as though putting him on his guard against a possible betrayal of trust.

“Sure! Sure! My dear lady--“ he measured her again with his quick confident
glance. “Don’t _you_ believe in him?”

She drew back with a confused murmur. “I--used to.” She had left her
hands in his: their pressure seemed to send a warm current to her heart.
“It ruined my life!” she cried with sudden passion. He looked at her
perplexedly.

“I gave up everything,” she went on wildly, “to keep him alive. I
sacrificed myself--others--I nursed his glory in my bosom and it died--and
left me--left me here alone.” She paused and gathered her courage with a
gasp. “Don’t make the same mistake!” she warned him.

He shook his head, still smiling. “No danger of that! You’re not alone, my
dear lady. He’s here with you--he’s come back to you to-day. Don’t you see
what’s happened? Don’t you see that it’s your love that has kept him alive?
If you’d abandoned your post for an instant--let things pass into other
hands--if your wonderful tenderness hadn’t perpetually kept guard--this
might have been--must have been--irretrievably lost.” He laid his hand on
the pamphlet. “And then--then he _would_ have been dead!”

“Oh,” she said, “don’t tell me too suddenly!” And she turned away and sank
into a chair.

The young man stood watching her in an awed silence. For a long time she
sat motionless, with her face hidden, and he thought she must be weeping.

At length he said, almost shyly: “You’ll let me come back, then? You’ll
help me work this thing out?”

She rose calmly and held out her hand. “I’ll help you,” she declared.

“I’ll come to-morrow, then. Can we get to work early?”

“As early as you please.”

“At eight o’clock, then,” he said briskly. “You’ll have the papers ready?”

“I’ll have everything ready.” She added with a half-playful hesitancy: “And
the fire shall be lit for you.”

He went out with his bright nod. She walked to the window and watched his
buoyant figure hastening down the elm-shaded street. When she turned back
into the empty room she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips.




THE RECOVERY


To the visiting stranger Hillbridge’s first question was, “Have you seen
Keniston’s things?” Keniston took precedence of the colonial State House,
the Gilbert Stuart Washington and the Ethnological Museum; nay, he ran neck
and neck with the President of the University, a prehistoric relic who had
known Emerson, and who was still sent about the country in cotton-wool to
open educational institutions with a toothless oration on Brook Farm.

Keniston was sent about the country too: he opened art exhibitions, laid
the foundation of academies, and acted in a general sense as the spokesman
and apologist of art. Hillbridge was proud of him in his peripatetic
character, but his fellow-townsmen let it be understood that to “know”
Keniston one must come to Hillbridge. Never was work more dependent for its
effect on “atmosphere,” on _milieu_. Hillbridge was Keniston’s milieu,
and there was one lady, a devotee of his art, who went so far as to assert
that once, at an exhibition in New York, she had passed a Keniston without
recognizing it. “It simply didn’t want to be seen in such surroundings; it
was hiding itself under an incognito,” she declared.

It was a source of special pride to Hillbridge that it contained all the
artist’s best works. Strangers were told that Hillbridge had discovered
him. The discovery had come about in the simplest manner. Professor
Driffert, who had a reputation for “collecting,” had one day hung a sketch
on his drawing-room wall, and thereafter Mrs. Driffert’s visitors (always
a little flurried by the sense that it was the kind of house in which one
might be suddenly called upon to distinguish between a dry-point and an
etching, or between Raphael Mengs and Raphael Sanzio) were not infrequently
subjected to the Professor’s off-hand inquiry, “By-the-way, have you seen
my Keniston?” The visitors, perceptibly awed, would retreat to a critical
distance and murmur the usual guarded generalities, while they tried to
keep the name in mind long enough to look it up in the Encyclopædia. The
name was not in the Encyclopædia; but, as a compensating fact, it became
known that the man himself was in Hillbridge. Hillbridge, then, owned an
artist whose celebrity it was the proper thing to take for granted! Some
one else, emboldened by the thought, bought a Keniston; and the next
year, on the occasion of the President’s golden jubilee, the Faculty, by
unanimous consent, presented him with a Keniston. Two years later there
was a Keniston exhibition, to which the art-critics came from New York
and Boston; and not long afterward a well-known Chicago collector vainly
attempted to buy Professor Driffert’s sketch, which the art journals cited
as a rare example of the painter’s first or silvery manner. Thus there
gradually grew up a small circle of connoisseurs known in artistic, circles
as men who collected Kenistons.

Professor Wildmarsh, of the chair of Fine Arts and Archaeology, was the
first critic to publish a detailed analysis of the master’s methods and
purpose. The article was illustrated by engravings which (though they had
cost the magazine a fortune) were declared by Professor Wildmarsh to give
but an imperfect suggestion of the esoteric significance of the originals.
The Professor, with a tact that contrived to make each reader feel himself
included among the exceptions, went on to say that Keniston’s work would
never appeal to any but exceptional natures; and he closed with the usual
assertion that to apprehend the full meaning of the master’s “message” it
was necessary to see him in the surroundings of his own home at Hillbridge.

Professor Wildmarsh’s article was read one spring afternoon by a young
lady just speeding eastward on her first visit to Hillbridge, and already
flushed with anticipation of the intellectual opportunities awaiting her.
In East Onondaigua, where she lived, Hillbridge was looked on as an Oxford.
Magazine writers, with the easy American use of the superlative, designated
it as “the venerable Alma Mater,” the “antique seat of learning,” and
Claudia Day had been brought up to regard it as the fountain-head of
knowledge, and of that mental distinction which is so much rarer than
knowledge. An innate passion for all that was thus distinguished and
exceptional made her revere Hillbridge as the native soil of those
intellectual amenities that were of such difficult growth in the
thin air of East Onondaigua. At the first suggestion of a visit to
Hillbridge--whither she went at the invitation of a girl friend
who (incredible apotheosis!) had married one of the University
professors--Claudia’s spirit dilated with the sense of new possibilities.
The vision of herself walking under the “historic elms” toward the Memorial
Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in,
from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President’s
reminiscences of the Concord group--this vividness of self-projection into
the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so
exquisite a moment.

It was in this mood that she opened the article on Keniston. She knew about
him, of course; she was wonderfully “well up,” even for East Onondaigua.
She had read of him in the magazines; she had met, on a visit to New York,
a man who collected Kenistons, and a photogravure of a Keniston in an
“artistic” frame hung above her writing-table at home. But Professor
Wildmarsh’s article made her feel how little she really knew of the master;
and she trembled to think of the state of relative ignorance in which, but
for the timely purchase of the magazine, she might have entered Hillbridge.
She had, for instance, been densely unaware that Keniston had already had
three “manners,” and was showing symptoms of a fourth. She was equally
ignorant of the fact that he had founded a school and “created a formula”;
and she learned with a thrill that no one could hope to understand him who
had not seen him in his studio at Hillbridge, surrounded by his own works.
“The man and the art interpret each other,” their exponent declared; and
Claudia Day, bending a brilliant eye on the future, wondered if she were
ever to be admitted to the privilege of that double initiation.

Keniston, to his other claims to distinction, added that of being hard to
know. His friends always hastened to announce the fact to strangers--adding
after a pause of suspense that they “would see what they could do.”
Visitors in whose favor he was induced to make an exception were further
warned that he never spoke unless he was interested--so that they mustn’t
mind if he remained silent. It was under these reassuring conditions that,
some ten days after her arrival at Hillbridge, Miss Day was introduced
to the master’s studio. She found him a tall listless-looking man, who
appeared middle-aged to her youth, and who stood before his own pictures
with a vaguely interrogative gaze, leaving the task of their interpretation
to the lady who had courageously contrived the visit. The studio, to
Claudia’s surprise, was bare and shabby. It formed a rambling addition to
the small cheerless house in which the artist lived with his mother and
a widowed sister. For Claudia it added the last touch to his distinction
to learn that he was poor, and that what he earned was devoted to the
maintenance of the two limp women who formed a neutral-tinted background to
his impressive outline. His pictures of course fetched high prices; but he
worked slowly--“painfully,” as his devotees preferred to phrase it--with
frequent intervals of ill health and inactivity, and the circle of Keniston
connoisseurs was still as small as it was distinguished. The girl’s fancy
instantly hailed in him that favorite figure of imaginative youth, the
artist who would rather starve than paint a pot-boiler. It is known to
comparatively few that the production of successful pot-boilers is an art
in itself, and that such heroic abstentions as Keniston’s are not always
purely voluntary. On the occasion of her first visit the artist said so
little that Claudia was able to indulge to the full the harrowing sense of
her inadequacy. No wonder she had not been one of the few that he cared
to talk to; every word she uttered must so obviously have diminished the
inducement! She had been cheap, trivial, conventional; at once gushing
and inexpressive, eager and constrained. She could feel him counting the
minutes till the visit was over, and as the door finally closed on the
scene of her discomfiture she almost shared the hope with which she
confidently credited him--that they might never meet again.


II

Mrs. Davant glanced reverentially about the studio. “I have always said,”
she murmured, “that they ought to be seen in Europe.”

Mrs. Davant was young, credulous and emotionally extravagant: she reminded
Claudia of her earlier self--the self that, ten years before, had first set
an awestruck foot on that very threshold.

“Not for _his_ sake,” Mrs. Davant continued, “but for Europe’s.”

Claudia smiled. She was glad that her husband’s pictures were to be
exhibited in Paris. She concurred in Mrs. Davant’s view of the importance
of the event; but she thought her visitor’s way of putting the case a
little overcharged. Ten years spent in an atmosphere of Keniston-worship
had insensibly developed in Claudia a preference for moderation of speech.
She believed in her husband, of course; to believe in him, with an
increasing abandonment and tenacity, had become one of the necessary laws
of being; but she did not believe in his admirers. Their faith in him was
perhaps as genuine as her own; but it seemed to her less able to give an
account of itself. Some few of his appreciators doubtless measured him
by their own standards; but it was difficult not to feel that in the
Hillbridge circle, where rapture ran the highest, he was accepted on
what was at best but an indirect valuation; and now and then she had a
frightened doubt as to the independence of her own convictions. That
innate sense of relativity which even East Onondaigua had not been able to
check in Claudia Day had been fostered in Mrs. Keniston by the artistic
absolutism of Hillbridge, and she often wondered that her husband remained
so uncritical of the quality of admiration accorded him. Her husband’s
uncritical attitude toward himself and his admirers had in fact been one of
the surprises of her marriage. That an artist should believe in his
potential powers seemed to her at once the incentive and the pledge of
excellence: she knew there was no future for a hesitating talent. What
perplexed her was Keniston’s satisfaction in his achievement. She had
always imagined that the true artist must regard himself as the imperfect
vehicle of the cosmic emotion--that beneath every difficulty overcome a new
one lurked, the vision widening as the scope enlarged. To be initiated into
these creative struggles, to shed on the toiler’s path the consolatory ray
of faith and encouragement, had seemed the chief privilege of her marriage.
But there is something supererogatory in believing in a man obviously
disposed to perform that service for himself; and Claudia’s ardor gradually
spent itself against the dense surface of her husband’s complacency. She
could smile now at her vision of an intellectual communion which should
admit her to the inmost precincts of his inspiration. She had learned
that the creative processes are seldom self-explanatory, and Keniston’s
inarticulateness no longer discouraged her; but she could not reconcile
her sense of the continuity of all high effort to his unperturbed air
of finishing each picture as though he had despatched a masterpiece to
posterity. In the first recoil from her disillusionment she even allowed
herself to perceive that, if he worked slowly, it was not because he
mistrusted his powers of expression, but because he had really so little to
express.

“It’s for Europe,” Mrs. Davant vaguely repeated; and Claudia noticed that
she was blushingly intent on tracing with the tip of her elaborate sunshade
the pattern of the shabby carpet.

“It will be a revelation to them,” she went on provisionally, as though
Claudia had missed her cue and left an awkward interval to fill.

Claudia had in fact a sudden sense of deficient intuition. She felt that
her visitor had something to communicate which required, on her own part,
an intelligent co-operation; but what it was her insight failed to suggest.
She was, in truth, a little tired of Mrs. Davant, who was Keniston’s latest
worshipper, who ordered pictures recklessly, who paid for them regally
in advance, and whose gallery was, figuratively speaking, crowded with
the artist’s unpainted masterpieces. Claudia’s impatience was perhaps
complicated by the uneasy sense that Mrs. Davant was too young, too rich,
too inexperienced; that somehow she ought to be warned.--Warned of what?
That some of the pictures might never be painted? Scarcely that, since
Keniston, who was scrupulous in business transactions, might be trusted not
to take any material advantage of such evidence of faith. Claudia’s impulse
remained undefined. She merely felt that she would have liked to help Mrs.
Davant, and that she did not know how.

“You’ll be there to see them?” she asked, as her visitor lingered.

“In Paris?” Mrs. Davant’s blush deepened. “We must all be there together.”

Claudia smiled. “My husband and I mean to go abroad some day--but I don’t
see any chance of it at present.”

“But he _ought_ to go--you ought both to go this summer!” Mrs. Davant
persisted. “I know Professor Wildmarsh and Professor Driffert and all the
other critics think that Mr. Keniston’s never having been to Europe has
given his work much of its wonderful individuality, its peculiar flavor
and meaning--but now that his talent is formed, that he has full command
of his means of expression,” (Claudia recognized one of Professor
Driffert’s favorite formulas) “they all think he ought to see the work of
the _other_ great masters--that he ought to visit the home of his
ancestors, as Professor Wildmarsh says!” She stretched an impulsive hand to
Claudia. “You ought to let him go, Mrs. Keniston!”

Claudia accepted the admonition with the philosophy of the wife who is used
to being advised on the management of her husband. “I sha’n’t interfere
with him,” she declared; and Mrs. Davant instantly caught her up with a cry
of, “Oh, it’s too lovely of you to say that!” With this exclamation she
left Claudia to a silent renewal of wonder.

A moment later Keniston entered: to a mind curious in combinations it
might have occurred that he had met Mrs. Davant on the door-step. In one
sense he might, for all his wife cared, have met fifty Mrs. Davants on the
door-step: it was long since Claudia had enjoyed the solace of resenting
such coincidences. Her only thought now was that her husband’s first words
might not improbably explain Mrs. Davant’s last; and she waited for him to
speak.

He paused with his hands in his pockets before an unfinished picture on the
easel; then, as his habit was, he began to stroll touristlike from canvas
to canvas, standing before each in a musing ecstasy of contemplation that
no readjustment of view ever seemed to disturb. Her eye instinctively
joined his in its inspection; it was the one point where their natures
merged. Thank God, there, was no doubt about the pictures! She was what she
had always dreamed of being--the wife of a great artist. Keniston dropped
into an armchair and filled his pipe. “How should you like to go to
Europe?” he asked.

His wife looked up quickly. “When?”

“Now--this spring, I mean.” He paused to light the pipe. “I should like to
be over there while these things are being exhibited.”

Claudia was silent.

“Well?” he repeated after a moment.

“How can we afford it?” she asked.

Keniston had always scrupulously fulfilled his duty to the mother and
sister whom his marriage had dislodged; and Claudia, who had the atoning
temperament which seeks to pay for every happiness by making it a source
of fresh obligations, had from the outset accepted his ties with an
exaggerated devotion. Any disregard of such a claim would have vulgarized
her most delicate pleasures; and her husband’s sensitiveness to it in great
measure extenuated the artistic obtuseness that often seemed to her like a
failure of the moral sense. His loyalty to the dull women who depended on
him was, after all, compounded of finer tissues than any mere sensibility
to ideal demands.

“Oh, I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” he rejoined. “I think we might manage
it.”

“At Mrs. Davant’s expense?” leaped from Claudia. She could not tell why she
had said it; some inner barrier seemed to have given way under a confused
pressure of emotions.

He looked up at her with frank surprise. “Well, she has been very jolly
about it--why not? She has a tremendous feeling for art--the keenest I
ever knew in a woman.” Claudia imperceptibly smiled. “She wants me to let
her pay in advance for the four panels she has ordered for the Memorial
Library. That would give us plenty of money for the trip, and my having the
panels to do is another reason for my wanting to go abroad just now.”

“Another reason?”

“Yes; I’ve never worked on such a big scale. I want to see how those old
chaps did the trick; I want to measure myself with the big fellows over
there. An artist ought to, once in his life.”

She gave him a wondering look. For the first time his words implied a sense
of possible limitation; but his easy tone seemed to retract what they
conceded. What he really wanted was fresh food for his self-satisfaction:
he was like an army that moves on after exhausting the resources of the
country.

Womanlike, she abandoned the general survey of the case for the
consideration of a minor point.

“Are you sure you can do that kind of thing?” she asked.

“What kind of thing?”

“The panels.”

He glanced at her indulgently: his self-confidence was too impenetrable to
feel the pin-prick of such a doubt.

“Immensely sure,” he said with a smile.

“And you don’t mind taking so much money from her in advance?”

He stared. “Why should I? She’ll get it back--with interest!” He laughed
and drew at his pipe. “It will be an uncommonly interesting experience. I
shouldn’t wonder if it freshened me up a bit.”

She looked at him again. This second hint of self-distrust struck her as
the sign of a quickened sensibility. What if, after all, he was beginning
to be dissatisfied with his work? The thought filled her with a renovating
sense of his sufficiency.


III

They stopped in London to see the National Gallery.

It was thus that, in their inexperience, they had narrowly put it; but in
reality every stone of the streets, every trick of the atmosphere, had
its message of surprise for their virgin sensibilities. The pictures were
simply the summing up, the final interpretation, of the cumulative pressure
of an unimagined world; and it seemed to Claudia that long before they
reached the doors of the gallery she had some intuitive revelation of what
awaited them within.

They moved about from room to room without exchanging a word. The vast
noiseless spaces seemed full of sound, like the roar of a distant multitude
heard only by the inner ear. Had their speech been articulate their
language would have been incomprehensible; and even that far-off murmur
of meaning pressed intolerably on Claudia’s nerves. Keniston took the
onset without outward sign of disturbance. Now and then he paused before a
canvas, or prolonged from one of the benches his silent communion with some
miracle of line or color; but he neither looked at his wife nor spoke to
her. He seemed to have forgotten her presence.

Claudia was conscious of keeping a furtive watch on him; but the sum total
of her impressions was negative. She remembered thinking when she first
met him that his face was rather expressionless; and he had the habit of
self-engrossed silences.

All that evening, at the hotel, they talked about London, and he surprised
her by an acuteness of observation that she had sometimes inwardly accused
him of lacking. He seemed to have seen everything, to have examined, felt,
compared, with nerves as finely adjusted as her own; but he said nothing
of the pictures. The next day they returned to the National Gallery, and
he began to study the paintings in detail, pointing out differences of
technique, analyzing and criticising, but still without summing up his
conclusions. He seemed to have a sort of provincial dread of showing
himself too much impressed. Claudia’s own sensations were too complex, too
overwhelming, to be readily classified. Lacking the craftsman’s instinct to
steady her, she felt herself carried off her feet by the rush of incoherent
impressions. One point she consciously avoided, and that was the comparison
of her husband’s work with what they were daily seeing. Art, she inwardly
argued, was too various, too complex, dependent on too many inter-relations
of feeling and environment, to allow of its being judged by any provisional
standard. Even the subtleties of technique must be modified by the artist’s
changing purpose, as this in turn is acted on by influences of which
he is himself unconscious. How, then, was an unprepared imagination to
distinguish between such varied reflections of the elusive vision? She took
refuge in a passionate exaggeration of her own ignorance and insufficiency.

After a week in London they went to Paris. The exhibition of Keniston’s
pictures had been opened a few days earlier; and as they drove through the
streets on the way to the station an “impressionist” poster here and there
invited them to the display of the American artist’s work. Mrs. Davant, who
had been in Paris for the opening, had already written rapturously of the
impression produced, enclosing commendatory notices from one or two papers.
She reported that there had been a great crowd on the first day, and that
the critics had been “immensely struck.”

The Kenistons arrived in the evening, and the next morning Claudia, as a
matter of course, asked her husband at what time he meant to go and see the
pictures.

He looked up absently from his guide-book.

“What pictures?”

“Why--yours,” she said, surprised.

“Oh, they’ll keep,” he answered; adding with a slightly embarrassed laugh,
“We’ll give the other chaps a show first.” Presently he laid down his book
and proposed that they should go to the Louvre.

They spent the morning there, lunched at a restaurant near by, and returned
to the gallery in the afternoon. Keniston had passed from inarticulateness
to an eager volubility. It was clear that he was beginning to co-ordinate
his impressions, to find his way about in a corner of the great imaginative
universe. He seemed extraordinarily ready to impart his discoveries; and
Claudia felt that her ignorance served him as a convenient buffer against
the terrific impact of new sensations.

On the way home she asked when he meant to see Mrs. Davant.

His answer surprised her. “Does she know we’re here?”

“Not unless you’ve sent her word,” said Claudia, with a touch of harmless
irony.

“That’s all right, then,” he returned simply. “I want to wait and look
about a day or two longer. She’d want us to go sight-seeing with her; and
I’d rather get my impressions alone.”

The next two days were hampered by the necessity of eluding Mrs. Davant.
Claudia, under different circumstances, would have scrupled to share in
this somewhat shabby conspiracy; but she found herself in a state of
suspended judgment, wherein her husband’s treatment of Mrs. Davant became
for the moment merely a clue to larger meanings.

They had been four days in Paris when Claudia, returning one afternoon from
a parenthetical excursion to the Rue de la Paix, was confronted on her
threshold by the reproachful figure of their benefactress. It was not to
her, however, that Mrs. Davant’s reproaches were addressed. Keniston, it
appeared, had borne the brunt of them; for he stood leaning against the
mantelpiece of their modest _salon_ in that attitude of convicted
negligence when, if ever, a man is glad to take refuge behind his wife.

Claudia had however no immediate intention of affording him such shelter.
She wanted to observe and wait.

“He’s too impossible!” cried Mrs. Davant, sweeping her at once into the
central current of her grievance.

Claudia looked from one to the other.

“For not going to see you?”

“For not going to see his pictures!” cried the other nobly.

Claudia colored and Keniston shifted his position uneasily.

“I can’t make her understand,” he said, turning to his wife.

“I don’t care about myself!” Mrs. Davant interjected.

“_I_ do, then; it’s the only thing I do care about,” he hurriedly
protested. “I meant to go at once--to write--Claudia wanted to go, but I
wouldn’t let her.” He looked helplessly about the pleasant red-curtained
room, which was rapidly burning itself into Claudia’s consciousness as a
visible extension of Mrs. Davant’s claims.

“I can’t explain,” he broke off.

Mrs. Davant in turn addressed herself to Claudia.

“People think it’s so odd,” she complained. “So many of the artists
here are anxious to meet him; they’ve all been so charming about the
pictures; and several of our American friends have come over from London
expressly for the exhibition. I told every one that he would be here
for the opening--there was a private view, you know--and they were so
disappointed--they wanted to give him an ovation; and I didn’t know what
to say. What _am_ I to say?” she abruptly ended.

“There’s nothing to say,” said Keniston slowly.

“But the exhibition closes the day after to-morrow.”

“Well, _I_ sha’n’t close--I shall be here,” he declared with an effort
at playfulness. “If they want to see me--all these people you’re kind
enough to mention--won’t there be other chances?”

“But I wanted them to see you _among_ your pictures--to hear you talk
about them, explain them in that wonderful way. I wanted you to interpret
each other, as Professor Wildmarsh says!”

“Oh, hang Professor Wildmarsh!” said Keniston, softening the commination
with a smile. “If my pictures are good for anything they oughtn’t to need
explaining.”

Mrs. Davant stared. “But I thought that was what made them so interesting!”
she exclaimed.

Keniston looked down. “Perhaps it was,” he murmured.

There was an awkward silence, which Claudia broke by saying, with a glance
at her husband: “But if the exhibition is to remain open to-morrow, could
we not meet you there? And perhaps you could send word to some of our
friends.”

Mrs. Davant brightened like a child whose broken toy is glued together.
“Oh, _do_ make him!” she implored. “I’ll ask them to come in the
afternoon--we’ll make it into a little tea--a _five o’clock_. I’ll
send word at once to everybody!” She gathered up her beruffled boa and
sunshade, settling her plumage like a reassured bird. “It will be too
lovely!” she ended in a self-consoling murmur.

But in the doorway a new doubt assailed her. “You won’t fail me?” she said,
turning plaintively to Keniston. “You’ll make him come, Mrs. Keniston?”

“I’ll bring him!” Claudia promised.


IV

When, the next morning, she appeared equipped for their customary ramble,
her husband surprised her by announcing that he meant to stay at home.

“The fact is I’m rather surfeited,” he said, smiling. “I suppose my
appetite isn’t equal to such a plethora. I think I’ll write some letters
and join you somewhere later.”

She detected the wish to be alone and responded to it with her usual
readiness.

“I shall sink to my proper level and buy a bonnet, then,” she said. “I
haven’t had time to take the edge off that appetite.”

They agreed to meet at the Hotel Cluny at mid-day, and she set out alone
with a vague sense of relief. Neither she nor Keniston had made any direct
reference to Mrs. Davant’s visit; but its effect was implicit in their
eagerness to avoid each other.

Claudia accomplished some shopping in the spirit of perfunctoriness that
robs even new bonnets of their bloom; and this business despatched, she
turned aimlessly into the wide inviting brightness of the streets. Never
had she felt more isolated amid that ordered beauty which gives a social
quality to the very stones and mortar of Paris. All about her were
evidences of an artistic sensibility pervading every form of life like the
nervous structure of the huge frame--a sensibility so delicate, alert and
universal that it seemed to leave no room for obtuseness or error. In such
a medium the faculty of plastic expression must develop as unconsciously
as any organ in its normal surroundings; to be “artistic” must cease to be
an attitude and become a natural function. To Claudia the significance of
the whole vast revelation was centred in the light it shed on one tiny
spot of consciousness--the value of her husband’s work. There are moments
when to the groping soul the world’s accumulated experiences are but
stepping-stones across a private difficulty.

She stood hesitating on a street corner. It was barely eleven, and she had
an hour to spare before going to the Hotel Cluny. She seemed to be letting
her inclination float as it would on the cross-currents of suggestion
emanating from the brilliant complex scene before her; but suddenly, in
obedience to an impulse that she became aware of only in acting on it, she
called a cab and drove to the gallery where her husband’s pictures were
exhibited.

A magnificent official in gold braid sold her a ticket and pointed the way
up the empty crimson-carpeted stairs. His duplicate, on the upper landing,
held out a catalogue with an air of recognizing the futility of the offer;
and a moment later she found herself in the long noiseless impressive room
full of velvet-covered ottomans and exotic plants. It was clear that the
public ardor on which Mrs. Davant had expatiated had spent itself earlier
in the week; for Claudia had this luxurious apartment to herself. Something
about its air of rich privacy, its diffusion of that sympathetic quality in
other countries so conspicuously absent from the public show-room, seemed
to emphasize its present emptiness. It was as though the flowers, the
carpet, the lounges, surrounded their visitor’s solitary advance with
the mute assurance that they had done all they could toward making the
thing “go off,” and that if they had failed it was simply for lack of
co-operation. She stood still and looked about her. The pictures struck her
instantly as odd gaps in the general harmony; it was self-evident that they
had not co-operated. They had not been pushing, aggressive, discordant:
they had merely effaced themselves. She swept a startled eye from one
familiar painting to another. The canvases were all there--and the
frames--but the miracle, the mirage of life and meaning, had vanished
like some atmospheric illusion. What was it that had happened? And had
it happened to _her_ or to the pictures? She tried to rally her
frightened thoughts; to push or coax them into a semblance of resistance;
but argument was swept off its feet by the huge rush of a single
conviction--the conviction that the pictures were bad. There was no
standing up against that: she felt herself submerged.

The stealthy fear that had been following her all these days had her by the
throat now. The great vision of beauty through which she had been moving
as one enchanted was turned to a phantasmagoria of evil mocking shapes.
She hated the past; she hated its splendor, its power, its wicked magical
vitality.... She dropped into a seat and continued to stare at the wall
before her. Gradually, as she stared, there stole out to her from the
dimmed humbled canvases a reminder of what she had once seen in them, a
spectral appeal to her faith to call them back to life. What proof had she
that her present estimate of them was less subjective than the other? The
confused impressions of the last few days were hardly to be pleaded as a
valid theory of art. How, after all, did she know that the pictures were
bad? On what suddenly acquired technical standard had she thus decided
the case against them? It seemed as though it were a standard outside of
herself, as though some unheeded inner sense were gradually making her
aware of the presence, in that empty room, of a critical intelligence that
was giving out a subtle effluence of disapproval. The fancy was so vivid
that, to shake it off, she rose and began to move about again. In the
middle of the room stood a monumental divan surmounted by a _massif_
of palms and azaleas. As Claudia’s muffled wanderings carried her around
the angle of this seat, she saw that its farther side was occupied by the
figure of a man, who sat with his hands resting on his stick and his head
bowed upon them. She gave a little cry and her husband rose and faced her.

Instantly the live point of consciousness was shifted, and she became aware
that the quality of the pictures no longer mattered. It was what _he_
thought of them that counted: her life hung on that.

They looked at each other a moment in silence; such concussions are not apt
to flash into immediate speech. At length he said simply, “I didn’t know
you were coming here.”

She colored as though he had charged her with something underhand.

“I didn’t mean to,” she stammered; “but I was too early for our
appointment--“

Her word’s cast a revealing glare on the situation. Neither of them looked
at the pictures; but to Claudia those unobtruding presences seemed suddenly
to press upon them and force them apart.

Keniston glanced at his watch. “It’s twelve o’clock,” he said. “Shall we go
on?”


V

At the door he called a cab and put her in it; then, drawing out his watch
again, he said abruptly: “I believe I’ll let you go alone. I’ll join you at
the hotel in time for luncheon.” She wondered for a moment if he meant to
return to the gallery; but, looking back as she drove off, she saw him walk
rapidly away in the opposite direction.

The cabman had carried her half-way to the Hotel Cluny before she realized
where she was going, and cried out to him to turn home. There was an acute
irony in this mechanical prolongation of the quest of beauty. She had
had enough of it, too much of it; her one longing was to escape, to hide
herself away from its all-suffusing implacable light.

At the hotel, alone in her room, a few tears came to soften her seared
vision; but her mood was too tense to be eased by weeping. Her whole being
was centred in the longing to know what her husband thought. Their short
exchange of words had, after all, told her nothing. She had guessed a faint
resentment at her unexpected appearance; but that might merely imply a
dawning sense, on his part, of being furtively watched and criticised. She
had sometimes wondered if he was never conscious of her observation; there
were moments when it seemed to radiate from her in visible waves. Perhaps,
after all, he was aware of it, on his guard against it, as a lurking knife
behind the thick curtain of his complacency; and to-day he must have caught
the gleam of the blade.

Claudia had not reached the age when pity is the first chord to vibrate in
contact with any revelation of failure. Her one hope had been that Keniston
should be clear-eyed enough to face the truth. Whatever it turned out to
be, she wanted him to measure himself with it. But as his image rose before
her she felt a sudden half-maternal longing to thrust herself between him
and disaster. Her eagerness to see him tested by circumstances seemed now
like a cruel scientific curiosity. She saw in a flash of sympathy that he
would need her most if he fell beneath his fate.

He did not, after all, return for luncheon; and when she came up-stairs
from her solitary meal their _salon_ was still untenanted. She
permitted herself no sensational fears; for she could not, at the height of
apprehension, figure Keniston as yielding to any tragic impulse; but the
lengthening hours brought an uneasiness that was fuel to her pity. Suddenly
she heard the clock strike five. It was the hour at which they had promised
to meet Mrs. Davant at the gallery--the hour of the “ovation.” Claudia
rose and went to the window, straining for a glimpse of her husband in the
crowded street. Could it be that he had forgotten her, had gone to the
gallery without her? Or had something happened--that veiled “something”
which, for the last hour, had grimly hovered on the outskirts of her mind?

She heard a hand on the door and Keniston entered. As she turned to meet
him her whole being was swept forward on a great wave of pity: she was so
sure, now, that he must know.

But he confronted her with a glance of preoccupied brightness; her first
impression was that she had never seen him so vividly, so expressively
pleased. If he needed her, it was not to bind up his wounds.

He gave her a smile which was clearly the lingering reflection of some
inner light. “I didn’t mean to be so late,” he said, tossing aside his hat
and the little red volume that served as a clue to his explorations. “I
turned in to the Louvre for a minute after I left you this morning, and the
place fairly swallowed me up--I couldn’t get away from it. I’ve been there
ever since.” He threw himself into a chair and glanced about for his pipe.

“It takes time,” he continued musingly, “to get at them, to make out what
they’re saying--the big fellows, I mean. They’re not a communicative lot.
At first I couldn’t make much out of their lingo--it was too different from
mine! But gradually, by picking up a hint here and there, and piecing them
together, I’ve begun to understand; and to-day, by Jove, I got one or two
of the old chaps by the throat and fairly turned them inside out--made them
deliver up their last drop.” He lifted a brilliant eye to her. “Lord, it
was tremendous!” he declared.

He had found his pipe and was musingly filling it. Claudia waited in
silence.

“At first,” he began again, “I was afraid their language was too hard for
me--that I should never quite know what they were driving at; they seemed
to cold-shoulder me, to be bent on shutting me out. But I was bound I
wouldn’t be beaten, and now, to-day”--he paused a moment to strike a
match--“when I went to look at those things of mine it all came over me
in a flash. By Jove! it was as if I’d made them all into a big bonfire to
light me on my road!”

His wife was trembling with a kind of sacred terror. She had been afraid
to pray for light for him, and here he was joyfully casting his whole past
upon the pyre!

“Is there nothing left?” she faltered.

“Nothing left? There’s everything!” he exulted. “Why, here I am, not much
over forty, and I’ve found out already--already!” He stood up and began to
move excitedly about the room. “My God! Suppose I’d never known! Suppose
I’d gone on painting things like that forever! Why, I feel like those
chaps at revivalist meetings when they get up and say they’re saved! Won’t
somebody please start a hymn?”

Claudia, with a tremulous joy, was letting herself go on the strong
current of his emotion; but it had not yet carried her beyond her depth,
and suddenly she felt hard ground underfoot.

“Mrs. Davant--“ she exclaimed.

He stared, as though suddenly recalled from a long distance. “Mrs. Davant?”

“We were to have met her--this afternoon--now--“

“At the gallery? Oh, that’s all right. I put a stop to that; I went to see
her after I left you; I explained it all to her.”

“All?”

“I told her I was going to begin all over again.”

Claudia’s heart gave a forward bound and then sank back hopelessly.

“But the panels--?”

“That’s all right too. I told her about the panels,” he reassured her.

“You told her--?”

“That I can’t paint them now. She doesn’t understand, of course; but she’s
the best little woman and she trusts me.”

She could have wept for joy at his exquisite obtuseness. “But that isn’t
all,” she wailed. “It doesn’t matter how much you’ve explained to her. It
doesn’t do away with the fact that we’re living on those panels!”

“Living on them?”

“On the money that she paid you to paint them. Isn’t that what brought us
here? And--if you mean to do as you say--to begin all over again--how in
the world are we ever to pay her back?”

Her husband turned on her an inspired eye. “There’s only one way that I
know of,” he imperturbably declared, “and that’s to stay out here till I
learn how to paint them.”




“COPY”

A DIALOGUE


_Mrs. Ambrose Dale--forty, slender, still young--sits in her drawing-room
at the tea-table. The winter twilight is falling, a lamp has been lit,
there is a fire on the hearth, and the room is pleasantly dim and
flower-scented. Books are scattered everywhere--mostly with autograph
inscriptions “From the Author”--and a large portrait of_ Mrs. Dale,
_at her desk, with papers strewn about her, takes up one of the
wall-panels. Before_ Mrs. Dale _stands_ Hilda, _fair and twenty,
her hands full of letters_.

_Mrs. Dale_. Ten more applications for autographs? Isn’t it strange
that people who’d blush to borrow twenty dollars don’t scruple to beg for
an autograph?

_Hilda (reproachfully)_. Oh--

_Mrs. Dale_. What’s the difference, pray?

_Hilda_. Only that your last autograph sold for fifty--

_Mrs. Dale (not displeased)_. Ah?--I sent for you, Hilda, because I’m
dining out to-night, and if there’s nothing important to attend to among
these letters you needn’t sit up for me.

_Hilda_. You don’t mean to work?

_Mrs. Dale_. Perhaps; but I sha’n’t need you. You’ll see that my
cigarettes and coffee-machine are in place, and that I don’t have to crawl
about the floor in search of my pen-wiper? That’s all. Now about these
letters--

_Hilda (impulsively)_. Oh, Mrs. Dale--

_Mrs. Dale_. Well?

_Hilda_. I’d rather sit up for you.

_Mrs. Dale_. Child, I’ve nothing for you to do. I shall be blocking
out the tenth chapter of _Winged Purposes_ and it won’t be ready for
you till next week.

_Hilda_. It isn’t that--but it’s so beautiful to sit here, watching
and listening, all alone in the night, and to feel that you’re in there
_(she points to the study-door)_ _creating_--._(Impulsively.)_
What do I care for sleep?

_Mrs. Dale (indulgently)_. Child--silly child!--Yes, I should have
felt so at your age--it would have been an inspiration--

_Hilda (rapt)_. It is!

_Mrs. Dale_. But you must go to bed; I must have you fresh in the
morning; for you’re still at the age when one is fresh in the morning!
_(She sighs.)_ The letters? _(Abruptly.)_ Do you take notes of
what you feel, Hilda--here, all alone in the night, as you say?

_Hilda (shyly)_. I have--

_Mrs. Dale (smiling)_. For the diary?

_Hilda (nods and blushes)_.

_Mrs. Dale (caressingly)_. Goose!--Well, to business. What is there?

_Hilda_. Nothing important, except a letter from Stroud & Fayerweather
to say that the question of the royalty on _Pomegranate Seed_ has been
settled in your favor. The English publishers of _Immolation_ write
to consult you about a six-shilling edition; Olafson, the Copenhagen
publisher, applies for permission to bring out a Danish translation of
_The Idol’s Feet_; and the editor of the _Semaphore_ wants a new
serial--I think that’s all; except that _Woman’s Sphere_ and _The
Droplight_ ask for interviews--with photographs--

_Mrs. Dale_. The same old story! I’m so tired of it all. _(To
herself, in an undertone.)_ But how should I feel if it all stopped?
_(The servant brings in a card.)_

_Mrs. Dale (reading it)_. Is it possible? Paul Ventnor? _(To the
servant.)_ Show Mr. Ventnor up. _(To herself.)_ Paul Ventnor!

_Hilda (breathless)_. Oh, Mrs. Dale--_the_ Mr. Ventnor?

_Mrs. Dale (smiling)_. I fancy there’s only one.

_Hilda_. The great, great poet? _(Irresolute.)_ No, I don’t
dare--

_Mrs. Dale (with a tinge of impatience)_. What?

_Hilda (fervently)_. Ask you--if I might--oh, here in this corner,
where he can’t possibly notice me--stay just a moment? Just to see him come
in? To see the meeting between you--the greatest novelist and the greatest
poet of the age? Oh, it’s too much to ask! It’s an historic moment.

_Mrs. Dale_. Why, I suppose it is. I hadn’t thought of it in that
light. Well _(smiling)_, for the diary--

_Hilda_. Oh, thank you, _thank you_! I’ll be off the very instant
I’ve heard him speak.

_Mrs. Dale_. The very instant, mind. _(She rises, looks at herself
in the glass, smooths her hair, sits down again, and rattles the
tea-caddy.)_ Isn’t the room very warm?--_(She looks over at her
portrait.)_ I’ve grown stouter since that was painted--. You’ll make a
fortune out of that diary, Hilda--

_Hilda (modestly)_. Four publishers have applied to me already--

_The Servant (announces)_. Mr. Paul Ventnor.

_(Tall, nearing fifty, with an incipient stoutness buttoned into a
masterly frock-coat, Ventnor drops his glass and advances vaguely, with a
short-sighted stare.)_

_Ventnor_. Mrs. Dale?

_Mrs. Dale_. My dear friend! This is kind. _(She looks over her
shoulder at Hilda, who vanishes through the door to the left.)_ The
papers announced your arrival, but I hardly hoped--

_Ventnor (whose short-sighted stare is seen to conceal a deeper
embarrassment)_. You hadn’t forgotten me, then?

_Mrs. Dale_. Delicious! Do _you_ forget that you’re public
property?

_Ventnor_. Forgotten, I mean, that we were old friends?

_Mrs. Dale_. Such old friends! May I remind you that it’s nearly
twenty years since we’ve met? Or do you find cold reminiscences
indigestible?

_Ventnor_. On the contrary, I’ve come to ask you for a dish of
them--we’ll warm them up together. You’re my first visit.

_Mrs. Dale_. How perfect of you! So few men visit their women friends
in chronological order; or at least they generally do it the other way
round, beginning with the present day and working back--if there’s time--to
prehistoric woman.

_Ventnor_. But when prehistoric woman has become historic woman--?

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, it’s the reflection of my glory that has guided you
here, then?

_Ventnor_. It’s a spirit in my feet that has led me, at the first
opportunity, to the most delightful spot I know.

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, the first opportunity--!

_Ventnor_. I might have seen you very often before; but never just in
the right way.

_Mrs. Dale_. Is this the right way?

_Ventnor_. It depends on you to make it so.

_Mrs. Dale_. What a responsibility! What shall I do?

_Ventnor_. Talk to me--make me think you’re a little glad to see me;
give me some tea and a cigarette; and say you’re out to everyone else.

_Mrs. Dale_. Is that all? _(She hands him a cup of tea.)_ The
cigarettes are at your elbow--. And do you think I shouldn’t have been glad
to see you before?

_Ventnor_. No; I think I should have been too glad to see you.

_Mrs. Dale_. Dear me, what precautions! I hope you always wear
goloshes when it looks like rain and never by any chance expose yourself
to a draught. But I had an idea that poets courted the emotions--

_Ventnor_. Do novelists?

_Mrs. Dale_. If you ask _me_--on paper!

_Ventnor_. Just so; that’s safest. My best things about the sea have
been written on shore. _(He looks at her thoughtfully.)_ But it
wouldn’t have suited us in the old days, would it?

_Mrs. Dale (sighing)_. When we were real people!

_Ventnor_. Real people?

_Mrs. Dale_. Are _you_, now? I died years ago. What you see
before you is a figment of the reporter’s brain--a monster manufactured out
of newspaper paragraphs, with ink in its veins. A keen sense of copyright
is _my_ nearest approach to an emotion.

_Ventnor (sighing)_. Ah, well, yes--as you say, we’re public property.

_Mrs. Dale_. If one shared equally with the public! But the last shred
of my identity is gone.

_Ventnor_. Most people would be glad to part with theirs on such
terms. I have followed your work with immense interest. _Immolation_
is a masterpiece. I read it last summer when it first came out.

_Mrs. Dale (with a shade less warmth)_. _Immolation_ has been out
three years.

_Ventnor_. Oh, by Jove--no? Surely not--But one is so overwhelmed--one
loses count. (_Reproachfully_.) Why have you never sent me your books?

_Mrs. Dale_. For that very reason.

_Ventnor (deprecatingly)_. You know I didn’t mean it for you! And
_my_ first book--do you remember--was dedicated to you.

_Mrs. Dale_. _Silver Trumpets_--

_Ventnor (much interested)_. Have you a copy still, by any chance? The
first edition, I mean? Mine was stolen years ago. Do you think you could
put your hand on it?

_Mrs. Dale (taking a small shabby book from the table at her side)_.
It’s here.

_Ventnor (eagerly)_. May I have it? Ah, thanks. This is _very_
interesting. The last copy sold in London for £40, and they tell me the
next will fetch twice as much. It’s quite _introuvable_.

_Mrs. Dale_. I know that. _(A pause. She takes the book from him,
opens it, and reads, half to herself--)_

  _How much we two have seen together,
    Of other eyes unwist,
  Dear as in days of leafless weather
    The willow’s saffron mist,

  Strange as the hour when Hesper swings
    A-sea in beryl green,
  While overhead on dalliant wings
    The daylight hangs serene,

  And thrilling as a meteor’s fall
    Through depths of lonely sky,
  When each to each two watchers call:
    I saw it!--So did I._

_Ventnor_. Thin, thin--the troubadour tinkle. Odd how little promise
there is in first volumes!

_Mrs. Dale (with irresistible emphasis)_. I thought there was a
distinct promise in this!

_Ventnor (seeing his mistake)_. Ah--the one you would never let me
fulfil? _(Sentimentally.)_ How inexorable you were! You never
dedicated a book to _me_.

_Mrs. Dale_. I hadn’t begun to write when we were--dedicating things
to each other.

_Ventnor_. Not for the public--but you wrote for me; and, wonderful as
you are, you’ve never written anything since that I care for half as much
as--

_Mrs. Dale (interested)_. Well?

_Ventnor_. Your letters.

_Mrs. Dale (in a changed voice)_. My letters--do you remember them?

_Ventnor_. When I don’t, I reread them.

_Mrs. Dale (incredulous)_. You have them still?

_Ventnor (unguardedly)_. You haven’t mine, then?

_Mrs. Dale (playfully)_. Oh, you were a celebrity already. Of course I
kept them! _(Smiling.)_ Think what they are worth now! I always keep
them locked up in my safe over there. _(She indicates a cabinet.)_

_Ventnor (after a pause)_. I always carry yours with me.

_Mrs. Dale (laughing)_. You--

_Ventnor_. Wherever I go. _(A longer pause. She looks at him
fixedly.)_ I have them with me now.

_Mrs. Dale (agitated)_. You--have them with you--now?

_Ventnor (embarrassed)_. Why not? One never knows--

_Mrs. Dale_. Never knows--?

_Ventnor (humorously)_. Gad--when the bank-examiner may come round.
You forget I’m a married man.

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah--yes.

_Ventnor (sits down beside her)_. I speak to you as I couldn’t to
anyone else--without deserving a kicking. You know how it all came about.
_(A pause.)_ You’ll bear witness that it wasn’t till you denied me all
hope--

_Mrs. Dale (a little breathless)_. Yes, yes--

_Ventnor_. Till you sent me from you--

_Mrs. Dale_. It’s so easy to be heroic when one is young! One doesn’t
realize how long life is going to last afterward. _(Musing.)_ Nor what
weary work it is gathering up the fragments.

_Ventnor_. But the time comes when one sends for the china-mender, and
has the bits riveted together, and turns the cracked side to the wall--

_Mrs. Dale_. And denies that the article was ever damaged?

_Ventnor_. Eh? Well, the great thing, you see, is to keep one’s self
out of reach of the housemaid’s brush. _(A pause.)_ If you’re married
you can’t--always. _(Smiling.)_ Don’t you hate to be taken down and
dusted?

_Mrs. Dale (with intention)_. You forget how long ago my husband died.
It’s fifteen years since I’ve been an object of interest to anybody but the
public.

_Ventnor (smiling)_. The only one of your admirers to whom you’ve ever
given the least encouragement!

_Mrs. Dale_. Say rather the most easily pleased!

_Ventnor_. Or the only one you cared to please?

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, you _haven’t_ kept my letters!

_Ventnor (gravely)_. Is that a challenge? Look here, then! _(He
drams a packet from his pocket and holds it out to her.)_

_Mrs. Dale (taking the packet and looking at him earnestly)_. Why have
you brought me these?

_Ventnor_. I didn’t bring them; they came because I came--that’s all.
_(Tentatively.)_ Are we unwelcome?

_Mrs. Dale (who has undone the packet and does not appear to hear
him)_. The very first I ever wrote you--the day after we met at the
concert. How on earth did you happen to keep it? _(She glances over
it.)_ How perfectly absurd! Well, it’s not a compromising document.

_Ventnor_. I’m afraid none of them are.

_Mrs. Dale (quickly)_. Is it to that they owe their immunity? Because
one could leave them about like safety matches?--Ah, here’s another I
remember--I wrote that the day after we went skating together for the first
time. _(She reads it slowly.)_ How odd! How very odd!

_Ventnor_. What?

_Mrs. Dale_. Why, it’s the most curious thing--I had a letter of this
kind to do the other day, in the novel I’m at work on now--the letter of a
woman who is just--just beginning--

_Ventnor_. Yes--just beginning--?

_Mrs. Dale_. And, do you know, I find the best phrase in it, the
phrase I somehow regarded as the fruit of--well, of all my subsequent
discoveries--is simply plagiarized, word for word, from this!

_Ventnor (eagerly)_. I told you so! You were all there!

_Mrs. Dale (critically)_. But the rest of it’s poorly done--very
poorly. _(Reads the letter over.)_ H’m--I didn’t know how to leave
off. It takes me forever to get out of the door.

_Ventnor (gayly)_. Perhaps I was there to prevent you! _(After a
pause.)_ I wonder what I said in return?

_Mrs. Dale (interested)_. Shall we look? _(She rises.)_ Shall
we--really? I have them all here, you know. _(She goes toward the
cabinet.)_

_Ventnor (following her with repressed eagerness)_. Oh--all!

_Mrs. Dale (throws open the door of the cabinet, revealing a number of
packets)_. Don’t you believe me now?

_Ventnor_. Good heavens! How I must have repeated myself! But then you
were so very deaf.

_Mrs. Dale (takes out a packet and returns to her seat. Ventnor extends
an impatient hand for the letters)_. No--no; wait! I want to find your
answer to the one I was just reading. _(After a pause.)_ Here it
is--yes, I thought so!

_Ventnor_. What did you think?

_Mrs. Dale (triumphantly)_. I thought it was the one in which you
quoted _Epipsychidion_--

_Ventnor_. Mercy! Did I _quote_ things? I don’t wonder you were
cruel.

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, and here’s the other--the one I--the one I didn’t
answer--for a long time. Do you remember?

_Ventnor (with emotion)_. Do I remember? I wrote it the morning after
we heard _Isolde_--

_Mrs. Dale (disappointed)_. No--no. _That_ wasn’t the one I
didn’t answer! Here--this is the one I mean.

_Ventnor (takes it curiously)_. Ah--h’m--this is very like unrolling a
mummy--_(he glances at her)_--with a live grain of wheat in it,
perhaps?--Oh, by Jove!

_Mrs. Dale_. What?

_Ventnor_. Why, this is the one I made a sonnet out of afterward! By
Jove, I’d forgotten where that idea came from. You may know the lines
perhaps? They’re in the fourth volume of my Complete Edition--It’s the
thing beginning

  _Love came to me with unrelenting eyes--_

one of my best, I rather fancy. Of course, here it’s very crudely put--the
values aren’t brought out--ah! this touch is good though--very good. H’m, I
daresay there might be other material. _(He glances toward the
cabinet.)_

_Mrs. Dale (drily)_. The live grain of wheat, as you said!

_Ventnor_. Ah, well--my first harvest was sown on rocky
ground--_now_ I plant for the fowls of the air. _(Rising and walking
toward the cabinet.)_ When can I come and carry off all this rubbish?

_Mrs. Dale_. Carry it off?

_Ventnor (embarrassed)_. My dear lady, surely between you and me
explicitness is a burden. You must see that these letters of ours can’t be
left to take their chance like an ordinary correspondence--you said
yourself we were public property.

_Mrs. Dale_. To take their chance? Do you suppose that, in my keeping,
your letters take any chances? _(Suddenly.)_ Do mine--in yours?

_Ventnor (still more embarrassed)_. Helen--! _(He takes a turn
through the room.)_ You force me to remind you that you and I are
differently situated--that in a moment of madness I sacrificed the only
right you ever gave me--the right to love you better than any other
woman in the world. _(A pause. She says nothing and he continues, with
increasing difficulty--)_ You asked me just now why I carried your
letters about with me--kept them, literally, in my own hands. Well, suppose
it’s to be sure of their not falling into some one else’s?

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh!

_Ventnor (throws himself into a chair)_. For God’s sake don’t pity me!

_Mrs. Dale (after a long pause)_. Am I dull--or are you trying to say
that you want to give me back my letters?

_Ventnor (starting up)_. I? Give you back--? God forbid! Your letters?
Not for the world! The only thing I have left! But you can’t dream that in
_my_ hands--

_Mrs. Dale (suddenly)_. You want yours, then?

_Ventnor (repressing his eagerness)_. My dear friend, if I’d ever
dreamed that you’d kept them--?

_Mrs. Dale (accusingly)_. You _do_ want them. _(A pause. He
makes a deprecatory gesture.)_ Why should they be less safe with me than
mine with you? _I_ never forfeited the right to keep them.

_Ventnor (after another pause)_. It’s compensation enough, almost,
to have you reproach me! _(He moves nearer to her, but she makes no
response.)_ You forget that I’ve forfeited _all_ my rights--even
that of letting you keep my letters.

_Mrs. Dale_. You _do_ want them! _(She rises, throws all the
letters into the cabinet, locks the door and puts the key in her
pocket.)_ There’s my answer.

_Ventnor_. Helen--!

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, I paid dearly enough for the right to keep them, and
I mean to! _(She turns to him passionately.)_ Have you ever asked
yourself how I paid for it? With what months and years of solitude, what
indifference to flattery, what resistance to affection?--Oh, don’t smile
because I said affection, and not love. Affection’s a warm cloak in cold
weather; and I _have_ been cold; and I shall keep on growing colder!
Don’t talk to me about living in the hearts of my readers! We both know
what kind of a domicile that is. Why, before long I shall become a classic!
Bound in sets and kept on the top book-shelf--brr, doesn’t that sound
freezing? I foresee the day when I shall be as lonely as an Etruscan
museum! _(She breaks into a laugh.)_ That’s what I’ve paid for the
right to keep your letters. _(She holds out her hand.)_ And now give
me mine.

_Ventnor_. Yours?

_Mrs. Dale (haughtily)_. Yes; I claim them.

_Ventnor (in the same tone)_. On what ground?

_Mrs. Dale_. Hear the man!--Because I wrote them, of course.

_Ventnor_. But it seems to me that--under your inspiration, I admit--I
also wrote mine.

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, I don’t dispute their authenticity--it’s yours I
deny!

_Ventnor_. Mine?

_Mrs. Dale_. You voluntarily ceased to be the man who wrote me those
letters--you’ve admitted as much. You traded paper for flesh and blood. I
don’t dispute your wisdom--only you must hold to your bargain! The letters
are all mine.

_Ventnor (groping between two tones)_. Your arguments are as
convincing as ever. _(He hazards a faint laugh.)_ You’re a marvellous
dialectician--but, if we’re going to settle the matter in the spirit of an
arbitration treaty, why, there are accepted conventions in such cases. It’s
an odious way to put it, but since you won’t help me, one of them is--

_Mrs. Dale_. One of them is--?

_Ventnor_. That it is usual--that technically, I mean, the
letter--belongs to its writer--

_Mrs. Dale (after a pause)_. Such letters as _these_?

_Ventnor_. Such letters especially--

_Mrs. Dale_. But you couldn’t have written them if I hadn’t--been
willing to read them. Surely there’s more of myself in them than of you.

_Ventnor_. Surely there’s nothing in which a man puts more of himself
than in his love-letters!

_Mrs. Dale (with emotion)_. But a woman’s love-letters are like her child.
They belong to her more than to anybody else--

_Ventnor_. And a man’s?

_Mrs. Dale (with sudden violence)_. Are all he risks!--There, take
them. _(She flings the key of the cabinet at his feet and sinks into a
chair.)_

_Ventnor (starts as though to pick up the key; then approaches and bends
over her)_. Helen--oh, Helen!

_Mrs. Dale (she yields her hands to him, murmuring:)_ Paul!
_(Suddenly she straightens herself and draws back illuminated.)_ What
a fool I am! I see it all now. You want them for your memoirs!

_Ventnor (disconcerted)_. Helen--

_Mrs. Dale (agitated)_. Come, come--the rule is to unmask when the
signal’s given! You want them for your memoirs.

_Ventnor (with a forced laugh)_. What makes you think so?

_Mrs. Dale (triumphantly)_. Because _I_ want them for mine!

_Ventnor (in a changed tone)_. Ah--. _(He moves away from her and
leans against the mantelpiece. She remains seated, with her eyes fixed on
him.)_

_Mrs. Dale_. I wonder I didn’t see it sooner. Your reasons were lame
enough.

_Ventnor (ironically)_. Yours were masterly. You’re the more
accomplished actor of the two. I was completely deceived.

_Mrs. Dale_. Oh, I’m a novelist. I can keep up that sort of thing for
five hundred pages!

_Ventnor_. I congratulate you. _(A pause.)_

_Mrs. Dale (moving to her seat behind the tea-table)_. I’ve never
offered you any tea. _(She bends over the kettle.)_ Why don’t you take
your letters?

_Ventnor_. Because you’ve been clever enough to make it impossible for
me. _(He picks up the key and hands it to her. Then abruptly)_--Was it
all acting--just now?

_Mrs. Dale_. By what right do you ask?

_Ventnor_. By right of renouncing my claim to my letters. Keep
them--and tell me.

_Mrs. Dale_. I give you back your claim--and I refuse to tell you.

_Ventnor (sadly)_. Ah, Helen, if you deceived me, you deceived
yourself also.

_Mrs. Dale_. What does it matter, now that we’re both undeceived? I
played a losing game, that’s all.

_Ventnor_. Why losing--since all the letters are yours?

_Mrs. Dale_. The letters? _(Slowly.)_ I’d forgotten the letters--

_Ventnor (exultant)_. Ah, I knew you’d end by telling me the truth!

_Mrs. Dale_. The truth? Where _is_ the truth? _(Half to
herself.)_ I thought I was lying when I began--but the lies turned into
truth as I uttered them! _(She looks at Ventnor.)_ I _did_ want
your letters for my memoirs--I _did_ think I’d kept them for that
purpose--and I wanted to get mine back for the same reason--but now _(she
puts out her hand and picks up some of her letters, which are lying
scattered on the table near her)_--how fresh they seem, and how they
take me back to the time when we lived instead of writing about life!

_Ventnor (smiling)_. The time when we didn’t prepare our impromptu
effects beforehand and copyright our remarks about the weather!

_Mrs. Dale_. Or keep our epigrams in cold storage and our adjectives
under lock and key!

_Ventnor_. When our emotions weren’t worth ten cents a word, and a
signature wasn’t an autograph. Ah, Helen, after all, there’s nothing like
the exhilaration of spending one’s capital!

_Mrs. Dale_. Of wasting it, you mean. _(She points to the
letters.)_ Do you suppose we could have written a word of these if we’d
known we were putting our dreams out at interest? _(She sits musing, with
her eyes on the fire, and he watches her in silence.)_ Paul, do you
remember the deserted garden we sometimes used to walk in?

_Ventnor_. The old garden with the high wall at the end of the village
street? The garden with the ruined box-borders and the broken-down arbor?
Why, I remember every weed in the paths and every patch of moss on the
walls!

_Mrs. Dale._ Well--I went back there the other day. The village is
immensely improved. There’s a new hotel with gas-fires, and a trolley in
the main street; and the garden has been turned into a public park, where
excursionists sit on cast-iron benches admiring the statue of an
Abolitionist.

_Ventnor_. An Abolitionist--how appropriate!

_Mrs. Dale_. And the man who sold the garden has made a fortune that
he doesn’t know how to spend--

_Ventnor (rising impulsively)_. Helen, _(he approaches and lays his
hand on her letters)_, let’s sacrifice our fortune and keep the
excursionists out!

_Mrs. Dale (with a responsive movement)_. Paul, do you really mean it?

_Ventnor (gayly)_. Mean it? Why, I feel like a landed proprietor
already! It’s more than a garden--it’s a park.

_Mrs. Dale_. It’s more than a park, it’s a world--as long as we keep
it to ourselves!

_Ventnor_. Ah, yes--even the pyramids look small when one sees a
Cook’s tourist on top of them! _(He takes the key from the table, unlocks
the cabinet and brings out his letters, which he lays beside hers.)_
Shall we burn the key to our garden?

_Mrs. Dale_. Ah, then it will indeed be boundless! _(Watching him
while he throws the letters into the fire.)_

_Ventnor (turning back to her with a half-sad smile)_. But not too big
for us to find each other in?

_Mrs. Dale_. Since we shall be the only people there! _(He takes
both her hands and they look at each other a moment in silence. Then he
goes out by the door to the right. As he reaches the door she takes a step
toward him, impulsively; then turning back she leans against the
chimney-piece, quietly watching the letters burn.)_




THE REMBRANDT


“You’re _so_ artistic,” my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Of all Eleanor’s exordiums it is the one I most dread. When she tells me
I’m so clever I know this is merely the preamble to inviting me to meet the
last literary obscurity of the moment: a trial to be evaded or endured, as
circumstances dictate; whereas her calling me artistic fatally connotes
the request to visit, in her company, some distressed gentlewoman whose
future hangs on my valuation of her old Saxe or of her grandfather’s
Marc Antonios. Time was when I attempted to resist these compulsions of
Eleanor’s; but I soon learned that, short of actual flight, there was
no refuge from her beneficent despotism. It is not always easy for the
curator of a museum to abandon his post on the plea of escaping a pretty
cousin’s importunities; and Eleanor, aware of my predicament, is none
too magnanimous to take advantage of it. Magnanimity is, in fact, not in
Eleanor’s line. The virtues, she once explained to me, are like bonnets:
the very ones that look best on other people may not happen to suit one’s
own particular style; and she added, with a slight deflection of metaphor,
that none of the ready-made virtues ever _had_ fitted her: they all
pinched somewhere, and she’d given up trying to wear them.

Therefore when she said to me, “You’re _so_ artistic.” emphasizing the
conjunction with a tap of her dripping umbrella (Eleanor is out in all
weathers: the elements are as powerless against her as man), I merely
stipulated, “It’s not old Saxe again?”

She shook her head reassuringly. “A picture--a Rembrandt!”

“Good Lord! Why not a Leonardo?”

“Well”--she smiled--“that, of course, depends on _you_.”

“On me?”

“On your attribution. I dare say Mrs. Fontage would consent to the
change--though she’s very conservative.”

A gleam of hope came to me and I pronounced: “One can’t judge of a picture
in this weather.”

“Of course not. I’m coming for you to-morrow.”

“I’ve an engagement to-morrow.”

“I’ll come before or after your engagement.”

The afternoon paper lay at my elbow and I contrived a furtive consultation
of the weather-report. It said “Rain to-morrow,” and I answered briskly:
“All right, then; come at ten”--rapidly calculating that the clouds on
which I counted might lift by noon.

My ingenuity failed of its due reward; for the heavens, as if in league
with my cousin, emptied themselves before morning, and punctually at ten
Eleanor and the sun appeared together in my office.

I hardly listened, as we descended the Museum steps and got into Eleanor’s
hansom, to her vivid summing-up of the case. I guessed beforehand that the
lady we were about to visit had lapsed by the most distressful degrees from
opulence to a “hall-bedroom”; that her grandfather, if he had not been
Minister to France, had signed the Declaration of Independence; that the
Rembrandt was an heirloom, sole remnant of disbanded treasures; that for
years its possessor had been unwilling to part with it, and that even now
the question of its disposal must be approached with the most diplomatic
obliquity.

Previous experience had taught me that all Eleanor’s “cases” presented a
harrowing similarity of detail. No circumstance tending to excite the
spectator’s sympathy and involve his action was omitted from the history of
her beneficiaries; the lights and shades were indeed so skilfully adjusted
that any impartial expression of opinion took on the hue of cruelty. I
could have produced closetfuls of “heirlooms” in attestation of this fact;
for it is one more mark of Eleanor’s competence that her friends usually
pay the interest on her philanthropy. My one hope was that in this case the
object, being a picture, might reasonably be rated beyond my means; and
as our cab drew up before a blistered brown-stone door-step I formed the
self-defensive resolve to place an extreme valuation on Mrs. Fontage’s
Rembrandt. It is Eleanor’s fault if she is sometimes fought with her own
weapons.

The house stood in one of those shabby provisional-looking New York streets
that seem resignedly awaiting demolition. It was the kind of house that,
in its high days, must have had a bow-window with a bronze in it. The
bow-window had been replaced by a plumber’s _devanture_, and one might
conceive the bronze to have gravitated to the limbo where Mexican onyx
tables and bric-a-brac in buffalo-horn await the first signs of our next
aesthetic reaction.

Eleanor swept me through a hall that smelled of poverty, up unlit stairs to
a bare slit of a room. “And she must leave this in a month!” she whispered
across her knock.

I had prepared myself for the limp widow’s weed of a woman that one figures
in such a setting; and confronted abruptly with Mrs. Fontage’s white-haired
erectness I had the disconcerting sense that I was somehow in her presence
at my own solicitation. I instinctively charged Eleanor with this reversal
of the situation; but a moment later I saw it must be ascribed to a
something about Mrs. Fontage that precluded the possibility of her asking
any one a favor. It was not that she was of forbidding, or even majestic,
demeanor; but that one guessed, under her aquiline prettiness, a dignity
nervously on guard against the petty betrayal of her surroundings. The
room was unconcealably poor: the little faded “relics,” the high-stocked
ancestral silhouettes, the steel-engravings after Raphael and Correggio,
grouped in a vain attempt to hide the most obvious stains on the
wall-paper, served only to accentuate the contrast of a past evidently
diversified by foreign travel and the enjoyment of the arts. Even Mrs.
Fontage’s dress had the air of being a last expedient, the ultimate outcome
of a much-taxed ingenuity in darning and turning. One felt that all the
poor lady’s barriers were falling save that of her impregnable manner.

To this manner I found myself conveying my appreciation of being admitted
to a view of the Rembrandt.

Mrs. Fontage’s smile took my homage for granted. “It is always,” she
conceded, “a privilege to be in the presence of the great masters.” Her
slim wrinkled hand waved me to a dusky canvas near the window.

“It’s _so_ interesting, dear Mrs. Fontage,” I heard Eleanor
exclaiming, “and my cousin will be able to tell you exactly--“ Eleanor, in
my presence, always admits that she knows nothing about art; but she gives
the impression that this is merely because she hasn’t had time to look into
the matter--and has had me to do it for her.

Mrs. Fontage seated herself without speaking, as though fearful that a
breath might disturb my communion with the masterpiece. I felt that she
thought Eleanor’s reassuring ejaculations ill-timed; and in this I was of
one mind with her; for the impossibility of telling her exactly what I
thought of her Rembrandt had become clear to me at a glance.

My cousin’s vivacities began to languish and the silence seemed to shape
itself into a receptacle for my verdict. I stepped back, affecting a more
distant scrutiny; and as I did so my eye caught Mrs. Fontage’s profile. Her
lids trembled slightly. I took refuge in the familiar expedient of asking
the history of the picture, and she waved me brightly to a seat.

This was indeed a topic on which she could dilate. The Rembrandt, it
appeared, had come into Mr. Fontage’s possession many years ago, while
the young couple were on their wedding-tour, and under circumstances so
romantic that she made no excuse for relating them in all their parenthetic
fulness. The picture belonged to an old Belgian Countess of redundant
quarterings, whom the extravagances of an ungovernable nephew had compelled
to part with her possessions (in the most private manner) about the time of
the Fontages’ arrival. By a really remarkable coincidence, it happened that
their courier (an exceptionally intelligent and superior man) was an old
servant of the Countess’s, and had thus been able to put them in the way of
securing the Rembrandt under the very nose of an English Duke, whose agent
had been sent to Brussels to negotiate for its purchase. Mrs. Fontage could
not recall the Duke’s name, but he was a great collector and had a famous
Highland castle, where somebody had been murdered, and which she herself
had visited (by moonlight) when she had travelled in Scotland as a girl.
The episode had in short been one of the most interesting “experiences” of
a tour almost chromo-lithographic in vivacity of impression; and they had
always meant to go back to Brussels for the sake of reliving so picturesque
a moment. Circumstances (of which the narrator’s surroundings declared the
nature) had persistently interfered with the projected return to Europe,
and the picture had grown doubly valuable as representing the high-water
mark of their artistic emotions. Mrs. Fontage’s moist eye caressed the
canvas. “There is only,” she added with a perceptible effort, “one slight
drawback: the picture is not signed. But for that the Countess, of course,
would have sold it to a museum. All the connoisseurs who have seen it
pronounce it an undoubted Rembrandt, in the artist’s best manner; but the
museums”--she arched her brows in smiling recognition of a well-known
weakness--“give the preference to signed examples--“

Mrs. Fontage’s words evoked so touching a vision of the young tourists of
fifty years ago, entrusting to an accomplished and versatile courier the
direction of their helpless zeal for art, that I lost sight for a moment
of the point at issue. The old Belgian Countess, the wealthy Duke with a
feudal castle in Scotland, Mrs. Fontage’s own maiden pilgrimage to Arthur’s
Seat and Holyrood, all the accessories of the naïf transaction, seemed
a part of that vanished Europe to which our young race carried its
indiscriminate ardors, its tender romantic credulity: the legendary
castellated Europe of keepsakes, brigands and old masters, that
compensated, by one such “experience” as Mrs. Fontage’s, for an after-life
of aesthetic privation.

I was restored to the present by Eleanor’s looking at her watch. The action
mutely conveyed that something was expected of me. I risked the temporizing
statement that the picture was very interesting; but Mrs. Fontage’s polite
assent revealed the poverty of the expedient. Eleanor’s impatience
overflowed.

“You would like my cousin to give you an idea of its value?” she suggested.

Mrs. Fontage grew more erect. “No one,” she corrected with great
gentleness, “can know its value quite as well as I, who live with it--“

We murmured our hasty concurrence.

“But it might be interesting to hear”--she addressed herself to me--“as a
mere matter of curiosity--what estimate would be put on it from the purely
commercial point of view--if such a term may be used in speaking of a work
of art.”

I sounded a note of deprecation.

“Oh, I understand, of course,” she delicately anticipated me, “that that
could never be _your_ view, your personal view; but since occasions
_may_ arise--do arise--when it becomes necessary to--to put a price on
the priceless, as it were--I have thought--Miss Copt has suggested--“

“Some day,” Eleanor encouraged her, “you might feel that the picture ought
to belong to some one who has more--more opportunity of showing it--letting
it be seen by the public--for educational reasons--“

“I have tried,” Mrs. Fontage admitted, “to see it in that light.”

The crucial moment was upon me. To escape the challenge of Mrs. Fontage’s
brilliant composure I turned once more to the picture. If my courage needed
reinforcement, the picture amply furnished it. Looking at that lamentable
canvas seemed the surest way of gathering strength to denounce it; but
behind me, all the while, I felt Mrs. Fontage’s shuddering pride drawn
up in a final effort of self-defense. I hated myself for my sentimental
perversion of the situation. Reason argued that it was more cruel to
deceive Mrs. Fontage than to tell her the truth; but that merely proved the
inferiority of reason to instinct in situations involving any concession to
the emotions. Along with her faith in the Rembrandt I must destroy not only
the whole fabric of Mrs. Fontage’s past, but even that lifelong habit of
acquiescence in untested formulas that makes the best part of the average
feminine strength. I guessed the episode of the picture to be inextricably
interwoven with the traditions and convictions which served to veil Mrs.
Fontage’s destitution not only from others but from herself. Viewed in
that light the Rembrandt had perhaps been worth its purchase-money; and I
regretted that works of art do not commonly sell on the merit of the moral
support they may have rendered.

From this unavailing flight I was recalled by the sense that something
must be done. To place a fictitious value on the picture was at best a
provisional measure; while the brutal alternative of advising Mrs. Fontage
to sell it for a hundred dollars at least afforded an opening to the
charitably disposed purchaser. I intended, if other resources failed,
to put myself forward in that light; but delicacy of course forbade my
coupling my unflattering estimate of the Rembrandt with an immediate offer
to buy it. All I could do was to inflict the wound: the healing unguent
must be withheld for later application.

I turned to Mrs. Fontage, who sat motionless, her finely-lined cheeks
touched with an expectant color, her eyes averted from the picture which
was so evidently the one object they beheld.

“My dear madam--“ I began. Her vivid smile was like a light held up to
dazzle me. It shrouded every alternative in darkness and I had the flurried
sense of having lost my way among the intricacies of my contention. Of
a sudden I felt the hopelessness of finding a crack in her impenetrable
conviction. My words slipped from me like broken weapons. “The picture,”
I faltered, “would of course be worth more if it were signed. As it is,
I--I hardly think--on a conservative estimate--it can be valued at--at
more--than--a thousand dollars, say--“

My deflected argument ran on somewhat aimlessly till it found itself
plunging full tilt against the barrier of Mrs. Fontage’s silence. She sat
as impassive as though I had not spoken. Eleanor loosed a few fluttering
words of congratulation and encouragement, but their flight was suddenly
cut short. Mrs. Fontage had risen with a certain solemnity.

“I could never,” she said gently--her gentleness was adamantine--“under any
circumstances whatever, consider, for a moment even, the possibility of
parting with the picture at such a price.”


II

Within three weeks a tremulous note from Mrs. Fontage requested the favor
of another visit. If the writing was tremulous, however, the writer’s tone
was firm. She named her own day and hour, without the conventional
reference to her visitor’s convenience.

My first impulse was to turn the note over to Eleanor. I had acquitted
myself of my share in the ungrateful business of coming to Mrs. Fontage’s
aid, and if, as her letter denoted, she had now yielded to the closer
pressure of need, the business of finding a purchaser for the Rembrandt
might well be left to my cousin’s ingenuity. But here conscience put in
the uncomfortable reminder that it was I who, in putting a price on the
picture, had raised the real obstacle in the way of Mrs. Fontage’s rescue.
No one would give a thousand dollars for the Rembrandt; but to tell
Mrs. Fontage so had become as unthinkable as murder. I had, in fact, on
returning from my first inspection of the picture, refrained from imparting
to Eleanor my opinion of its value. Eleanor is porous, and I knew that
sooner or later the unnecessary truth would exude through the loose texture
of her dissimulation. Not infrequently she thus creates the misery she
alleviates; and I have sometimes suspected her of paining people in order
that she might be sorry for them. I had, at all events, cut off retreat in
Eleanor’s direction; and the remaining alternative carried me straight to
Mrs. Fontage.

She received me with the same commanding sweetness. The room was even barer
than before--I believe the carpet was gone--but her manner built up about
her a palace to which I was welcomed with high state; and it was as a mere
incident of the ceremony that I was presently made aware of her decision to
sell the Rembrandt. My previous unsuccess in planning how to deal with Mrs.
Fontage had warned me to leave my farther course to chance; and I listened
to her explanation with complete detachment. She had resolved to travel for
her health; her doctor advised it, and as her absence might be indefinitely
prolonged she had reluctantly decided to part with the picture in order
to avoid the expense of storage and insurance. Her voice drooped at the
admission, and she hurried on, detailing the vague itinerary of a journey
that was to combine long-promised visits to impatient friends with various
“interesting opportunities” less definitely specified. The poor lady’s
skill in rearing a screen of verbiage about her enforced avowal had
distracted me from my own share in the situation, and it was with dismay
that I suddenly caught the drift of her assumptions. She expected me to
buy the Rembrandt for the Museum; she had taken my previous valuation as a
tentative bid, and when I came to my senses she was in the act of accepting
my offer.

Had I had a thousand dollars of my own to dispose of, the bargain would
have been concluded on the spot; but I was in the impossible position of
being materially unable to buy the picture and morally unable to tell her
that it was not worth acquiring for the Museum.

I dashed into the first evasion in sight. I had no authority, I explained,
to purchase pictures for the Museum without the consent of the committee.

Mrs. Fontage coped for a moment in silence with the incredible fact
that I had rejected her offer; then she ventured, with a kind of pale
precipitation: “But I understood--Miss Copt tells me that you practically
decide such matters for the committee.” I could guess what the effort had
cost her.

“My cousin is given to generalizations. My opinion may have some weight
with the committee--“

“Well, then--“ she timidly prompted.

“For that very reason I can’t buy the picture.”

She said, with a drooping note, “I don’t understand.”

“Yet you told me,” I reminded her, “that you knew museums didn’t buy
unsigned pictures.”

“Not for what they are worth! Every one knows that. But I--I
understood--the price you named--“ Her pride shuddered back from the
abasement. “It’s a misunderstanding then,” she faltered.

To avoid looking at her, I glanced desperately at the Rembrandt. Could
I--? But reason rejected the possibility. Even if the committee had been
blind--and they all _were_ but Crozier--I simply shouldn’t have dared
to do it. I stood up, feeling that to cut the matter short was the only
alleviation within reach.

Mrs. Fontage had summoned her indomitable smile; but its brilliancy
dropped, as I opened the door, like a candle blown out by a draught.

“If there’s any one else--if you knew any one who would care to see the
picture, I should be most happy--“ She kept her eyes on me, and I saw that,
in her case, it hurt less than to look at the Rembrandt. “I shall have to
leave here, you know,” she panted, “if nobody cares to have it--“


III

That evening at my club I had just succeeded in losing sight of Mrs.
Fontage in the fumes of an excellent cigar, when a voice at my elbow evoked
her harassing image.

“I want to talk to you,” the speaker said, “about Mrs. Fontage’s
Rembrandt.”

“There isn’t any,” I was about to growl; but looking up I recognized the
confiding countenance of Mr. Jefferson Rose.

Mr. Rose was known to me chiefly as a young man suffused with a vague
enthusiasm for Virtue and my cousin Eleanor.

One glance at his glossy exterior conveyed the assurance that his morals
were as immaculate as his complexion and his linen. Goodness exuded from
his moist eye, his liquid voice, the warm damp pressure of his trustful
hand. He had always struck me as one of the most uncomplicated organisms
I had ever met. His ideas were as simple and inconsecutive as the
propositions in a primer, and he spoke slowly, with a kind of uniformity
of emphasis that made his words stand out like the raised type for the
blind. An obvious incapacity for abstract conceptions made him peculiarly
susceptible to the magic of generalization, and one felt he would have been
at the mercy of any Cause that spelled itself with a capital letter. It was
hard to explain how, with such a superabundance of merit, he managed to be
a good fellow: I can only say that he performed the astonishing feat as
naturally as he supported an invalid mother and two sisters on the slender
salary of a banker’s clerk. He sat down beside me with an air of bright
expectancy.

“It’s a remarkable picture, isn’t it?” he said.

“You’ve seen it?”

“I’ve been so fortunate. Miss Copt was kind enough to get Mrs. Fontage’s
permission; we went this afternoon.” I inwardly wished that Eleanor
had selected another victim; unless indeed the visit were part of a
plan whereby some third person, better equipped for the cultivation of
delusions, was to be made to think the Rembrandt remarkable. Knowing the
limitations of Mr. Rose’s resources I began to wonder if he had any rich
aunts.

“And her buying it in that way, too,” he went on with his limpid smile,
“from that old Countess in Brussels, makes it all the more interesting,
doesn’t it? Miss Copt tells me it’s very seldom old pictures can be traced
back for more than a generation. I suppose the fact of Mrs. Fontage’s
knowing its history must add a good deal to its value?”

Uncertain as to his drift, I said: “In her eyes it certainly appears to.”

Implications are lost on Mr. Rose, who glowingly continued: “That’s the
reason why I wanted to talk to you about it--to consult you. Miss Copt
tells me you value it at a thousand dollars.”

There was no denying this, and I grunted a reluctant assent.

“Of course,” he went on earnestly, “your valuation is based on the fact
that the picture isn’t signed--Mrs. Fontage explained that; and it does
make a difference, certainly. But the thing is--if the picture’s really
good--ought one to take advantage--? I mean--one can see that Mrs. Fontage
is in a tight place, and I wouldn’t for the world--“

My astonished stare arrested him.

“_You_ wouldn’t--?”

“I mean--you see, it’s just this way”; he coughed and blushed: “I can’t
give more than a thousand dollars myself--it’s as big a sum as I can manage
to scrape together--but before I make the offer I want to be sure I’m not
standing in the way of her getting more money.”

My astonishment lapsed to dismay. “You’re going to buy the picture for a
thousand dollars?”

His blush deepened. “Why, yes. It sounds rather absurd, I suppose. It isn’t
much in my line, of course. I can see the picture’s very beautiful, but I’m
no judge--it isn’t the kind of thing, naturally, that I could afford to go
in for; but in this case I’m very glad to do what I can; the circumstances
are so distressing; and knowing what you think of the picture I feel it’s a
pretty safe investment--“

“I don’t think!” I blurted out.

“You--?”

“I don’t think the picture’s worth a thousand dollars; I don’t think it’s
worth ten cents; I simply lied about it, that’s all.”

Mr. Rose looked as frightened as though I had charged him with the offense.

“Hang it, man, can’t you see how it happened? I saw the poor woman’s pride
and happiness hung on her faith in that picture. I tried to make her
understand that it was worthless--but she wouldn’t; I tried to tell her
so--but I couldn’t. I behaved like a maudlin ass, but you shan’t pay for my
infernal bungling--you mustn’t buy the picture!”

Mr. Rose sat silent, tapping one glossy boot-tip with another. Suddenly he
turned on me a glance of stored intelligence. “But you know,” he said
good-humoredly, “I rather think I must.”

“You haven’t--already?”

“Oh, no; the offer’s not made.”

“Well, then--“

His look gathered a brighter significance.

“But if the picture’s worth nothing, nobody will buy it--“

I groaned.

“Except,” he continued, “some fellow like me, who doesn’t know anything.
_I_ think it’s lovely, you know; I mean to hang it in my mother’s
sitting-room.” He rose and clasped my hand in his adhesive pressure. “I’m
awfully obliged to you for telling me this; but perhaps you won’t mind my
asking you not to mention our talk to Miss Copt? It might bother her, you
know, to think the picture isn’t exactly up to the mark; and it won’t make
a rap of difference to me.”


IV

Mr. Rose left me to a sleepless night. The next morning my resolve was
formed, and it carried me straight to Mrs. Fontage’s. She answered my knock
by stepping out on the landing, and as she shut the door behind her I
caught a glimpse of her devastated interior. She mentioned, with a careful
avoidance of the note of pathos on which our last conversation had closed,
that she was preparing to leave that afternoon; and the trunks obstructing
the threshold showed that her preparations were nearly complete. They were,
I felt certain, the same trunks that, strapped behind a rattling vettura,
had accompanied the bride and groom on that memorable voyage of discovery
of which the booty had till recently adorned her walls; and there was a
dim consolation in the thought that those early “finds” in coral and Swiss
wood-carving, in lava and alabaster, still lay behind the worn locks, in
the security of worthlessness.

Mrs. Fontage, on the landing, among her strapped and corded treasures,
maintained the same air of stability that made it impossible, even under
such conditions, to regard her flight as anything less dignified than
a departure. It was the moral support of what she tacitly assumed that
enabled me to set forth with proper deliberation the object of my visit;
and she received my announcement with an absence of surprise that struck
me as the very flower of tact. Under cover of these mutual assumptions the
transaction was rapidly concluded; and it was not till the canvas passed
into my hands that, as though the physical contact had unnerved her,
Mrs. Fontage suddenly faltered. “It’s the giving it up--“ she stammered,
disguising herself to the last; and I hastened away from the collapse of
her splendid effrontery.

I need hardly point out that I had acted impulsively, and that reaction
from the most honorable impulses is sometimes attended by moral
perturbation. My motives had indeed been mixed enough to justify some
uneasiness, but this was allayed by the instinctive feeling that it is more
venial to defraud an institution than a man. Since Mrs. Fontage had to be
kept from starving by means not wholly defensible, it was better that the
obligation should be borne by a rich institution than an impecunious youth.
I doubt, in fact, if my scruples would have survived a night’s sleep, had
they not been complicated by some uncertainty as to my own future. It was
true that, subject to the purely formal assent of the committee, I had
full power to buy for the Museum, and that the one member of the committee
likely to dispute my decision was opportunely travelling in Europe; but the
picture once in place I must face the risk of any expert criticism to which
chance might expose it. I dismissed this contingency for future study,
stored the Rembrandt in the cellar of the Museum, and thanked heaven that
Crozier was abroad.

Six months later he strolled into my office. I had just concluded, under
conditions of exceptional difficulty, and on terms unexpectedly benign,
the purchase of the great Bartley Reynolds; and this circumstance, by
relegating the matter of the Rembrandt to a lower stratum of consciousness,
enabled me to welcome Crozier with unmixed pleasure. My security
was enhanced by his appearance. His smile was charged with amiable
reminiscences, and I inferred that his trip had put him in the humor
to approve of everything, or at least to ignore what fell short of his
approval. I had therefore no uneasiness in accepting his invitation to dine
that evening. It is always pleasant to dine with Crozier and never more so
than when he is just back from Europe. His conversation gives even the food
a flavor of the Café Anglais.

The repast was delightful, and it was not till we had finished a Camembert
which he must have brought over with him, that my host said, in a tone of
after-dinner perfunctoriness: “I see you’ve picked up a picture or two
since I left.”

I assented. “The Bartley Reynolds seemed too good an opportunity to miss,
especially as the French government was after it. I think we got it
cheap--“

“_Connu, connu_” said Crozier pleasantly. “I know all about the
Reynolds. It was the biggest kind of a haul and I congratulate you. Best
stroke of business we’ve done yet. But tell me about the other picture--the
Rembrandt.”

“I never said it was a Rembrandt.” I could hardly have said why, but I felt
distinctly annoyed with Crozier.

“Of course not. There’s ‘Rembrandt’ on the frame, but I saw you’d
modified it to ‘Dutch School‘; I apologize.” He paused, but I offered no
explanation. “What about it?” he went on. “Where did you pick it up?” As
he leaned to the flame of the cigar-lighter his face seemed ruddy with
enjoyment.

“I got it for a song,” I said.

“A thousand, I think?”

“Have you seen it?” I asked abruptly.

“Went over the place this afternoon and found it in the cellar. Why hasn’t
it been hung, by the way?”

I paused a moment. “I’m waiting--“

“To--?”

“To have it varnished.”

“Ah!” He leaned back and poured himself a second glass of Chartreuse. The
smile he confided to its golden depths provoked me to challenge him with--

“What do you think of it?”

“The Rembrandt?” He lifted his eyes from the glass. “Just what you do.”

“It isn’t a Rembrandt.”

“I apologize again. You call it, I believe, a picture of the same period?”

“I’m uncertain of the period.”

“H’m.” He glanced appreciatively along his cigar. “What are you certain
of?”

“That it’s a damned bad picture,” I said savagely.

He nodded. “Just so. That’s all we wanted to know.”

“_We_?”

“We--I--the committee, in short. You see, my dear fellow, if you hadn’t
been certain it was a damned bad picture our position would have been a
little awkward. As it is, my remaining duty--I ought to explain that in
this matter I’m acting for the committee--is as simple as it’s agreeable.”

“I’ll be hanged,” I burst out, “if I understand one word you’re saying!”

He fixed me with a kind of cruel joyousness. “You will--you will,” he
assured me; “at least you’ll begin to, when you hear that I’ve seen Miss
Copt.”

“Miss Copt?”

“And that she has told me under what conditions the picture was bought.”

“She doesn’t know anything about the conditions! That is,” I added,
hastening to restrict the assertion, “she doesn’t know my opinion of the
picture.” I thirsted for five minutes with Eleanor.

“Are you quite sure?” Crozier took me up. “Mr. Jefferson Rose does.”

“Ah--I see.”

“I thought you would,” he reminded me. “As soon as I’d laid eyes on
the Rembrandt--I beg your pardon!--I saw that it--well, required some
explanation.”

“You might have come to me.”

“I meant to; but I happened to meet Miss Copt, whose encyclopædic
information has often before been of service to me. I always go to Miss
Copt when I want to look up anything; and I found she knew all about the
Rembrandt.”

“_All_?”

“Precisely. The knowledge was in fact causing her sleepless nights. Mr.
Rose, who was suffering from the same form of insomnia, had taken her into
his confidence, and she--ultimately--took me into hers.”

“Of course!”

“I must ask you to do your cousin justice. She didn’t speak till it became
evident to her uncommonly quick perceptions that your buying the picture on
its merits would have been infinitely worse for--for everybody--than your
diverting a small portion of the Museum’s funds to philanthropic uses. Then
she told me the moving incident of Mr. Rose. Good fellow, Rose. And the
old lady’s case was desperate. Somebody had to buy that picture.” I moved
uneasily in my seat “Wait a moment, will you? I haven’t finished my cigar.
There’s a little head of Il Fiammingo’s that you haven’t seen, by the way;
I picked it up the other day in Parma. We’ll go in and have a look at it
presently. But meanwhile what I want to say is that I’ve been charged--in
the most informal way--to express to you the committee’s appreciation of
your admirable promptness and energy in capturing the Bartley Reynolds. We
shouldn’t have got it at all if you hadn’t been uncommonly wide-awake, and
to get it at such a price is a double triumph. We’d have thought nothing of
a few more thousands--“

“I don’t see,” I impatiently interposed, “that, as far as I’m concerned,
that alters the case.”

“The case--?”

“Of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. I bought the picture because, as you say, the
situation was desperate, and I couldn’t raise a thousand myself. What I did
was of course indefensible; but the money shall be refunded tomorrow--“

Crozier raised a protesting hand. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m talking ex
cathedra. The money’s been refunded already. The fact is, the Museum has
sold the Rembrandt.”

I stared at him wildly. “Sold it? To whom?”

“Why--to the committee.--Hold on a bit, please.--Won’t you take another
cigar? Then perhaps I can finish what I’ve got to say.--Why, my dear
fellow, the committee’s under an obligation to you--that’s the way we look
at it. I’ve investigated Mrs. Fontage’s case, and--well, the picture had to
be bought. She’s eating meat now, I believe, for the first time in a year.
And they’d have turned her out into the street that very day, your cousin
tells me. Something had to be done at once, and you’ve simply given a
number of well-to-do and self-indulgent gentlemen the opportunity of
performing, at very small individual expense, a meritorious action in
the nick of time. That’s the first thing I’ve got to thank you for. And
then--you’ll remember, please, that I have the floor--that I’m still
speaking for the committee--and secondly, as a slight recognition of your
services in securing the Bartley Reynolds at a very much lower figure than
we were prepared to pay, we beg you--the committee begs you--to accept the
gift of Mrs. Fontage’s Rembrandt. Now we’ll go in and look at that little
head....”




THE MOVING FINGER


The news of Mrs. Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense
blunder--one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism. It was as
though all sorts of renovating forces had been checked by the clogging of
that one wheel. Not that Mrs. Grancy contributed any perceptible momentum
to the social machine: her unique distinction was that of filling to
perfection her special place in the world. So many people are like
badly-composed statues, over-lapping their niches at one point and leaving
them vacant at another. Mrs. Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if
it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a
very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must
be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility.
Ralph Grancy’s was in short a kind of disembodied usefulness: one of those
constructive influences that, instead of crystallizing into definite forms,
remain as it were a medium for the development of clear thinking and fine
feeling. He faithfully irrigated his own dusty patch of life, and the
fruitful moisture stole far beyond his boundaries. If, to carry on the
metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously-cultivated enclosure, his wife was
the flower he had planted in its midst--the embowering tree, rather, which
gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper
branches.

We had all--his small but devoted band of followers--known a moment when it
seemed likely that Grancy would fail us. We had watched him pitted against
one stupid obstacle after another--ill-health, poverty, misunderstanding
and, worst of all for a man of his texture, his first wife’s soft insidious
egotism. We had seen him sinking under the leaden embrace of her affection
like a swimmer in a drowning clutch; but just as we despaired he had always
come to the surface again, blinded, panting, but striking out fiercely for
the shore. When at last her death released him it became a question as to
how much of the man she had carried with her. Left alone, he revealed numb
withered patches, like a tree from which a parasite has been stripped. But
gradually he began to put out new leaves; and when he met the lady who
was to become his second wife--his one _real_ wife, as his friends
reckoned--the whole man burst into flower.

The second Mrs. Grancy was past thirty when he married her, and it was
clear that she had harvested that crop of middle joy which is rooted in
young despair. But if she had lost the surface of eighteen she had kept
its inner light; if her cheek lacked the gloss of immaturity her eyes were
young with the stored youth of half a life-time. Grancy had first known her
somewhere in the East--I believe she was the sister of one of our consuls
out there--and when he brought her home to New York she came among us as
a stranger. The idea of Grancy’s remarriage had been a shock to us all.
After one such calcining most men would have kept out of the fire; but we
agreed that he was predestined to sentimental blunders, and we awaited
with resignation the embodiment of his latest mistake. Then Mrs. Grancy
came--and we understood. She was the most beautiful and the most complete
of explanations. We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight and gave
it hasty burial under a prodigality of welcome. For the first time in years
we had Grancy off our minds. “He’ll do something great now!” the least
sanguine of us prophesied; and our sentimentalist emended: “He _has_
done it--in marrying her!”

It was Claydon, the portrait-painter, who risked this hyperbole; and who
soon afterward, at the happy husband’s request, prepared to defend it in a
portrait of Mrs. Grancy. We were all--even Claydon--ready to concede that
Mrs. Grancy’s unwontedness was in some degree a matter of environment. Her
graces were complementary and it needed the mate’s call to reveal the flash
of color beneath her neutral-tinted wings. But if she needed Grancy to
interpret her, how much greater was the service she rendered him! Claydon
professionally described her as the right frame for him; but if she defined
she also enlarged, if she threw the whole into perspective she also cleared
new ground, opened fresh vistas, reclaimed whole areas of activity that had
run to waste under the harsh husbandry of privation. This interaction of
sympathies was not without its visible expression. Claydon was not alone
in maintaining that Grancy’s presence--or indeed the mere mention of his
name--had a perceptible effect on his wife’s appearance. It was as though a
light were shifted, a curtain drawn back, as though, to borrow another of
Claydon’s metaphors, Love the indefatigable artist were perpetually seeking
a happier “pose” for his model. In this interpretative light Mrs. Grancy
acquired the charm which makes some women’s faces like a book of which
the last page is never turned. There was always something new to read in
her eyes. What Claydon read there--or at least such scattered hints of
the ritual as reached him through the sanctuary doors--his portrait in
due course declared to us. When the picture was exhibited it was at once
acclaimed as his masterpiece; but the people who knew Mrs. Grancy smiled
and said it was flattered. Claydon, however, had not set out to paint
_their_ Mrs. Grancy--or ours even--but Ralph’s; and Ralph knew his own
at a glance. At the first confrontation he saw that Claydon had understood.
As for Mrs. Grancy, when the finished picture was shown to her she turned
to the painter and said simply: “Ah, you’ve done me facing the east!”

The picture, then, for all its value, seemed a mere incident in the
unfolding of their double destiny, a foot-note to the illuminated text of
their lives. It was not till afterward that it acquired the significance
of last words spoken on a threshold never to be recrossed. Grancy, a year
after his marriage, had given up his town house and carried his bliss an
hour’s journey away, to a little place among the hills. His various duties
and interests brought him frequently to New York but we necessarily saw him
less often than when his house had served as the rallying-point of kindred
enthusiasms. It seemed a pity that such an influence should be withdrawn,
but we all felt that his long arrears of happiness should be paid in
whatever coin he chose. The distance from which the fortunate couple
radiated warmth on us was not too great for friendship to traverse; and our
conception of a glorified leisure took the form of Sundays spent in the
Grancys’ library, with its sedative rural outlook, and the portrait of Mrs.
Grancy illuminating its studious walls. The picture was at its best in that
setting; and we used to accuse Claydon of visiting Mrs. Grancy in order to
see her portrait. He met this by declaring that the portrait _was_
Mrs. Grancy; and there were moments when the statement seemed unanswerable.
One of us, indeed--I think it must have been the novelist--said that
Clayton had been saved from falling in love with Mrs. Grancy only by
falling in love with his picture of her; and it was noticeable that he, to
whom his finished work was no more than the shed husk of future effort,
showed a perennial tenderness for this one achievement. We smiled afterward
to think how often, when Mrs. Grancy was in the room, her presence
reflecting itself in our talk like a gleam of sky in a hurrying current,
Claydon, averted from the real woman, would sit as it were listening to the
picture. His attitude, at the time, seemed only a part of the unusualness
of those picturesque afternoons, when the most familiar combinations of
life underwent a magical change. Some human happiness is a landlocked lake;
but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and illimitable
surface to the voyaging interests of life. There was room and to spare on
those waters for all our separate ventures; and always beyond the sunset,
a mirage of the fortunate isles toward which our prows bent.


II

It was in Rome that, three years later, I heard of her death. The notice
said “suddenly”; I was glad of that. I was glad too--basely perhaps--to be
away from Grancy at a time when silence must have seemed obtuse and speech
derisive.

I was still in Rome when, a few months afterward, he suddenly arrived
there. He had been appointed secretary of legation at Constantinople and
was on the way to his post. He had taken the place, he said frankly, “to
get away.” Our relations with the Porte held out a prospect of hard work,
and that, he explained, was what he needed. He could never be satisfied to
sit down among the ruins. I saw that, like most of us in moments of extreme
moral tension, he was playing a part, behaving as he thought it became a
man to behave in the eye of disaster. The instinctive posture of grief is
a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels
the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe. Grancy, by
nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the rôle of the man of action,
who answers blow for blow and opposes a mailed front to the thrusts of
destiny; and the completeness of the equipment testified to his inner
weakness. We talked only of what we were not thinking of, and parted, after
a few days, with a sense of relief that proved the inadequacy of friendship
to perform, in such cases, the office assigned to it by tradition.

Soon afterward my own work called me home, but Grancy remained several
years in Europe. International diplomacy kept its promise of giving
him work to do, and during the year in which he acted as _chargé
d’affaires_ he acquitted himself, under trying conditions, with
conspicuous zeal and discretion. A political redistribution of matter
removed him from office just as he had proved his usefulness to the
government; and the following summer I heard that he had come home and
was down at his place in the country.

On my return to town I wrote him and his reply came by the next post. He
answered as it were in his natural voice, urging me to spend the following
Sunday with him, and suggesting that I should bring down any of the old
set who could be persuaded to join me. I thought this a good sign, and
yet--shall I own it?--I was vaguely disappointed. Perhaps we are apt to
feel that our friends’ sorrows should be kept like those historic monuments
from which the encroaching ivy is periodically removed.

That very evening at the club I ran across Claydon. I told him of Grancy’s
invitation and proposed that we should go down together; but he pleaded an
engagement. I was sorry, for I had always felt that he and I stood nearer
Ralph than the others, and if the old Sundays were to be renewed I should
have preferred that we two should spend the first alone with him. I said as
much to Claydon and offered to fit my time to his; but he met this by a
general refusal.

“I don’t want to go to Grancy’s,” he said bluntly. I waited a moment, but
he appended no qualifying clause.

“You’ve seen him since he came back?” I finally ventured.

Claydon nodded.

“And is he so awfully bad?”

“Bad? No: he’s all right.”

“All right? How can he be, unless he’s changed beyond all recognition?”

“Oh, you’ll recognize _him_,” said Claydon, with a puzzling deflection
of emphasis.

His ambiguity was beginning to exasperate me, and I felt myself shut out
from some knowledge to which I had as good a right as he.

“You’ve been down there already, I suppose?”

“Yes; I’ve been down there.”

“And you’ve done with each other--the partnership is dissolved?”

“Done with each other? I wish to God we had!” He rose nervously and tossed
aside the review from which my approach had diverted him. “Look here,”
he said, standing before me, “Ralph’s the best fellow going and there’s
nothing under heaven I wouldn’t do for him--short of going down there
again.” And with that he walked out of the room.

Claydon was incalculable enough for me to read a dozen different meanings
into his words; but none of my interpretations satisfied me. I determined,
at any rate, to seek no farther for a companion; and the next Sunday I
travelled down to Grancy’s alone. He met me at the station and I saw at
once that he had changed since our last meeting. Then he had been in
fighting array, but now if he and grief still housed together it was
no longer as enemies. Physically the transformation was as marked but
less reassuring. If the spirit triumphed the body showed its scars. At
five-and-forty he was gray and stooping, with the tired gait of an old man.
His serenity, however, was not the resignation of age. I saw that he did
not mean to drop out of the game. Almost immediately he began to speak of
our old interests; not with an effort, as at our former meeting, but simply
and naturally, in the tone of a man whose life has flowed back into its
normal channels. I remembered, with a touch of self-reproach, how I had
distrusted his reconstructive powers; but my admiration for his reserved
force was now tinged by the sense that, after all, such happiness as his
ought to have been paid with his last coin. The feeling grew as we neared
the house and I found how inextricably his wife was interwoven with my
remembrance of the place: how the whole scene was but an extension of that
vivid presence.

Within doors nothing was changed, and my hand would have dropped without
surprise into her welcoming clasp. It was luncheon-time, and Grancy led me
at once to the dining-room, where the walls, the furniture, the very plate
and porcelain, seemed a mirror in which a moment since her face had been
reflected. I wondered whether Grancy, under the recovered tranquillity
of his smile, concealed the same sense of her nearness, saw perpetually
between himself and the actual her bright unappeasable ghost. He spoke of
her once or twice, in an easy incidental way, and her name seemed to hang
in the air after he had uttered it, like a chord that continues to vibrate.
If he felt her presence it was evidently as an enveloping medium, the moral
atmosphere in which he breathed. I had never before known how completely
the dead may survive.

After luncheon we went for a long walk through the autumnal fields and
woods, and dusk was falling when we re-entered the house. Grancy led the
way to the library, where, at this hour, his wife had always welcomed
us back to a bright fire and a cup of tea. The room faced the west, and
held a clear light of its own after the rest of the house had grown dark.
I remembered how young she had looked in this pale gold light, which
irradiated her eyes and hair, or silhouetted her girlish outline as she
passed before the windows. Of all the rooms the library was most peculiarly
hers; and here I felt that her nearness might take visible shape. Then, all
in a moment, as Grancy opened the door, the feeling vanished and a kind
of resistance met me on the threshold. I looked about me. Was the room
changed? Had some desecrating hand effaced the traces of her presence? No;
here too the setting was undisturbed. My feet sank into the same deep-piled
Daghestan; the bookshelves took the firelight on the same rows of rich
subdued bindings; her armchair stood in its old place near the tea-table;
and from the opposite wall her face confronted me.

Her face--but _was_ it hers? I moved nearer and stood looking up at
the portrait. Grancy’s glance had followed mine and I heard him move to my
side.

“You see a change in it?” he said.

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means--that five years have passed.”

“Over _her_?”

“Why not?--Look at me!” He pointed to his gray hair and furrowed temples.
“What do you think kept _her_ so young? It was happiness! But now--“
he looked up at her with infinite tenderness. “I like her better so,” he
said. “It’s what she would have wished.”

“Have wished?”

“That we should grow old together. Do you think she would have wanted to be
left behind?”

I stood speechless, my gaze travelling from his worn grief-beaten features
to the painted face above. It was not furrowed like his; but a veil
of years seemed to have descended on it. The bright hair had lost its
elasticity, the cheek its clearness, the brow its light: the whole woman
had waned.

Grancy laid his hand on my arm. “You don’t like it?” he said sadly.

“Like it? I--I’ve lost her!” I burst out.

“And I’ve found her,” he answered.

“In _that_?” I cried with a reproachful gesture.

“Yes; in that.” He swung round on me almost defiantly. “The other had
become a sham, a lie! This is the way she would have looked--does look, I
mean. Claydon ought to know, oughtn’t he?”

I turned suddenly. “Did Claydon do this for you?”

Grancy nodded.

“Since your return?”

“Yes. I sent for him after I’d been back a week--.” He turned away and gave
a thrust to the smouldering fire. I followed, glad to leave the picture
behind me. Grancy threw himself into a chair near the hearth, so that the
light fell on his sensitive variable face. He leaned his head back, shading
his eyes with his hand, and began to speak.


III

“You fellows knew enough of my early history to A guess what my second
marriage meant to me. I say guess, because no one could understand--really.
I’ve always had a feminine streak in me, I suppose: the need of a pair of
eyes that should see with me, of a pulse that should keep time with mine.
Life is a big thing, of course; a magnificent spectacle; but I got so tired
of looking at it alone! Still, it’s always good to live, and I had plenty
of happiness--of the evolved kind. What I’d never had a taste of was the
simple inconscient sort that one breathes in like the air....

“Well--I met her. It was like finding the climate in which I was meant to
live. You know what she was--how indefinitely she multiplied one’s points
of contact with life, how she lit up the caverns and bridged the abysses!
Well, I swear to you (though I suppose the sense of all that was latent in
me) that what I used to think of on my way home at the end of the day, was
simply that when I opened this door she’d be sitting over there, with the
lamp-light falling in a particular way on one little curl in her neck....
When Claydon painted her he caught just the look she used to lift to mine
when I came in--I’ve wondered, sometimes, at his knowing how she looked
when she and I were alone.--How I rejoiced in that picture! I used to say
to her, ‘You’re my prisoner now--I shall never lose you. If you grew tired
of me and left me you’d leave your real self there on the wall!’ It was
always one of our jokes that she was going to grow tired of me--

“Three years of it--and then she died. It was so sudden that there was
no change, no diminution. It was as if she had suddenly become fixed,
immovable, like her own portrait: as if Time had ceased at its happiest
hour, just as Claydon had thrown down his brush one day and said, ‘I can’t
do better than that.’

“I went away, as you know, and stayed over there five years. I worked as
hard as I knew how, and after the first black months a little light stole
in on me. From thinking that she would have been interested in what I was
doing I came to feel that she _was_ interested--that she was there and
that she knew. I’m not talking any psychical jargon--I’m simply trying to
express the sense I had that an influence so full, so abounding as hers
couldn’t pass like a spring shower. We had so lived into each other’s
hearts and minds that the consciousness of what she would have thought
and felt illuminated all I did. At first she used to come back shyly,
tentatively, as though not sure of finding me; then she stayed longer and
longer, till at last she became again the very air I breathed.... There
were bad moments, of course, when her nearness mocked me with the loss of
the real woman; but gradually the distinction between the two was effaced
and the mere thought of her grew warm as flesh and blood.

“Then I came home. I landed in the morning and came straight down here. The
thought of seeing her portrait possessed me and my heart beat like a
lover’s as I opened the library door. It was in the afternoon and the room
was full of light. It fell on her picture--the picture of a young and
radiant woman. She smiled at me coldly across the distance that divided us.
I had the feeling that she didn’t even recognize me. And then I caught
sight of myself in the mirror over there--a gray-haired broken man whom she
had never known!

“For a week we two lived together--the strange woman and the strange man.
I used to sit night after night and question her smiling face; but no
answer ever came. What did she know of me, after all? We were irrevocably
separated by the five years of life that lay between us. At times, as I
sat here, I almost grew to hate her; for her presence had driven away my
gentle ghost, the real wife who had wept, aged, struggled with me during
those awful years.... It was the worst loneliness I’ve ever known. Then,
gradually, I began to notice a look of sadness in the picture’s eyes; a
look that seemed to say: ‘Don’t you see that _I_ am lonely too?’ And
all at once it came over me how she would have hated to be left behind! I
remembered her comparing life to a heavy book that could not be read with
ease unless two people held it together; and I thought how impatiently her
hand would have turned the pages that divided us!--So the idea came to me:
‘It’s the picture that stands between us; the picture that is dead, and not
my wife. To sit in this room is to keep watch beside a corpse.’ As this
feeling grew on me the portrait became like a beautiful mausoleum in which
she had been buried alive: I could hear her beating against the painted
walls and crying to me faintly for help....

“One day I found I couldn’t stand it any longer and I sent for Claydon. He
came down and I told him what I’d been through and what I wanted him to do.
At first he refused point-blank to touch the picture. The next morning I
went off for a long tramp, and when I came home I found him sitting here
alone. He looked at me sharply for a moment and then he said: ‘I’ve changed
my mind; I’ll do it.’ I arranged one of the north rooms as a studio and he
shut himself up there for a day; then he sent for me. The picture stood
there as you see it now--it was as though she’d met me on the threshold and
taken me in her arms! I tried to thank him, to tell him what it meant to
me, but he cut me short.

“‘There’s an up train at five, isn’t there?’ he asked. ‘I’m booked for a
dinner to-night. I shall just have time to make a bolt for the station and
you can send my traps after me.’ I haven’t seen him since.

“I can guess what it cost him to lay hands on his masterpiece; but, after
all, to him it was only a picture lost, to me it was my wife regained!”


IV

After that, for ten years or more, I watched the strange spectacle of a
life of hopeful and productive effort based on the structure of a dream.
There could be no doubt to those who saw Grancy during this period that
he drew his strength and courage from the sense of his wife’s mystic
participation in his task. When I went back to see him a few months later I
found the portrait had been removed from the library and placed in a small
study up-stairs, to which he had transferred his desk and a few books. He
told me he always sat there when he was alone, keeping the library for his
Sunday visitors. Those who missed the portrait of course made no comment on
its absence, and the few who were in his secret respected it. Gradually all
his old friends had gathered about him and our Sunday afternoons regained
something of their former character; but Claydon never reappeared among us.

As I look back now I see that Grancy must have been failing from the time
of his return home. His invincible spirit belied and disguised the signs of
weakness that afterward asserted themselves in my remembrance of him. He
seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of life to draw on, and more than one
of us was a pensioner on his superfluity.

Nevertheless, when I came back one summer from my European holiday and
heard that he had been at the point of death, I understood at once that we
had believed him well only because he wished us to.

I hastened down to the country and found him midway in a slow
convalescence. I felt then that he was lost to us and he read my thought at
a glance.

“Ah,” he said, “I’m an old man now and no mistake. I suppose we shall have
to go half-speed after this; but we shan’t need towing just yet!”

The plural pronoun struck me, and involuntarily I looked up at Mrs.
Grancy’s portrait. Line by line I saw my fear reflected in it. It was the
face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying. My heart stood still
at the thought of what Claydon had done.

Grancy had followed my glance. “Yes, it’s changed her,” he said quietly.
“For months, you know, it was touch and go with me--we had a long fight of
it, and it was worse for her than for me.” After a pause he added: “Claydon
has been very kind; he’s so busy nowadays that I seldom see him, but when I
sent for him the other day he came down at once.”

I was silent and we spoke no more of Grancy’s illness; but when I took
leave it seemed like shutting him in alone with his death-warrant.

The next time I went down to see him he looked much better. It was a Sunday
and he received me in the library, so that I did not see the portrait
again. He continued to improve and toward spring we began to feel that, as
he had said, he might yet travel a long way without being towed.

One evening, on returning to town after a visit which had confirmed my
sense of reassurance, I found Claydon dining alone at the club. He asked me
to join him and over the coffee our talk turned to his work.

“If you’re not too busy,” I said at length, “you ought to make time to go
down to Grancy’s again.”

He looked up quickly. “Why?” he asked.

“Because he’s quite well again,” I returned with a touch of cruelty. “His
wife’s prognostications were mistaken.”

Claydon stared at me a moment. “Oh, _she_ knows,” he affirmed with a
smile that chilled me.

“You mean to leave the portrait as it is then?” I persisted.

He shrugged his shoulders. “He hasn’t sent for me yet!”

A waiter came up with the cigars and Claydon rose and joined another group.

It was just a fortnight later that Grancy’s housekeeper telegraphed for me.
She met me at the station with the news that he had been “taken bad” and
that the doctors were with him. I had to wait for some time in the deserted
library before the medical men appeared. They had the baffled manner of
empirics who have been superseded by the great Healer; and I lingered only
long enough to hear that Grancy was not suffering and that my presence
could do him no harm.

I found him seated in his arm-chair in the little study. He held out his
hand with a smile.

“You see she was right after all,” he said.

“She?” I repeated, perplexed for the moment.

“My wife.” He indicated the picture. “Of course I knew she had no hope from
the first. I saw that”--he lowered his voice--“after Claydon had been here.
But I wouldn’t believe it at first!”

I caught his hands in mine. “For God’s sake don’t believe it now!” I
adjured him.

He shook his head gently. “It’s too late,” he said. “I might have known
that she knew.”

“But, Grancy, listen to me,” I began; and then I stopped. What could I say
that would convince him? There was no common ground of argument on which we
could meet; and after all it would be easier for him to die feeling that
she _had_ known. Strangely enough, I saw that Claydon had missed his
mark....


V

Grancy’s will named me as one of his executors; and my associate, having
other duties on his hands, begged me to assume the task of carrying out our
friend’s wishes. This placed me under the necessity of informing Claydon
that the portrait of Mrs. Grancy had been bequeathed to him; and he replied
by the next post that he would send for the picture at once. I was staying
in the deserted house when the portrait was taken away; and as the door
closed on it I felt that Grancy’s presence had vanished too. Was it his
turn to follow her now, and could one ghost haunt another?

After that, for a year or two, I heard nothing more of the picture, and
though I met Claydon from time to time we had little to say to each other.
I had no definable grievance against the man and I tried to remember that
he had done a fine thing in sacrificing his best picture to a friend; but
my resentment had all the tenacity of unreason.

One day, however, a lady whose portrait he had just finished begged me
to go with her to see it. To refuse was impossible, and I went with the
less reluctance that I knew I was not the only friend she had invited.
The others were all grouped around the easel when I entered, and after
contributing my share to the chorus of approval I turned away and began
to stroll about the studio. Claydon was something of a collector and his
things were generally worth looking at. The studio was a long tapestried
room with a curtained archway at one end. The curtains were looped back,
showing a smaller apartment, with books and flowers and a few fine bits of
bronze and porcelain. The tea-table standing in this inner room proclaimed
that it was open to inspection, and I wandered in. A _bleu poudré_
vase first attracted me; then I turned to examine a slender bronze
Ganymede, and in so doing found myself face to face with Mrs. Grancy’s
portrait. I stared up at her blankly and she smiled back at me in all
the recovered radiance of youth. The artist had effaced every trace of
his later touches and the original picture had reappeared. It throned
alone on the panelled wall, asserting a brilliant supremacy over its
carefully-chosen surroundings. I felt in an instant that the whole room was
tributary to it: that Claydon had heaped his treasures at the feet of the
woman he loved. Yes--it was the woman he had loved and not the picture; and
my instinctive resentment was explained.

Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Ah, how could you?” I cried, turning on him.

“How could I?” he retorted. “How could I _not_? Doesn’t she belong to
me now?”

I moved away impatiently.

“Wait a moment,” he said with a detaining gesture. “The others have gone
and I want to say a word to you.--Oh, I know what you’ve thought of me--I
can guess! You think I killed Grancy, I suppose?”

I was startled by his sudden vehemence. “I think you tried to do a cruel
thing,” I said.

“Ah--what a little way you others see into life!” he murmured. “Sit down a
moment--here, where we can look at her--and I’ll tell you.”

He threw himself on the ottoman beside me and sat gazing up at the picture,
with his hands clasped about his knee.

“Pygmalion,” he began slowly, “turned his statue into a real woman;
_I_ turned my real woman into a picture. Small compensation, you
think--but you don’t know how much of a woman belongs to you after you’ve
painted her!--Well, I made the best of it, at any rate--I gave her the best
I had in me; and she gave me in return what such a woman gives by merely
being. And after all she rewarded me enough by making me paint as I shall
never paint again! There was one side of her, though, that was mine alone,
and that was her beauty; for no one else understood it. To Grancy even
it was the mere expression of herself--what language is to thought. Even
when he saw the picture he didn’t guess my secret--he was so sure she was
all his! As though a man should think he owned the moon because it was
reflected in the pool at his door--

“Well--when he came home and sent for me to change the picture it was like
asking me to commit murder. He wanted me to make an old woman of her--of
her who had been so divinely, unchangeably young! As if any man who really
loved a woman would ask her to sacrifice her youth and beauty for his sake!
At first I told him I couldn’t do it--but afterward, when he left me alone
with the picture, something queer happened. I suppose it was because I was
always so confoundedly fond of Grancy that it went against me to refuse
what he asked. Anyhow, as I sat looking up at her, she seemed to say, ‘I’m
not yours but his, and I want you to make me what he wishes.” And so I did
it. I could have cut my hand off when the work was done--I daresay he told
you I never would go back and look at it. He thought I was too busy--he
never understood....

“Well--and then last year he sent for me again--you remember. It was after
his illness, and he told me he’d grown twenty years older and that he
wanted her to grow older too--he didn’t want her to be left behind. The
doctors all thought he was going to get well at that time, and he thought
so too; and so did I when I first looked at him. But when I turned to
the picture--ah, now I don’t ask you to believe me; but I swear it was
_her_ face that told me he was dying, and that she wanted him to know
it! She had a message for him and she made me deliver it.”

He rose abruptly and walked toward the portrait; then he sat down beside me
again.

“Cruel? Yes, it seemed so to me at first; and this time, if I resisted,
it was for _his_ sake and not for mine. But all the while I felt her
eyes drawing me, and gradually she made me understand. If she’d been there
in the flesh (she seemed to say) wouldn’t she have seen before any of us
that he was dying? Wouldn’t he have read the news first in her face? And
wouldn’t it be horrible if now he should discover it instead in strange
eyes?--Well--that was what she wanted of me and I did it--I kept them
together to the last!” He looked up at the picture again. “But now she
belongs to me,” he repeated....




THE CONFESSIONAL


When I was a young man I thought a great deal of local color. At that
time it was still a pigment of recent discovery, and supposed to have
a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye. As an aid to the
imagination its value was perhaps overrated; but as an object of pursuit
to that vagrant faculty, it had all the merits claimed for it. I certainly
never hunted any game better worth my powder; and to a young man with rare
holidays and long working hours, its value was enhanced by the fact that
one might bring it down at any turn, if only one kept one’s eye alert and
one’s hand on the trigger.

Even the large manufacturing city where, for some years, my young
enthusiasms were chained to an accountant’s desk, was not without its
romantic opportunities. Many of the mill-hands at Dunstable were Italians,
and a foreign settlement had formed itself in that unsavory and unsanitary
portion of the town known as the Point. The Point, like more aristocratic
communities, had its residential and commercial districts, its church, its
theatre and its restaurant. When the craving for local color was on me it
was my habit to resort to the restaurant, a low-browed wooden building with
the appetizing announcement:

“_Aristiù di montone_”

pasted in one of its fly-blown window-panes. Here the consumption of tough
macaroni or of an ambiguous _frittura_ sufficed to transport me to the
Cappello d’Oro in Venice, while my cup of coffee and a wasp-waisted cigar
with a straw in it turned my greasy table-cloth into the marble top of
one of the little round tables under the arcade of the Caffè Pedrotti at
Padua. This feat of the imagination was materially aided by Agostino, the
hollow-eyed and low-collared waiter, whose slimy napkin never lost its
Latin flourish and whose zeal for my comfort was not infrequently displayed
by his testing the warmth of my soup with his finger. Through Agostino I
became acquainted with the inner history of the colony, heard the details
of its feuds and vendettas, and learned to know by sight the leading
characters in these domestic dramas.

The restaurant was frequented by the chief personages of the community:
the overseer of the Italian hands at the Meriton Mills, the doctor, his
wife the _levatrice_ (a plump Neapolitan with greasy ringlets, a plush
picture-hat, and a charm against the evil-eye hanging in a crease of her
neck) and lastly by Don Egidio, the _parocco_ of the little church
across the street. The doctor and his wife came only on feast days, but
the overseer and Don Egidio were regular patrons. The former was a quiet
saturnine-looking man, of accomplished manners but reluctant speech, and I
depended for my diversion chiefly on Don Egidio, whose large loosely-hung
lips were always ajar for conversation. The remarks issuing from them
were richly tinged by the gutturals of the Bergamasque dialect, and it
needed but a slight acquaintance with Italian types to detect the Lombard
peasant under the priest’s rusty cassock. This inference was confirmed
by Don Egidio’s telling me that he came from a village of Val Camonica,
the radiant valley which extends northward from the lake of Iseo to
the Adamello glaciers. His step-father had been a laborer on one of
the fruit-farms of a Milanese count who owned large estates in the Val
Camonica; and that gentleman, taking a fancy to the lad, whom he had seen
at work in his orchards, had removed him to his villa on the lake of Iseo
and had subsequently educated him for the Church.

It was doubtless to this picturesque accident that Don Egidio owed the
mingling of ease and simplicity that gave an inimitable charm to his
stout shabby presence. It was as though some wild mountain-fruit had been
transplanted to the Count’s orchards and had mellowed under cultivation
without losing its sylvan flavor. I have never seen the social art carried
farther without suggestion of artifice. The fact that Don Egidio’s
amenities were mainly exercised on the mill-hands composing his parish
proved the genuineness of his gift. It is easier to simulate gentility
among gentlemen than among navvies; and the plain man is a touchstone who
draws out all the alloy in the gold.

Among his parishioners Don Egidio ruled with the cheerful despotism of the
good priest. On cardinal points he was inflexible, but in minor matters he
had that elasticity of judgment which enables the Catholic discipline to
fit itself to every inequality of the human conscience. There was no appeal
from his verdict; but his judgment-seat was a revolving chair from which he
could view the same act at various angles. His influence was acknowledged
not only by his flock, but by the policeman at the corner, the “bar-keep’”
in the dive, the ward politician in the corner grocery. The general verdict
of Dunstable was that the Point would have been hell without the priest.
It was perhaps not precisely heaven with him; but such light of the upper
sky as pierced its murky atmosphere was reflected from Don Egidio’s
countenance. It is hardly possible for any one to exercise such influence
without taking pleasure in it; and on the whole the priest was probably
a contented man; though it does not follow that he was a happy one. On
this point the first stages of our acquaintance yielded much food for
conjecture. At first sight Don Egidio was the image of cheerfulness. He had
all the physical indications of a mind at ease: the leisurely rolling gait,
the ready laugh, the hospitable eye of the man whose sympathies are always
on the latch. It took me some time to discover under his surface garrulity
the impenetrable reticence of his profession, and under his enjoyment of
trifles a levelling melancholy which made all enjoyment trifling. Don
Egidio’s aspect and conversation were so unsuggestive of psychological
complexities that I set down this trait to poverty or home-sickness. There
are few classes of men more frugal in tastes and habit than the village
priest in Italy; but Don Egidio, by his own account, had been introduced,
at an impressionable age, to a way of living that must have surpassed his
wildest dreams of self-indulgence. To whatever privations his parochial
work had since accustomed him, the influences of that earlier life were
too perceptible in his talk not to have made a profound impression on his
tastes; and he remained, for all his apostolic simplicity, the image of the
family priest who has his seat at the rich man’s table.

It chanced that I had used one of my short European holidays to explore
afoot the romantic passes connecting the Valtelline with the lake of Iseo;
and my remembrance of that enchanting region made it seem impossible
that Don Egidio should ever look without a reminiscent pang on the grimy
perspective of his parochial streets. The transition was too complete, too
ironical, from those rich glades and Titianesque acclivities to the brick
hovels and fissured sidewalks of the Point.

This impression was confirmed when Don Egidio, in response to my urgent
invitation, paid his first visit to my modest lodgings. He called one
winter evening, when a wood-fire in its happiest humor was giving a
factitious lustre to my book-shelves and bringing out the values of the one
or two old prints and Chinese porcelains that accounted for the perennial
shabbiness of my wardrobe.

“Ah,” said he with a murmur of satisfaction, as he laid aside his shiny hat
and bulging umbrella, “it is a long time since I have been in a _casa
signorile_.”

My remembrance of his own room (he lodged with the doctor and the
_levatrice_) saved this epithet from the suggestion of irony and kept
me silent while he sank into my arm-chair with the deliberation of a tired
traveller lowering himself gently into a warm bath.

“Good! good!” he repeated, looking about him. “Books, porcelains, objects
of _virtù_--I am glad to see that there are still such things in the
world!” And he turned a genial eye on the glass of Marsala that I had
poured out for him.

Don Egidio was the most temperate of men and never exceeded his one glass;
but he liked to sit by the hour puffing at my Cabañas, which I suspected
him of preferring to the black weed of his native country. Under the
influence of my tobacco he became even more blandly garrulous, and I
sometimes fancied that of all the obligations of his calling none could
have placed such a strain on him as that of preserving the secrets of the
confessional. He often talked of his early life at the Count’s villa, where
he had been educated with his patron’s two sons till he was of age to be
sent to the seminary; and I could see that the years spent in simple and
familiar intercourse with his benefactors had been the most vivid chapter
in his experience. The Italian peasant’s inarticulate tenderness for the
beauty of his birthplace had been specialized in him by contact with
cultivated tastes, and he could tell me not only that the Count had a
“stupendous” collection of pictures, but that the chapel of the villa
contained a sepulchral monument by Bambaja, and that the art-critics were
divided as to the authenticity of the Leonardo in the family palace at
Milan.

On all these subjects he was inexhaustibly voluble; but there was one point
which he always avoided, and that was his reason for coming to America. I
remember the round turn with which he brought me up when I questioned him.

“A priest,” said he, “is a soldier and must obey orders like a soldier.”
He set down his glass of Marsala and strolled across the room. “I had not
observed,” he went on, “that you have here a photograph of the Sposalizio
of the Brera. What a picture! _È stupendo_!” and he turned back to his
seat and smilingly lit a fresh cigar.

I saw at once that I had hit on a point where his native garrulity was
protected by the chain-mail of religious discipline that every Catholic
priest wears beneath his cassock. I had too much respect for my friend
to wish to penetrate his armor, and now and then I almost fancied he was
grateful to me for not putting his reticence to the test.

Don Egidio must have been past sixty when I made his acquaintance; but it
was not till the close of an exceptionally harsh winter, some five or six
years after our first meeting, that I began to think of him as an old man.
It was as though the long-continued cold had cracked and shrivelled him. He
had grown bent and hollow-chested and his lower lip shook like an unhinged
door. The summer heat did little to revive him, and in September, when I
came home from my vacation, I found him just recovering from an attack of
pneumonia. That autumn he did not care to venture often into the night air,
and now and then I used to go and sit with him in his little room, to which
I had contributed the unheard-of luxuries of an easy-chair and a gas-stove.

My engagements, however, made these visits infrequent, and several weeks
had elapsed without my seeing the _parocco_ when, one snowy November
morning, I ran across him in the railway-station. I was on my way to New
York for the day and had just time to wave a greeting to him as I jumped
into the railway-carriage; but a moment later, to my surprise, I saw him
stiffly clambering into the same train. I found him seated in the common
car, with his umbrella between his knees and a bundle done up in a red
cotton handkerchief on the seat at his side. The caution with which, at my
approach, he transferred this bundle to his arms caused me to glance at it
in surprise; and he answered my look by saying with a smile:

“They are flowers for the dead--the most exquisite flowers--from the
greenhouses of Mr. Meriton--_si figuri_!” And he waved a descriptive
hand. “One of my lads, Gianpietro, is employed by the gardener there, and
every year on this day he brings me a beautiful bunch of flowers--for such
a purpose it is no sin,” he added, with the charming Italian pliancy of
judgment.

“And why are you travelling in this snowy weather, _signor parocco_?”
I asked, as he ended with a cough.

He fixed me gravely with his simple shallow eye. “Because it is the day of
the dead, my son,” he said, “and I go to place these on the grave of the
noblest man that ever lived.”

“You are going to New York?”

“To Brooklyn--“

I hesitated a moment, wishing to question him, yet uncertain whether his
replies were curtailed by the persistency of his cough or by the desire to
avoid interrogation.

“This is no weather to be travelling with such a cough,” I said at length.

He made a deprecating gesture.

“I have never missed the day--not once in eighteen years. But for me he
would have no one!” He folded his hands on his umbrella and looked away
from me to hide the trembling of his lip.

I resolved on a last attempt to storm his confidence. “Your friend is
buried in Calvary cemetery?”

He signed an assent.

“That is a long way for you to go alone, _signor parocco_. The streets
are sure to be slippery and there is an icy wind blowing. Give me your
flowers and let me send them to the cemetery by a messenger. I give you my
word they shall reach their destination safely.”

He turned a quiet look on me. “My son, you are young,” he said, “and you
don’t know how the dead need us.” He drew his breviary from his pocket and
opened it with a smile. “_Mi scusi?_” he murmured.

The business which had called me to town obliged me to part from him as
soon as the train entered the station, and in my dash for the street I
left his unwieldy figure laboring far behind me through the crowd on the
platform. Before we separated, however, I had learned that he was returning
to Dunstable by the four o’clock train, and had resolved to despatch my
business in time to travel home with him. When I reached Wall Street I was
received with the news that the man I had appointed to meet was ill and
detained in the country. My business was “off” and I found myself with
the rest of the day at my disposal. I had no difficulty in deciding how
to employ my time. I was at an age when, in such contingencies, there is
always a feminine alternative; and even now I don’t know how it was that,
on my way to a certain hospitable luncheon-table, I suddenly found myself
in a cab which was carrying me at full-speed to the Twenty-third Street
ferry. It was not till I had bought my ticket and seated myself in the
varnished tunnel of the ferry-boat that I was aware of having been diverted
from my purpose by an overmastering anxiety for Don Egidio. I rapidly
calculated that he had not more than an hour’s advance on me, and that,
allowing for my greater agility and for the fact that I had a cab at my
call, I was likely to reach the cemetery in time to see him under shelter
before the gusts of sleet that were already sweeping across the river had
thickened to a snow-storm.

At the gates of the cemetery I began to take a less sanguine view of my
attempt. The commemorative anniversary had filled the silent avenues
with visitors, and I felt the futility of my quest as I tried to fix the
gatekeeper’s attention on my delineation of a stout Italian priest with a
bad cough and a bunch of flowers tied up in a red cotton handkerchief. The
gate-keeper showed that delusive desire to oblige that is certain to send
its victims in the wrong direction; but I had the presence of mind to go
exactly contrary to his indication, and thanks to this precaution I came,
after half an hour’s search, on the figure of my poor _parocco_,
kneeling on the wet ground in one of the humblest by-ways of the great
necropolis. The mound before which he knelt was strewn with the spoils of
Mr. Meriton’s conservatories, and on the weather-worn tablet at its head I
read the inscription:

IL CONTE SIVIANO
DA MILANO.

_Super flumina Babylonis, illic sedimus et flevimus._

So engrossed was Don Egidio that for some moments I stood behind him
unobserved; and when he rose and faced me, grief had left so little room
for any minor emotion that he looked at me almost without surprise.

“Don Egidio,” I said, “I have a carriage waiting for you at the gate. You
must come home with me.”

He nodded quietly and I drew his hand through my arm.

He turned back to the grave. “One moment, my son,” he said. “It may be for
the last time.” He stood motionless, his eyes on the heaped-up flowers
which were already bruised and blackened by the cold. “To leave him
alone--after sixty years! But God is everywhere--“ he murmured as I led him
away.

On the journey home he did not care to talk, and my chief concern was to
keep him wrapped in my greatcoat and to see that his bed was made ready as
soon as I had restored him to his lodgings. The _levatrice_ brought a
quilted coverlet from her own room and hovered over him as gently as though
he had been of the sex to require her services; while Agostino, at my
summons, appeared with a bowl of hot soup that was heralded down the
street by a reviving waft of garlic. To these ministrations I left the
_parocco_, intending to call for news of him the next evening; but an
unexpected pressure of work kept me late at my desk, and the following day
some fresh obstacle delayed me.

On the third afternoon, as I was leaving the office, an agate-eyed infant
from the Point hailed me with a message from the doctor. The _parocco_
was worse and had asked for me. I jumped into the nearest car and ten
minutes later was running up the doctor’s greasy stairs.

To my dismay I found Don Egidio’s room cold and untenanted; but I was
reassured a moment later by the appearance of the _levatrice_, who
announced that she had transferred the blessed man to her own apartment,
where he could have the sunlight and a good bed to lie in. There in fact
he lay, weak but smiling, in a setting which contrasted oddly enough with
his own monastic surroundings: a cheerful grimy room, hung with anecdotic
chromos, photographs of lady-patients proudly presenting their offspring
to the camera, and innumerable Neapolitan _santolini_ decked out with
shrivelled palm-leaves.

The _levatrice_ whispered that the good man had the pleurisy, and
that, as she phrased it, he was nearing his last mile-stone. I saw that he
was in fact in a bad way, but his condition did not indicate any pressing
danger, and I had the presentiment that he would still, as the saying is,
put up a good fight. It was clear, however, that he knew what turn the
conflict must take, and the solemnity with which he welcomed me showed that
my summons was a part of that spiritual strategy with which the Catholic
opposes the surprise of death.

“My son,” he said, when the _levatrice_ had left us, “I have a favor
to ask you. You found me yesterday bidding good-bye to my best friend.”
His cough interrupted him. “I have never told you,” he went on, “the name
of the family in which I was brought up. It was Siviano, and that was
the grave of the Count’s eldest son, with whom I grew up as a brother.
For eighteen years he has lain in that strange ground--_in terra
aliena_--and when I die, there will be no one to care for his grave.”

I saw what he waited for. “I will care for it, _signor parocco_.”

“I knew I should have your promise, my child; and what you promise you
keep. But my friend is a stranger to you--you are young and at your age
life is a mistress who kisses away sad memories. Why should you remember
the grave of a stranger? I cannot lay such a claim on you. But I will tell
you his story--and then I think that neither joy nor grief will let you
forget him; for when you rejoice you will remember how he sorrowed; and
when you sorrow the thought of him will be like a friend’s hand in yours.”


II

You tell me (Don Egidio began) that you know our little lake; and if you
have seen it you will understand why it always used to remind me of the
“garden enclosed” of the Canticles.

_Hortus inclusus; columba mea in foraminibus petræ_: the words used
to come back to me whenever I returned from a day’s journey across the
mountains, and looking down saw the blue lake far below, hidden in its
hills like a happy secret in a stern heart. We were never envious of
the glory of the great lakes. They are like the show pictures that some
nobleman hangs in his public gallery; but our Iseo is the treasure that
he hides in his inner chamber.

You tell me you saw it in summer, when it looks up like a saint’s eye,
reflecting the whole of heaven. It was then too that I first saw it.
My future friend, the old Count, had found me at work on one of his
fruit-farms up the valley, and hearing that I was ill-treated by my
step-father--a drunken pedlar from the Val Mastellone, whom my poor mother
a year or two earlier had come across at the fair of Lovere--he had taken
me home with him to Iseo. I used to serve mass in our hill-village of
Cerveno, and the village children called me “the little priest” because
when my work was done I often crept back to the church to get away from
my step-father’s blows and curses. “I will make a real priest of him,”
the Count declared; and that afternoon, perched on the box of his
travelling-carriage, I was whirled away from the dark scenes of my
childhood into a world, where, as it seemed to me, every one was as happy
as an angel on a _presepio_.

I wonder if you remember the Count’s villa? It lies on the shore of the
lake, facing the green knoll of Monte Isola, and overlooked by the village
of Siviano and by the old parish-church where I said mass for fifteen happy
years. The village hangs on a ledge of the mountain; but the villa dips its
foot in the lake, smiling at its reflection like a bather lingering on the
brink. What Paradise it seemed to me that day! In our church up the valley
there hung an old brown picture, with a Saint Sabastian in the foreground;
and behind him the most wonderful palace, with terraced gardens adorned
with statues and fountains, where fine folk in resplendent dresses walked
up and down without heeding the blessed martyr’s pangs. The Count’s villa,
with its terraces, its roses, its marble steps descending to the lake,
reminded me of that palace; only instead of being inhabited by wicked
people engrossed in their selfish pleasures it was the home of the kindest
friends that ever took a poor lad by the hand.

The old Count was a widower when I first knew him. He had been twice
married, and his first wife had left him two children, a son and a
daughter. The eldest, Donna Marianna, was then a girl of twenty, who
kept her father’s house and was a mother to the two lads. She was not
handsome or learned, and had no taste for the world; but she was like the
lavender-plant in a poor man’s window--just a little gray flower, but a
sweetness that fills the whole house. Her brother, Count Roberto, had been
ailing from his birth, and was a studious lad with a melancholy musing face
such as you may see in some of Titian’s portraits of young men. He looked
like an exiled prince dressed in mourning. There was one child by the
second marriage, Count Andrea, a boy of my own age, handsome as a Saint
George, but not as kind as the others. No doubt, being younger, he was less
able to understand why an uncouth peasant lad should have been brought to
his father’s table; and the others were so fearful of hurting my feelings
that, but for his teasing, I might never have mended my clumsy manners or
learned how to behave in the presence of my betters. Count Andrea was not
sparing in such lessons, and Count Roberto, in spite of his weak arms,
chastised his brother roundly when he thought the discipline had been too
severe; but for my part it seemed to me natural enough that such a godlike
being should lord it over a poor clodhopper like myself.

Well--I will not linger over the beginning of my new life for my story has
to do with its close. Only I should like to make you understand what the
change meant to me--an ignorant peasant lad, coming from hard words and
blows and a smoke-blackened hut in the hills to that great house full of
rare and beautiful things, and of beings who seemed to me even more rare
and beautiful. Do you wonder I was ready to kiss the ground they trod, and
would have given the last drop of my blood to serve them?

In due course I was sent to the seminary at Lodi; and on holidays I used
to visit the family in Milan. Count Andrea was growing up to be one of
the handsomest young men imaginable, but a trifle wild; and the old Count
married him in haste to the daughter of a Venetian noble, who brought as
her dower a great estate in Istria. The Countess Gemma, as this lady was
called, was as light as thistledown and had an eye like a baby’s; but while
she was cooing for the moon her pretty white hands were always stealing
toward something within reach that she had not been meant to have. The old
Count was not alert enough to follow these manoeuvres; and the Countess hid
her designs under a torrent of guileless chatter, as pick-pockets wear long
sleeves to conceal their movements. Her only fault, he used to say, was
that one of her aunts had married an Austrian; and this event having taken
place before she was born he laughingly acquitted her of any direct share
in it. She confirmed his good opinion of her by giving her husband two
sons; and Roberto showing no inclination to marry, these boys naturally
came to be looked on as the heirs of the house.

Meanwhile I had finished my course of studies, and the old Count, on my
twenty-first birthday, had appointed me priest of the parish of Siviano. It
was the year of Count Andrea’s marriage and there were great festivities at
the villa. Three years later the old Count died, to the sorrow of his two
eldest children. Donna Marianna and Count Roberto closed their apartments
in the palace at Milan and withdrew for a year to Siviano. It was then
that I first began to know my friend. Before that I had loved him without
understanding him; now I learned of what metal he was made. His bookish
tastes inclined him to a secluded way of living; and his younger brother
perhaps fancied that he would not care to assume the charge of the estate.
But if Andrea thought this he was disappointed. Roberto resolutely took up
the tradition of his father’s rule, and, as if conscious of lacking the
old Count’s easy way with the peasants, made up for it by a redoubled zeal
for their welfare. I have seen him toil for days to adjust some trifling
difficulty that his father would have set right with a ready word; like the
sainted bishop who, when a beggar asked him for a penny, cried out: “Alas,
my brother, I have not a penny in my purse; but here are two gold pieces,
if they can be made to serve you instead!” We had many conferences over
the condition of his people, and he often sent me up the valley to look
into the needs of the peasantry on the fruit-farms. No grievance was too
trifling for him to consider it, no abuse too deep-seated for him to root
it out; and many an hour that other men of his rank would have given to
books or pleasure was devoted to adjusting a quarrel about boundary-lines
or to weighing the merits of a complaint against the tax-collector. I
often said that he was as much his people’s priest as I; and he smiled and
answered that every landowner was a king and that in old days the king was
always a priest.

Donna Marianna was urgent with him to marry, but he always declared that
he had a family in his tenantry, and that, as for a wife, she had never
let him feel the want of one. He had that musing temper which gives a man
a name for coldness; though in fact he may all the while be storing fuel
for a great conflagration. But to me he whispered another reason for not
marrying. A man, he said, does not take wife and rejoice while his mother
is on her death-bed; and Italy, his mother, lay dying, with the foreign
vultures waiting to tear her apart.

You are too young to know anything of those days, my son; and how can any
one understand them who did not live through them? Italy lay dying indeed;
but Lombardy was her heart, and the heart still beat, and sent the faint
blood creeping to her cold extremities. Her torturers, weary of their
work, had allowed her to fall into a painless stupor; but just as she was
sinking from sleep to death, heaven sent Radetsky to scourge her back to
consciousness; and at the first sting of his lash she sprang maimed and
bleeding to her feet.

Ah, those days, those days, my son! Italy--Italy--was the word on our
lips; but the thought in our hearts was just _Austria_. We clamored
for liberty, unity, the franchise; but under our breath we prayed only to
smite the white-coats. Remove the beam from our eye, we cried, and we shall
see our salvation clearly enough! We priests in the north were all liberals
and worked with the nobles and the men of letters. Gioberti was our
breviary and his Holiness the new Pope was soon to be the Tancred of our
crusade. But meanwhile, mind you, all this went on in silence, underground
as it were, while on the surface Lombardy still danced, feasted, married,
and took office under the Austrian. In the iron-mines up our valley there
used to be certain miners who stayed below ground for months at a time;
and, like one of these, Roberto remained buried in his purpose, while life
went its way overhead. Though I was not in his confidence I knew well
enough where his thoughts were, for he went among us with the eye of a
lover, the visionary look of one who hears a Voice. We all heard that
Voice, to be sure, mingling faintly with the other noises of life; but to
Roberto it was already as the roar of mighty waters, drowning every other
sound with its thunder.

On the surface, as I have said, things looked smooth enough. An Austrian
cardinal throned in Milan and an Austrian-hearted Pope ruled in Rome. In
Lombardy, Austria couched like a beast of prey, ready to spring at our
throats if we stirred or struggled. The Moderates, to whose party Count
Roberto belonged, talked of prudence, compromise, the education of the
masses; but if their words were a velvet sheath their thought was a dagger.
For many years, as you know, the Milanese had maintained an outward show of
friendliness with their rulers. The nobles had accepted office under the
vice-roy, and in the past there had been frequent intermarriage between
the two aristocracies. But now, one by one, the great houses had closed
their doors against official society. Though some of the younger and more
careless, those who must dance and dine at any cost, still went to the
palace and sat beside the enemy at the opera, fashion was gradually taking
sides against them, and those who had once been laughed at as old fogeys
were now applauded as patriots. Among these, of course, was Count Roberto,
who for several years had refused to associate with the Austrians, and
had silently resented his easy-going brother’s disregard of political
distinctions. Andrea and Gemma belonged to the moth tribe, who flock to
the brightest light; and Gemma’s Istrian possessions, and her family’s
connection with the Austrian nobility, gave them a pretext for fluttering
about the vice-regal candle. Roberto let them go their way, but his own
course was a tacit protest against their conduct. They were always welcome
at the palazzo Siviano; but he and Donna Marianna withdrew from society in
order to have an excuse for not showing themselves at the Countess Gemma’s
entertainments. If Andrea and Gemma were aware of his disapproval they were
clever enough to ignore it; for the rich elder brother who paid their debts
and never meant to marry was too important a person to be quarrelled with
on political grounds. They seemed to think that if he married it would be
only to spite them; and they were persuaded that their future depended on
their giving him no cause to take such reprisals. I shall never be more
than a plain peasant at heart and I have little natural skill in discerning
hidden motives; but the experience of the confessional gives every priest
a certain insight into the secret springs of action, and I often wondered
that the worldly wisdom of Andrea and Gemma did not help them to a clearer
reading of their brother’s character. For my part I knew that, in Roberto’s
heart, no great passion could spring from a mean motive; and I had always
thought that if he ever loved any woman as he loved Italy, it must be from
his country’s hand that he received his bride. And so it came about.

Have you ever noticed, on one of those still autumn days before a storm,
how here and there a yellow leaf will suddenly detach itself from the bough
and whirl through the air as though some warning of the gale had reached
it? So it was then in Lombardy. All round was the silence of decay; but now
and then a word, a look, a trivial incident, fluttered ominously through
the stillness. It was in ’45. Only a year earlier the glorious death of the
Bandiera brothers had sent a long shudder through Italy. In the Romagna,
Renzi and his comrades had tried to uphold by action the protest set forth
in the “Manifesto of Rimini”; and their failure had sowed the seed which
d’Azeglio and Cavour were to harvest. Everywhere the forces were silently
gathering; and nowhere was the hush more profound, the least reverberation
more audible, than in the streets of Milan.

It was Count Roberto’s habit to attend early mass in the Cathedral; and one
morning, as he was standing in the aisle, a young girl passed him with her
father. Roberto knew the father, a beggarly Milanese of the noble family of
Intelvi, who had cut himself off from his class by accepting an appointment
in one of the government offices. As the two went by he saw a group of
Austrian officers looking after the girl, and heard one of them say: “Such
a choice morsel as that is too good for slaves;” and another answer with a
laugh: “Yes, it’s a dish for the master’s table!”

The girl heard too. She was as white as a wind-flower and he saw the words
come out on her cheek like the red mark from a blow. She whispered to
her father, but he shook his head and drew her away without so much as
a glance at the Austrians. Roberto heard mass and then hastened out and
placed himself in the porch of the Cathedral. A moment later the officers
appeared, and they too stationed themselves near the doorway. Presently the
girl came out on her father’s arm. Her admirers stepped forward to greet
Intelvi; and the cringing wretch stood there exchanging compliments with
them, while their insolent stare devoured his daughter’s beauty. She,
poor thing, shook like a leaf, and her eyes, in avoiding theirs, suddenly
encountered Roberto’s. Her look was a wounded bird that flew to him for
shelter. He carried it away in his breast and its live warmth beat against
his heart. He thought that Italy had looked at him through those eyes; for
love is the wiliest of masqueraders and has a thousand disguises at his
command.

Within a month Faustina Intelvi was his wife. Donna Marianna and I
rejoiced; for we knew he had chosen her because he loved her, and she
seemed to us almost worthy of such a choice. As for Count Andrea and his
wife, I leave you to guess what ingredients were mingled in the kiss with
which they welcomed the bride. They were all smiles at Roberto’s marriage,
and had only words of praise for his wife. Donna Marianna, who had
sometimes taxed me with suspecting their motives, rejoiced in this fresh
proof of their magnanimity; but for my part I could have wished to see them
a little less kind. All such twilight fears, however, vanished in the flush
of my friend’s happiness. Over some natures love steals gradually, as the
morning light widens across a valley; but it had flashed on Roberto like
the leap of dawn to a snow-peak. He walked the world with the wondering
step of a blind man suddenly restored to sight; and once he said to me with
a laugh: “Love makes a Columbus of every one of us!”

And the Countess--? The Countess, my son, was eighteen, and her husband was
forty. Count Roberto had the heart of a poet, but he walked with a limp and
his skin was sallow. Youth plucks the fruit for its color rather than its
flavor; and first love does not serenade its mistress on a church-organ. In
Italy girls are married as land is sold; if two estates adjoin two lives
are united. As for the portionless girl, she is a knick-knack that goes to
the highest bidder. Faustina was handed over to her purchaser as if she
had been a picture for his gallery; and the transaction doubtless seemed
as natural to her as to her parents. She walked to the altar like an
Iphigenia; but pallor becomes a bride, and it looks well for a daughter to
weep on leaving her mother. Perhaps it would have been different if she had
guessed that the threshold of her new home was carpeted with love and its
four corners hung with tender thoughts of her; but her husband was a silent
man, who never called attention to his treasures.

The great palace in Milan was a gloomy house for a girl to enter. Roberto
and his sister lived in it as if it had been a monastery, going nowhere and
receiving only those who labored for the Cause. To Faustina, accustomed to
the easy Austrian society, the Sunday evening receptions at the palazzo
Siviano must have seemed as dreary as a scientific congress. It pleased
Roberto to regard her as a victim of barbarian insolence, an embodiment of
his country desecrated by the desire of the enemy; but though, like any
handsome penniless girl, Faustina had now and then been exposed to a free
look or a familiar word, I doubt if she connected such incidents with the
political condition of Italy. She knew, of course, that in marrying Siviano
she was entering a house closed against the Austrian. One of Siviano’s
first cares had been to pension his father-in-law, with the stipulation
that Intelvi should resign his appointment and give up all relations with
the government; and the old hypocrite, only too glad to purchase idleness
on such terms, embraced the liberal cause with a zeal which left his
daughter no excuse for half-heartedness. But he found it less easy than he
had expected to recover a footing among his own people. In spite of his
patriotic bluster the Milanese held aloof from him; and being the kind of
man who must always take his glass in company he gradually drifted back
to his old associates. It was impossible to forbid Faustina to visit her
parents; and in their house she breathed an air that was at least tolerant
of Austria.

But I must not let you think that the young Countess appeared ungrateful or
unhappy. She was silent and shy, and it needed a more enterprising temper
than Roberto’s to break down the barrier between them. They seemed to talk
to one another through a convent-grating, rather than across a hearth; but
if Roberto had asked more of her than she could give, outwardly she was
a model wife. She chose me at once as her confessor and I watched over
the first steps of her new life. Never was younger sister tenderer to her
elder than she to Donna Marianna; never was young wife more mindful of her
religious duties, kinder to her dependents, more charitable to the poor;
yet to be with her was like living in a room with shuttered windows. She
was always the caged bird, the transplanted flower: for all Roberto’s care
she never bloomed or sang.

Donna Marianna was the first to speak of it. “The child needs more light
and air,” she said.

“Light? Air?” Roberto repeated. “Does she not go to mass every morning?
Does she not drive on the Corso every evening?”

Donna Marianna was not called clever, but her heart was wiser than most
women’s heads.

“At our age, brother,” said she, “the windows of the mind face north and
look out on a landscape full of lengthening shadows. Faustina needs another
outlook. She is as pale as a hyacinth grown in a cellar.”

Roberto himself turned pale and I saw that she had uttered his own thought.

“You want me to let her go to Gemma’s!” he exclaimed.

“Let her go wherever there is a little careless laughter.”

“Laughter--now!” he cried, with a gesture toward the sombre line of
portraits above his head.

“Let her laugh while she can, my brother.”

That evening after dinner he called Faustina to him.

“My child,” he said, “go and put on your jewels. Your sister Gemma gives a
ball to-night and the carriage waits to take you there. I am too much of a
recluse to be at ease in such scenes, but I have sent word to your father
to go with you.”

Andrea and Gemma welcomed their young sister-in-law with effusion, and from
that time she was often in their company. Gemma forbade any mention of
politics in her drawing-room, and it was natural that Faustina should be
glad to escape from the solemn conclaves of the palazzo Siviano to a house
where life went as gaily as in that villa above Florence where Boccaccio’s
careless story-tellers took refuge from the plague. But meanwhile the
political distemper was rapidly spreading, and in spite of Gemma’s Austrian
affiliations it was no longer possible for her to receive the enemy openly.
It was whispered that her door was still ajar to her old friends; but
the rumor may have risen from the fact that one of the Austrian cavalry
officers stationed at Milan was her own cousin, the son of the aunt on
whose misalliance the old Count had so often bantered her. No one could
blame the Countess Gemma for not turning her own flesh and blood out of
doors; and the social famine to which the officers of the garrison were
reduced made it natural that young Welkenstern should press the claims of
consanguinity.

All this must have reached Roberto’s ears; but he made no sign and his wife
came and went as she pleased. When they returned the following year to the
old dusky villa at Siviano she was like the voice of a brook in a twilight
wood: one could not look at her without ransacking the spring for new
similes to paint her freshness. With Roberto it was different. I found him
older, more preoccupied and silent; but I guessed that his preoccupations
were political, for when his eye rested on his wife it cleared like the
lake when a cloud-shadow lifts from it.

Count Andrea and his wife occupied an adjoining villa; and during the
_villeggiatura_ the two households lived almost as one family.
Roberto, however, was often absent in Milan, called thither on business of
which the nature was not hard to guess. Sometimes he brought back guests to
the villa; and on these occasions Faustina and Donna Marianna went to Count
Andrea’s for the day. I have said that I was not in his confidence; but
he knew my sympathies were with the liberals and now and then he let fall
a word of the work going on underground. Meanwhile the new Pope had been
elected, and from Piedmont to Calabria we hailed in him the Banner that was
to lead our hosts to war.

So time passed and we reached the last months of ’47. The villa on Iseo had
been closed since the end of August. Roberto had no great liking for his
gloomy palace in Milan, and it had been his habit to spend nine months
of the year at Siviano; but he was now too much engrossed in his work to
remain away from Milan, and his wife and sister had joined him there as
soon as the midsummer heat was over. During the autumn he had called me
once or twice to the city to consult me on business connected with his
fruit-farms; and in the course of our talks he had sometimes let fall a
hint of graver matters. It was in July of that year that a troop of Croats
had marched into Ferrara, with muskets and cannon loaded. The lighted
matches of their cannon had fired the sleeping hate of Austria, and the
whole country now echoed the Lombard cry: “Out with the barbarian!” All
talk of adjustment, compromise, reorganization, shrivelled on lips that
the live coal of patriotism had touched. Italy for the Italians, and
then--monarchy, federation, republic, it mattered not what!

The oppressor’s grip had tightened on our throats and the clear-sighted
saw well enough that Metternich’s policy was to provoke a rebellion and
then crush it under the Croat heel. But it was too late to cry prudence in
Lombardy. With the first days of the new year the tobacco riots had drawn
blood in Milan. Soon afterward the Lions’ Club was closed, and edicts were
issued forbidding the singing of Pio Nono’s hymn, the wearing of white and
blue, the collecting of subscriptions for the victims of the riots. To each
prohibition Milan returned a fresh defiance. The ladies of the nobility put
on mourning for the rioters who had been shot down by the soldiery. Half
the members of the Guardia Nobile resigned and Count Borromeo sent back
his Golden Fleece to the Emperor. Fresh regiments were continually pouring
into Milan and it was no secret that Radetsky was strengthening the
fortifications. Late in January several leading liberals were arrested and
sent into exile, and two weeks later martial law was proclaimed in Milan.
At the first arrests several members of the liberal party had hastily left
Milan, and I was not surprised to hear, a few days later, that orders had
been given to reopen the villa at Siviano. The Count and Countess arrived
there early in February.

It was seven months since I had seen the Countess, and I was struck with
the change in her appearance.

She was paler than ever, and her step had lost its lightness. Yet she
did not seem to share her husband’s political anxieties; one would have
said that she was hardly aware of them. She seemed wrapped in a veil of
lassitude, like Iseo on a still gray morning, when dawn is blood-red on the
mountains but a mist blurs its reflection in the lake. I felt as though her
soul were slipping away from me, and longed to win her back to my care; but
she made her ill-health a pretext for not coming to confession, and for the
present I could only wait and carry the thought of her to the altar. She
had not been long at Siviano before I discovered that this drooping mood
was only one phase of her humor. Now and then she flung back the cowl of
melancholy and laughed life in the eye; but next moment she was in shadow
again, and her muffled thoughts had given us the slip. She was like the
lake on one of those days when the wind blows twenty ways and every
promontory holds a gust in ambush.

Meanwhile there was a continual coming and going of messengers between
Siviano and the city. They came mostly at night, when the household slept,
and were away again with the last shadows; but the news they brought stayed
and widened, shining through every cranny of the old house. The whole of
Lombardy was up. From Pavia to Mantua, from Como to Brescia, the streets
ran blood like the arteries of one great body. At Pavia and Padua the
universities were closed. The frightened vice-roy was preparing to withdraw
from Milan to Verona, and Radetsky continued to pour his men across the
Alps, till a hundred thousand were massed between the Piave and the Ticino.
And now every eye was turned to Turin. Ah, how we watched for the blue
banner of Piedmont on the mountains! Charles Albert was pledged to our
cause; his whole people had armed to rescue us, the streets echoed with
_avanti, Savoia!_ and yet Savoy was silent and hung back. Each day was
a life-time strained to the cracking-point with hopes and disappointments.
We reckoned the hours by rumors, the very minutes by hearsay. Then
suddenly--ah, it was worth living through!--word came to us that Vienna
was in revolt. The points of the compass had shifted and our sun had risen
in the north. I shall never forget that day at the villa. Roberto sent for
me early, and I found him smiling and resolute, as becomes a soldier on
the eve of action. He had made all his preparations to leave for Milan and
was awaiting a summons from his party. The whole household felt that great
events impended, and Donna Marianna, awed and tearful, had pleaded with
her brother that they should all receive the sacrament together the next
morning. Roberto and his sister had been to confession the previous day,
but the Countess Faustina had again excused herself. I did not see her
while I was with the Count, but as I left the house she met me in the
laurel-walk. The morning was damp and cold, and she had drawn a black scarf
over her hair, and walked with a listless dragging step; but at my approach
she lifted her head quickly and signed to me to follow her into one of the
recesses of clipped laurel that bordered the path.

“Don Egidio,” she said, “you have heard the news?”

I assented.

“The Count goes to Milan to-morrow?”

“It seems probable, your excellency.”

“There will be fighting--we are on the eve of war, I mean?”

“We are in God’s hands, your excellency.”

“In God’s hands!” she murmured. Her eyes wandered and for a moment we stood
silent; then she drew a purse from her pocket. “I was forgetting,” she
exclaimed. “This is for that poor girl you spoke to me about the other
day--what was her name? The girl who met the Austrian soldier at the fair
at Peschiera--“

“Ah, Vannina,” I said; “but she is dead, your excellency.”

“Dead!” She turned white and the purse dropped from her hand. I picked it
up and held it out to her, but she put back my hand. “That is for masses,
then,” she said; and with that she moved away toward the house.

I walked on to the gate; but before I had reached it I heard her step
behind me.

“Don Egidio!” she called; and I turned back.

“You are coming to say mass in the chapel to-morrow morning?”

“That is the Count’s wish.”

She wavered a moment. “I am not well enough to walk up to the village this
afternoon,” she said at length. “Will you come back later and hear my
confession here?”

“Willingly, your excellency.”

“Come at sunset then.” She looked at me gravely. “It is a long time since I
have been to confession,” she added.

“My child, the door of heaven is always unlatched.”

She made no answer and I went my way.

I returned to the villa a little before sunset, hoping for a few words
with Roberto. I felt with Faustina that we were on the eve of war, and the
uncertainty of the outlook made me treasure every moment of my friend’s
company. I knew he had been busy all day, but hoped to find that his
preparations were ended and that he could spare me a half hour. I was not
disappointed; for the servant who met me asked me to follow him to the
Count’s apartment. Roberto was sitting alone, with his back to the door, at
a table spread with maps and papers. He stood up and turned an ashen face
on me.

“Roberto!” I cried, as if we had been boys together.

He signed to me to be seated.

“Egidio,” he said suddenly, “my wife has sent for you to confess her?”

“The Countess met me on my way home this morning and expressed a wish to
receive the sacrament to-morrow morning with you and Donna Marianna, and I
promised to return this afternoon to hear her confession.”

Roberto sat silent, staring before him as though he hardly heard. At length
he raised his head and began to speak.

“You have noticed lately that my wife has been ailing?” he asked.

“Every one must have seen that the Countess is not in her usual health. She
has seemed nervous, out of spirits--I have fancied that she might be
anxious about your excellency.”

He leaned across the table and laid his wasted hand on mine. “Call me
Roberto,” he said.

There was another pause before he went on. “Since I saw you this morning,”
he said slowly, “something horrible has happened. After you left I sent for
Andrea and Gemma to tell them the news from Vienna and the probability of
my being summoned to Milan before night. You know as well as I that we have
reached a crisis. There will be fighting within twenty-four hours, if I
know my people; and war may follow sooner than we think. I felt it my duty
to leave my affairs in Andrea’s hands, and to entrust my wife to his care.
Don’t look startled,” he added with a faint smile. “No reasonable man goes
on a journey without setting his house in order; and if things take the
turn I expect it may be some months before you see me back at Siviano.--But
it was not to hear this that I sent for you.” He pushed his chair aside and
walked up and down the room with his short limping step. “My God!” he broke
out wildly, “how can I say it?--When Andrea had heard me, I saw him
exchange a glance with his wife, and she said with that infernal sweet
voice of hers, ‘Yes, Andrea, it is our duty.’

“‘Your duty?’ I asked. ‘What is your duty?’

“Andrea wetted his lips with his tongue and looked at her again; and her
look was like a blade in his hand.

“‘Your wife has a lover,’ he said.

“She caught my arm as I flung myself on him. He is ten times stronger than
I, but you remember how I made him howl for mercy in the old days when he
used to bully you.

“‘Let me go,’ I said to his wife. ‘He must live to unsay it.’

“Andrea began to whimper. ‘Oh, my poor brother, I would give my heart’s
blood to unsay it!’

“‘The secret has been killing us,’ she chimed in.

“‘The secret? Whose secret? How dare you--?’

“Gemma fell on her knees like a tragedy actress. ‘Strike me--kill me--it is
I who am the offender! It was at my house that she met him--’

“‘Him?’

“‘Franz Welkenstern--my cousin,’ she wailed.

“I suppose I stood before them like a stunned ox, for they repeated the
name again and again, as if they were not sure of my having heard it.--Not
hear it!” he cried suddenly, dropping into a chair and hiding his face in
his hands. “Shall I ever on earth hear anything else again?”

He sat a long time with his face hidden and I waited. My head was like a
great bronze bell with one thought for the clapper.

After a while he went on in a low deliberate voice, as though his words
were balancing themselves on the brink of madness. With strange composure
he repeated each detail of his brother’s charges: the meetings in the
Countess Gemma’s drawing-room, the innocent friendliness of the two
young people, the talk of mysterious visits to a villa outside the Porta
Ticinese, the ever-widening circle of scandal that had spread about their
names. At first, Andrea said, he and his wife had refused to listen to the
reports which reached them. Then, when the talk became too loud, they had
sent for Welkenstern, remonstrated with him, implored him to exchange into
another regiment; but in vain. The young officer indignantly denied the
reports and declared that to leave his post at such a moment would be
desertion.

With a laborious accuracy Roberto went on, detailing one by one each
incident of the hateful story, till suddenly he cried out, springing from
his chair--“And now to leave her with this lie unburied!”

His cry was like the lifting of a grave-stone from my breast. “You must not
leave her!” I exclaimed.

He shook his head. “I am pledged.”

“This is your first duty.”

“It would be any other man’s; not an Italian’s.”

I was silent: in those days the argument seemed unanswerable.

At length I said: “No harm can come to her while you are away. Donna
Marianna and I are here to watch over her. And when you come back--“

He looked at me gravely. “_If_ I come back--“

“Roberto!”

“We are men, Egidio; we both know what is coming. Milan is up already; and
there is a rumor that Charles Albert is moving. This year the spring rains
will be red in Italy.”

“In your absence not a breath shall touch her!”

“And if I never come back to defend her? They hate her as hell hates,
Egidio!--They kept repeating, ‘He is of her own age and youth draws
youth--.’ She is in their way, Egidio!”

“Consider, my son. They do not love her, perhaps; but why should they hate
her at such cost? She has given you no child.”

“No child!” He paused. “But what if--? She has ailed lately!” he cried, and
broke off to grapple with the stabbing thought.

“Roberto! Roberto!” I adjured him.

He jumped up and gripped my arm.

“Egidio! You believe in her?”

“She’s as pure as a lily on the altar!”

“Those eyes are wells of truth--and she has been like a daughter to
Marianna.--Egidio! do I look like an old man?”

“Quiet yourself, Roberto,” I entreated.

“Quiet myself? With this sting in my blood? A lover--and an Austrian lover!
Oh, Italy, Italy, my bride!”

“I stake my life on her truth,” I cried, “and who knows better than I? Has
her soul not lain before me like the bed of a clear stream?”

“And if what you saw there was only the reflection of your faith in her?”

“My son, I am a priest, and the priest penetrates to the soul as the angel
passed through the walls of Peter’s prison. I see the truth in her heart as
I see Christ in the host!”

“No, no, she is false!” he cried.

I sprang up terrified. “Roberto, be silent!”

He looked at me with a wild incredulous smile. “Poor simple man of God!” he
said.

“I would not exchange my simplicity for yours--the dupe of envy’s first
malicious whisper!”

“Envy--you think that?”

“Is it questionable?”

“You would stake your life on it?”

“My life!”

“Your faith?”

“My faith!”

“Your vows as a priest?”

“My vows--“ I stopped and stared at him. He had risen and laid his hand on
my shoulder.

“You see now what I would be at,” he said quietly. “I must take your place
presently--“

“My place--?”

“When my wife comes down. You understand me.”

“Ah, now you are quite mad!” I cried breaking away from him.

“Am I?” he returned, maintaining his strange composure. “Consider a moment.
She has not confessed to you before since our return from Milan--“

“Her ill-health--“

He cut me short with a gesture. “Yet to-day she sends for you--“

“In order that she may receive the sacrament with you on the eve of your
first separation.”

“If that is her only reason her first words will clear her. I must hear
those words, Egidio!”

“You are quite mad,” I repeated.

“Strange,” he said slowly. “You stake your life on my wife’s innocence, yet
you refuse me the only means of vindicating it!”

“I would give my life for any one of you--but what you ask is not mine to
give.”

“The priest first--the man afterward?” he sneered.

“Long afterward!”

He measured me with a contemptuous eye. “We laymen are ready to give the
last shred of flesh from our bones, but you priests intend to keep your
cassocks whole.”

“I tell you my cassock is not mine,” I repeated.

“And, by God,” he cried, “you are right; for it’s mine! Who put it on your
back but my father? What kept it there but my charity? Peasant! beggar!
Hear his holiness pontificate!” “Yes,” I said, “I was a peasant and a
beggar when your father found me; and if he had left me one I might have
been excused for putting my hand to any ugly job that my betters required
of me; but he made me a priest, and so set me above all of you, and laid on
me the charge of your souls as well as mine.”

He sat down shaken with dreadful tears. “Ah,” he broke out, “would you have
answered me thus when we were boys together, and I stood between you and
Andrea?”

“If God had given me the strength.”

“You call it strength to make a woman’s soul your stepping-stone to
heaven?”

“Her soul is in my care, not yours, my son. She is safe with me.”

“She? But I? I go out to meet death, and leave a worse death behind me!”
He leaned over and clutched my arm. “It is not for myself I plead but for
her--for her, Egidio! Don’t you see to what a hell you condemn her if I
don’t come back? What chance has she against that slow unsleeping hate?
Their lies will fasten themselves to her and suck out her life. You and
Marianna are powerless against such enemies.”

“You leave her in God’s hands, my son.”

“Easily said--but, ah, priest, if you were a man! What if their poison
works in me and I go to battle thinking that every Austrian bullet may be
sent by her lover’s hand? What if I die not only to free Italy but to free
my wife as well?”

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “My son, I answer for her. Leave your faith
in her in my hands and I will keep it whole.”

He stared at me strangely. “And what if your own fail you?”

“In her? Never. I call every saint to witness!”

“And yet--and yet--ah, this is a blind,” he shouted; “you know all and
perjure yourself to spare me!”

At that, my son, I felt a knife in my breast. I looked at him in anguish
and his gaze was a wall of metal. Mine seemed to slip away from it, like a
clawless thing struggling up the sheer side of a precipice.

“You know all,” he repeated, “and you dare not let me hear her!”

“I dare not betray my trust.”

He waved the answer aside.

“Is this a time to quibble over church discipline? If you believed in her
you would save her at any cost!”

I said to myself, “Eternity can hold nothing worse than this for me--“ and
clutched my resolve again like a cross to my bosom.

Just then there was a hand on the door and we heard Donna Marianna.

“Faustina has sent to know if the _signar parocco_ is here.”

“He is here. Bid her come down to the chapel.” Roberto spoke quietly, and
closed the door on her so that she should not see his face. We heard her
patter away across the brick floor of the _salone_.

Roberto turned to me. “Egidio!” he said; and all at once I was no more than
a straw on the torrent of his will.

The chapel adjoined the room in which we sat. He opened the door, and in
the twilight I saw the light glimmering before the Virgin’s shrine and the
old carved confessional standing like a cowled watcher in its corner. But
I saw it all in a dream; for nothing in heaven or earth was real to me but
the iron grip on my shoulder.

“Quick!” he said and drove me forward. I heard him shoot back the bolt of
the outer door and a moment later I stood alone in the garden. The sun had
set and the cold spring dusk was falling. Lights shone here and there in
the long front of the villa; the statues glimmered gray among the thickets.
Through the window-pane of the chapel I caught the faint red gleam of the
Virgin’s lamp; but I turned my back on it and walked away.

       *       *       *       *       *

All night I lay like a heretic on the fire. Before dawn there came a call
from the villa. The Count had received a second summons from Milan and was
to set out in an hour. I hurried down the cold dewy path to the lake. All
was new and hushed and strange as on the day of resurrection; and in the
dark twilight of the garden alleys the statues stared at me like the
shrouded dead.

In the _salone_, where the old Count’s portrait hung, I found the
family assembled. Andrea and Gemma sat together, a little pinched, I
thought, but decent and self-contained, like mourners who expect to
inherit. Donna Marianna drooped near them, with something black over her
head and her face dim with weeping. Roberto received me calmly and then
turned to his sister.

“Go fetch my wife,” he said.

While she was gone there was silence. We could hear the cold drip of the
garden-fountain and the patter of rats in the wall. Andrea and his wife
stared out of window and Roberto sat in his father’s carved seat at the
head of the long table. Then the door opened and Faustina entered.

When I saw her I stopped breathing. She seemed no more than the shell of
herself, a hollow thing that grief has voided. Her eyes returned our images
like polished agate, but conveyed to her no sense of our presence. Marianna
led her to a seat, and she crossed her hands and nailed her dull gaze on
Roberto. I looked from one to another, and in that spectral light it seemed
to me that we were all souls come to judgment and naked to each other as to
God. As to my own wrongdoing, it weighed on me no more than dust. The only
feeling I had room for was fear--a fear that seemed to fill my throat and
lungs and bubble coldly over my drowning head.

Suddenly Roberto began to speak. His voice was clear and steady, and I
clutched at his words to drag myself above the surface of my terror. He
touched on the charge that had been made against his wife--he did not say
by whom--the foul rumor that had made itself heard on the eve of their
first parting. Duty, he said, had sent him a double summons; to fight for
his country and for his wife. He must clear his wife’s name before he was
worthy to draw sword for Italy. There was no time to tame the slander
before throttling it; he had to take the shortest way to its throat. At
this point he looked at me and my soul shook. Then he turned to Andrea and
Gemma.

“When you came to me with this rumor,” he said quietly, “you agreed to
consider the family honor satisfied if I could induce Don Egidio to let me
take his place and overhear my wife’s confession, and if that confession
convinced me of her innocence. Was this the understanding?”

Andrea muttered something and Gemma tapped a sullen foot.

“After you had left,” Roberto continued, “I laid the case before Don Egidio
and threw myself on his mercy.” He looked at me fixedly. “So strong was his
faith in my wife’s innocence that for her sake he agreed to violate the
sanctity of the confessional. I took his place.”

Marianna sobbed and crossed herself and a strange look flitted over
Faustina’s face.

There was a moment’s pause; then Roberto, rising, walked across the room to
his wife and took her by the hand.

“Your seat is beside me, Countess Siviano,” he said, and led her to the
empty chair by his own.

Gemma started to her feet, but her husband pulled her down again.

“Jesus! Mary!” We heard Donna Marianna moan.

Roberto raised his wife’s hand to his lips. “You forgive me,” he said, “the
means I took to defend you?” And turning to Andrea he added slowly: “I
declare my wife innocent and my honor satisfied. You swear to stand by my
decision?”

What Andrea stammered out, what hissing serpents of speech Gemma’s clinched
teeth bit back, I never knew--for my eyes were on Faustina, and her face
was a wonder to behold.

She had let herself be led across the room like a blind woman, and had
listened without change of feature to her husband’s first words; but as
he ceased her frozen gaze broke and her whole body seemed to melt against
his breast. He put his arm out, but she slipped to his feet and Marianna
hastened forward to raise her up. At that moment we heard the stroke
of oars across the quiet water and saw the Count’s boat touch the
landing-steps. Four strong oarsmen from Monte Isola were to row him down
to Iseo, to take horse for Milan, and his servant, knapsack on shoulder,
knocked warningly at the terrace window.

“No time to lose, excellency!” he cried.

Roberto turned and gripped my hand. “Pray for me,” he said low; and with a
brief gesture to the others ran down the terrace to the boat.

Marianna was bathing Faustina with happy tears.

“Look up, dear! Think how soon he will come back! And there is the
sunrise--see!”

Andrea and Gemma had slunk away like ghosts at cock-crow, and a red dawn
stood over Milan.

       *       *       *       *       *

If that sun rose red it set scarlet. It was the first of the Five Days in
Milan--the Five Glorious Days, as they are called. Roberto reached the city
just before the gates closed. So much we knew--little more. We heard of him
in the Broletto (whence he must have escaped when the Austrians blew in
the door) and in the Casa Vidiserti, with Casati, Cattaneo and the rest;
but after the barricading began we could trace him only as having been
seen here and there in the thick of the fighting, or tending the wounded
under Bertani’s orders. His place, one would have said, was in the
council-chamber, with the soberer heads; but that was an hour when every
man gave his blood where it was most needed, and Cernuschi, Dandolo,
Anfossi, della Porta fought shoulder to shoulder with students, artisans
and peasants. Certain it is that he was seen on the fifth day; for among
the volunteers who swarmed after Manara in his assault on the Porta Tosa
was a servant of palazzo Siviano; and this fellow swore he had seen his
master charge with Manara in the last assault--had watched him, sword
in hand, press close to the gates, and then, as they swung open before
the victorious dash of our men, had seen him drop and disappear in the
inrushing tide of peasants that almost swept the little company off its
feet. After that we heard nothing. There was savage work in Milan in those
days, and more than one well-known figure lay lost among the heaps of dead
hacked and disfeatured by Croat blades.

At the villa, we waited breathless. News came to us hour by hour: the very
wind seemed to carry it, and it was swept to us on the incessant rush of
the rain. On the twenty-third Radetsky had fled from Milan, to face Venice
rising in his path. On the twenty-fourth the first Piedmontese had crossed
the Ticino, and Charles Albert himself was in Pavia on the twenty-ninth.
The bells of Milan had carried the word from Turin to Naples, from Genoa to
Ancona, and the whole country was pouring like a flood-tide into Lombardy.
Heroes sprang up from the bloody soil as thick as wheat after rain, and
every day carried some new name to us; but never the one for which we
prayed and waited. Weeks passed. We heard of Pastrengo, Goito, Rivoli; of
Radetsky hemmed into the Quadrilateral, and our troops closing in on him
from Rome, Tuscany and Venetia. Months passed--and we heard of Custozza. We
saw Charles Albert’s broken forces flung back from the Mincio to the Oglio,
from the Oglio to the Adda. We followed the dreadful retreat from Milan,
and saw our rescuers dispersed like dust before the wind. But all the while
no word came to us of Roberto.

These were dark days in Lombardy; and nowhere darker than in the old villa
on Iseo. In September Donna Marianna and the young Countess put on black,
and Count Andrea and his wife followed their example. In October the
Countess gave birth to a daughter. Count Andrea then took possession of the
palazzo Siviano, and the two women remained at the villa. I have no heart
to tell you of the days that followed. Donna Marianna wept and prayed
incessantly, and it was long before the baby could snatch a smile from her.
As for the Countess Faustina, she went among us like one of the statues in
the garden. The child had a wet-nurse from the village, and it was small
wonder there was no milk for it in that marble breast. I spent much of
my time at the villa, comforting Donna Marianna as best I could; but
sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when we three sat in the dimly-lit
_salone_, with the old Count’s portrait overhead, and I looked up and
saw the Countess Faustina in the tall carved seat beside her husband’s
empty chair, my spine grew chill and I felt a cold wind in my hair.

The end of it was that in the spring I went to see my bishop and laid my
sin before him. He was a saintly and merciful old man, and gave me a
patient hearing.

“You believed the lady innocent?” he asked when I had ended.

“Monsignore, on my soul!”

“You thought to avert a great calamity from the house to which you owed
more than your life?”

“It was my only thought.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Go home, my son. You shall learn my decision.”

Three months later I was ordered to resign my living and go to America,
where a priest was needed for the Italian mission church in New York. I
packed my possessions and set sail from Genoa. I knew no more of America
than any peasant up in the hills. I fully expected to be speared by naked
savages on landing; and for the first few months after my arrival I wished
at least once a day that such a blessed fate had befallen me. But it is
no part of my story to tell you what I suffered in those early days. The
Church had dealt with me mercifully, as is her wont, and her punishment
fell far below my deserts....

I had been some four years in New York, and no longer thought of looking
back from the plough, when one day word was brought me that an Italian
professor lay ill and had asked for a priest. There were many Italian
refugees in New York at that time, and the greater number, being
well-educated men, earned a living by teaching their language, which was
then included among the accomplishments of fashionable New York. The
messenger led me to a poor boarding-house and up to a small bare room on
the top floor. On the visiting-card nailed to the door I read the name “De
Roberti, Professor of Italian.” Inside, a gray-haired haggard man tossed on
the narrow bed. He turned a glazed eye on me as I entered, and I recognized
Roberto Siviano.

I steadied myself against the door-post and stood staring at him without a
word.

“What’s the matter?” asked the doctor who was bending over the bed. I
stammered that the sick man was an old friend.

“He wouldn’t know his oldest friend just now,” said the doctor. “The
fever’s on him; but it will go down toward sunset.”

I sat down at the head of the bed and took Roberto’s hand in mine.

“Is he going to die?” I asked.

“I don’t believe so; but he wants nursing.”

“I will nurse him.”

The doctor nodded and went out. I sat in the little room, with Roberto’s
burning hand in mine. Gradually his skin cooled, the fingers grew quiet,
and the flush faded from his sallow cheek-bones. Toward dusk he looked up
at me and smiled.

“Egidio,” he said quietly.

I administered the sacrament, which he received with the most fervent
devotion; then he fell into a deep sleep.

During the weeks that followed I had no time to ask myself the meaning of
it all. My one business was to keep him alive if I could. I fought the
fever day and night, and at length it yielded. For the most part he raved
or lay unconscious; but now and then he knew me for a moment, and whispered
“Egidio” with a look of peace.

I had stolen many hours from my duties to nurse him; and as soon as the
danger was past I had to go back to my parish work. Then it was that I
began to ask myself what had brought him to America; but I dared not face
the answer.

On the fourth day I snatched a moment from my work and climbed to his
room. I found him sitting propped against his pillows, weak as a child but
clear-eyed and quiet. I ran forward, but his look stopped me.

“_Signor parocco_,” he said, “the doctor tells me that I owe my life
to your nursing, and I have to thank you for the kindness you have shown to
a friendless stranger.”

“A stranger?” I gasped.

He looked at me steadily. “I am not aware that we have met before,” he
said.

For a moment I thought the fever was on him; but a second glance convinced
me that he was master of himself.

“Roberto!” I cried, trembling.

“You have the advantage of me,” he said civilly. “But my name is Roberti,
not Roberto.”

The floor swam under me and I had to lean against the wall.

“You are not Count Roberto Siviano of Milan?”

“I am Tommaso de Roberti, professor of Italian, from Modena.”

“And you have never seen me before?”

“Never that I know of.”

“Were you never at Siviano, on the lake of Iseo?” I faltered.

He said calmly: “I am unacquainted with that part of Italy.”

My heart grew cold and I was silent.

“You mistook me for a friend, I suppose?” he added.

“Yes,” I cried, “I mistook you for a friend;” and with that I fell on my
knees by his bed and cried like a child.

Suddenly I felt a touch on my shoulder. “Egidio,” said he in a broken
voice, “look up.”

I raised my eyes, and there was his old smile above me, and we clung to
each other without a word. Presently, however, he drew back, and put me
quietly aside.

“Sit over there, Egidio. My bones are like water and I am not good for much
talking yet.”

“Let us wait, Roberto. Sleep now--we can talk tomorrow.”

“No. What I have to say must be said at once.” He examined me thoughtfully.
“You have a parish here in New York?”

I assented.

“And my work keeps me here. I have pupils. It is too late to make a
change.”

“A change?”

He continued to look at me calmly. “It would be difficult for me,” he
explained, “to find employment in a new place.”

“But why should you leave here?”

“I shall have to,” he returned deliberately, “if you persist in recognizing
in me your former friend Count Siviano.”

“Roberto!”

He lifted his hand. “Egidio,” he said, “I am alone here, and without
friends. The companionship, the sympathy of my parish priest would be a
consolation in this strange city; but it must not be the companionship of
the _parocco_ of Siviano. You understand?”

“Roberto,” I cried, “it is too dreadful to understand!”

“Be a man, Egidio,” said he with a touch of impatience. “The choice lies
with you, and you must make it now. If you are willing to ask no questions,
to name no names, to make no allusions to the past, let us live as friends
together, in God’s name! If not, as soon as my legs can carry me I must be
off again. The world is wide, luckily--but why should we be parted?”

I was on my knees at his side in an instant. “We must never be parted!” I
cried. “Do as you will with me. Give me your orders and I obey--have I not
always obeyed you?”

I felt his hand close sharply on mine. “Egidio!” he admonished me.

“No--no--I shall remember. I shall say nothing--“

“Think nothing?”

“Think nothing,” I said with a last effort.

“God bless you!” he answered.

My son, for eight years I kept my word to him. We met daily almost, we ate
and walked and talked together, we lived like David and Jonathan--but
without so much as a glance at the past. How he had escaped from Milan--how
he had reached New York--I never knew. We talked often of Italy’s
liberation--as what Italians would not?--but never touched on his share in
the work. Once only a word slipped from him; and that was when one day he
asked me how it was that I had been sent to America. The blood rushed to my
face, and before I could answer he had raised a silencing hand.

“I see,” he said; “it was _your_ penance too.”

During the first years he had plenty of work to do, but he lived so
frugally that I guessed he had some secret use for his earnings. It was
easy to conjecture what it was. All over the world Italian exiles were
toiling and saving to further the great cause. He had political friends in
New York, and sometimes he went to other cities to attend meetings and make
addresses. His zeal never slackened; and but for me he would often have
gone hungry that some shivering patriot might dine. I was with him heart
and soul, but I had the parish on my shoulders, and perhaps my long
experience of men had made me a little less credulous than Christian
charity requires; for I could have sworn that some of the heroes who hung
on him had never had a whiff of Austrian blood, and would have fed out of
the same trough with the white-coats if there had been polenta enough to go
round. Happily my friend had no such doubts. He believed in the patriots as
devoutly as in the cause; and if some of his hard-earned dollars travelled
no farther than the nearest wine-cellar or cigar-shop, he never suspected
the course they took.

His health was never the same after the fever; and by and by he began to
lose his pupils, and the patriots cooled off as his pockets fell in. Toward
the end I took him to live in my shabby attic. He had grown weak and had a
troublesome cough, and he spent the greater part of his days indoors. Cruel
days they must have been to him, but he made no sign, and always welcomed
me with a cheerful word. When his pupils dropped off, and his health made
it difficult for him to pick up work outside, he set up a letter-writer’s
sign, and used to earn a few pennies by serving as amanuensis to my poor
parishioners; but it went against him to take their money, and half the
time he did the work for nothing. I knew it was hard for him to live on
charity, as he called it, and I used to find what jobs I could for him
among my friends the _negozianti_, who would send him letters to copy,
accounts to make up and what not; but we were all poor together, and the
master had licked the platter before the dog got it.

So lived that just man, my son; and so, after eight years of exile, he died
one day in my arms. God had let him live long enough to see Solferino and
Villa-franca; and was perhaps never more merciful than in sparing him Monte
Rotondo and Mentana. But these are things of which it does not become me to
speak. The new Italy does not wear the face of our visions; but it is
written that God shall know His own, and it cannot be that He shall misread
the hearts of those who dreamed of fashioning her in His image.

As for my friend, he is at peace, I doubt not; and his just life and holy
death intercede for me, who sinned for his sake alone.





                                VERSES.


           “_Be friendly, pray, to these fancies of mine._”

                          --BETTINE BRENTANO.

                            [Illustration]


               NEWPORT, R. I., C. E. HAMMETT, JR., 1878.

                            [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Sonnets.


    I. LE VIOL D’AMOUR.

     (An Organ-stop.)

    O soft, caressing sound, more sweet than scent
    Of violets in woody hollows! Tone
    As amorous as the ring-dove’s tender moan
    Beneath the spreading forest’s leafy tent;
    What mystery of earth or air hath lent
    Thee that bewitching music, where the drone
    Of Summer bees in dewy buds new blown
    With trembling, fainting melody is blent?
    What master did conceive thee, as the sound
    Most fit to woo his lady from her rest,
    What wakeful maiden in thy wooing found
    The passion of her lover first exprest,
    And from her silken pillows, beauty-crowned,
    Stept forth and smiled on him who loved her best?

                _November 10th, 1875._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]


      II. VESPERS.

    It is the vesper hour, and in yon aisle
    Where fainting incense clouds the heavy air
    My lady’s kneeling at her evening prayer,
    Alone and silently; for in a file
    The choristers have passed, and left her there,
    Where martyrs from the tinted windows stare,
    And saints look downward with a holy smile
    Upon her meek devotions, while the day
    Fades slowly, and a tender amber light
    From coloured panes about her head doth play--
    Her veil falls like a shade, and ghostly white
    Her clasped hands glimmer through the deepening gray;
    So will she kneel, until from Heaven’s height
    The Angels bend to hear their sister pray.

                _November 11th, 1875._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]


      III. BETTINE TO GOETHE.

     “Be friendly, pray, with these fancies of mine.” BETTINE.

    Could youth discrown thy head of its gray hair,
    I could not love it as I love it now;
    Could one grand line be smoothed from thy brow,
    ’Twould seem to me less stately and less fair.
    O no, be as thou art! For thou dost wear
    The signs of noble age that cannot bow
    Thine intellect like thy form, and I who know
    How each year that did visibly impair
    Thy first fresh youth, left inwardly such grand
    And gracious gifts, would rather have thee so--
    Believe me, master, who erect doth stand
    In soul and purpose, age cannot lay low
    Till he receive, new from the Father’s hand
    The youth he did but outwardly forego.

                _April, 1876._

      [Illustration]




      Spring Song.

     “O primavera! Gioventù dell’ anno.”


    The first warm buds that break their covers,
      The first young twigs that burst in green,
    The first blade that the sun discovers,
      Starting the loosened earth between.

    The pale soft sky, so clear and tender,
      With little clouds that break and fly;
    The crocus, earliest pretender
      To the low breezes passing by;

    The chirp and twitter of brown builders,
      A couple in a tree, at least;
    The watchful wisdom of the elders
      For callow younglings in the nest;

    The flush of branches with fair blossoms,
      The deepening of the faint green boughs,
    As leaf by leaf the crown grows fuller
      That binds the young Spring’s rosy brows;

    New promise every day of sweetness,
      The next bright dawn is sure to bring;
    Slow breaking into green completeness,
      Fresh rapture of the early Spring!

                _May, 1876._




      Prophecies of Summer.


    I found a wee leaf in the cleft
    Where the half-melted ice had left
    A sunny corner, moist and warm,
    For it to bud, beyond all harm.
          The wet, brown sod,
    Long horned with ice, had slowly grown
    So soft, the tender seedling blown
    By Autumn winds, in earliest Spring
    Sent through the sun-warmed covering,
          Its little leaf to God.

    I found it there, beneath a ledge,
    The dawning Spring time’s fairest pledge,
    And to my mind it dimly brought
    The sudden, joyous, leafy thought
          Of Summer-time.
    I plucked it from the sheltered cleft
    Which the more kindly ice had left.
    Within my hand to drop and die,
    But for its sweet suggestions, I
          Revive it in a rhyme.

                _1876._




      [Illustration]

      Song.


    O Love, where are the hours fled,
      The hours of our young delight?
    Are they forever gone and dead,
      Or only vanished out of sight?

    O can it be that we shall live
      To know once more the joys gone by,
    To feel the old, deep love revive,
      And smile again before we die?

    Could I but fancy it might be,
      Could I the past bring back again,
    And for one moment, holding thee,
      Forget the present and its pain!

    O Love, those hours are past away
      Beyond our longing and our sighs--
    Perhaps the Angels, some bright day,
      Will give them back in Paradise!

                _August, 1876._

      [Illustration]




      Heaven.


    Not over roof and spire doth Heaven lie,
    Star-sentinelled from our humanity,
    Beyond the humble reach of every day.
    And only near us when we weep or pray;
    But rather in the household and the street,
    Where loudest is the noise of hurrying feet,
    Where hearts beat thickest, where our duties call,
    Where watchers sit, where tears in silence fall.
    We know not, or forget, there is no line
    That marks our human off from our divine;
    For all one household, all one family
    In different chamberings labouring are we;
    God leaves the doors between them open wide,
    Knowing how life and death are close allied,
    And though across the threshold, in the gloom,
    We cannot see into that other room,
    It may be that the dear ones watching there
    Can hear our cry of passionate despair,
    And wait unseen to lead us through the door
    When twilight comes, and all our work is o’er.

                _January, 1877._




      [Illustration]

      “Maiden, Arise.”


    She, whom through life her God forbade to hear
    The voices of her nearest and most dear,
    So that she dwelt, amid the hum and rush
    Of cities, in a vast, eternal hush,
    Yet heard the first low calling of the voice
    That others had not heeded in the noise,
    And rising, when it whispered “Come with me,”
    Followed the form that others could not see,
    Smiling, perchance, in death at last to hear
    The voices of the Angels fill her ear,
    While the great, silent void that closed her round
    Was overflowed with rippled floods of sound,
    And the dumb past in Alleluias drowned.

                _March, 1877._

      [Illustration]




      Spring.

     A Fragment.


      HILDEGARD.

    It is the time when everything
    Is flusht with presage of the Spring,
    When every leaf and twig and bud
    Feels new life rushing like a flood
    Through greening veins and bursting tips;
    When every hour a sunbeam slips
    Across a sleepy flower’s mouth,
    And wakes it, babbling of the South;
    When birds are doubtful where or how
    To hang their nests on trunk or bough,
    And all that is in wood or croft
    Beneath an influence balmy-soft
    Towards the light begins to strive,
    Feeling how good it is to live!


      WALTHER.

    How beautiful thou standest there,
      Thyself a prophet of the May!
    The shining of thy golden hair
      Would melt December’s snows away.
    The roses on thy cheeks would woo
      Forth envious blossoms from their sleeps.
    And robins plume their breasts anew
      To mock the crimson of thy lips.


      HILDEGARD.

    But where would be the golden tresses,
    With ribands bravely intertwined
    And where the roses, that thy praises
    Have opened like a Summer wind,
    Wert thou, my love, my Knight, not here,
    To make these empty beauties dear?
    The Spring would never deck her train
    In such a fair and winsome wise
    Did she not seek by smiles to chain
    The sun her royal lover’s eyes.

                _1876._

      [Illustration]




      May Marian.


      A BALLAD.

    In our town there dwelt a maiden
      Whom the folk called Marian;
    In her narrow gabled casement
      All day long she sat and span.

    Till a gentleman came riding
      Through our town one Summer day,
    Spied May Marian at the casement,
      Stole her silly heart away.

    Then she up and left her spinning,
      Laid aside her russet gown,
    In a footboy’s cap and mantle
      Followed him to London town.

    There he led her to a mansion
      Standing by the river side;
    “In that mansion dwells the lady
      Who is my betrothed bride;

    “Gif thou’lt be her serving-maiden,
      Thou shalt wear a braw red gown,
    Follow her to mass on Sunday
      Through the streets of London town;

    “But if thou’lt not be her maiden,
      Turn about and get thee home;
    ’Tis not meet that country wenches
      Through the city here should roam.”

    Not a word in answer spake she;
      Weeping sore she turned away,
    And alone she gat her homeward,
      Travelling till the fall of day.

    To our town she came at gloaming,
      Softly tirled she at the door;
    Whispered: “let me in, sweet mother,
      I will wander never more.”

    “I will turn me to my spinning,
      I will don my russet gown;
    Home is best for country lasses,
      Men are false in London town.”

    But the door was shut against her,
      To her prayer came answer none.
    All night long alone she wandered,
      Wandered weeping through our town.

    But at dawn she was aweary--
      In the street she laid her down;
    And they found her dead at sunrise
      With her head upon a stone.


      MORAL.

    Ladies, listen to my ballad:
      Maidens are too lightly won;
    Home is best for country lasses,
      Men are false in London town.

                _1876._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Opportunities.


    Who knows his opportunities? They come
    Not trumpet-tongued from Heaven, but small and dumb,
    Not beckoning from the future’s promised land,
    But in the narrow present close at hand.
    They walk beside us with unsounding feet,
    And like those two that trode the Eastern street
    And with their Saviour bartered thought for thought,
    Our eyes are holden and we know them not.

                _1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      “The Last Token.”

     A. D. 107.


     (She speaks.)

    One minute more of life! Enough to snatch
    This flower to my bosom, and to catch
    The parting glance and signal overhead
    From one who sits and waits to see me dead.
    One minute more! Enough to let him see
    How straight the message fell from him to me,
    And how, his talisman upon my breast,
    I’ll face the end as calmly as the rest.--
    Th’ impassive wall of faces seems to break
    And shew one face aquiver for my sake * * *
    How different death seems, with a hand that throws
    Across the pathway of my doom a rose,
    How brief and paltry life, compared to this
    O’ertoppling moment of supremest bliss! * * *
    Farewell! I feel the lions’ hungry breath,
    I meet your eyes * * * beloved, this is death.

                _1878._

      [Illustration]




      Raffaelle to the Fornarina.

     (Sitting to him for a Madonna.)


    Knot up the filmy strands of golden hair
    That veil your breast, yet leave its beauties bare;
    In decent ripples backward let it flow,
    Smooth-parted sideways from your placid brow.
    Unclasp the clinging necklace from your throat,
    And let this misty veil about you float,
    As round the seraphs of my visions swim
    Faint, roseate clouds to make their radiance dim
    And bearable to dazzled human eyes,
    Uplifted in a rapture of surprise.
    Lay off your armlets now, and cover up
    With dark blue folds that shoulder’s dimpled slope;
    Let naught appear to woo the grosser sense,
    But ruling calm, and sacred innocence;
    Subdue the pointed twinkle of your eye
    Into a level, large serenity,
    (Now comes the test) and let your mouth awhile
    Be pressed into a faint, ascetic smile,
    A pure reflection of the inward thought,
    A chastened glow from fires celestial caught.

                _1878._




      Chriemhild of Burgundy.

     A Fragment.


    In all the land was not a maid
    Could match her beauty white and red;
    No decent veil she need to wear,
    Deep-mantled in her royal hair,
    Dun ripples, shot all through and through
    With fiery gold; her eyes were blue
    And clearer than a Summer wave
    That murmurs in some sunless cave,
    And over them her brow shone white,
    Like the first low star that pricks the night,
    And under them her mouth did redden,
    Like ripe red clover, honey-laden;
    But white as pear-bloom was her chin,
    An elvish dimple played therein;
    Her breast stirred softly up and down
    Beneath the folding of her gown
    As if a bird were prisoned there
    That fluttered for the outer air,
    And round and comely was each limb,
    As doth a royal maid beseem.

                _1878._




      [Illustration]

      Some Woman to Some Man.


    We might have loved each other after all,
    Have lived and learned together! Yet I doubt it;
    You asked, I think, too great a sacrifice,
    Or else, perhaps, I rate myself too dear.
    Whichever way the difference lies between us,
    Would common cares have helped to lessen it,
    A common interest, and a common lot?
    Who knows indeed? We choose our path, and then
    Stand looking back and sighing at our choice,
    And say: “Perhaps the other road had led
    To fruitful valleys dozing in the sun.”
    Perhaps--perhaps--but all things are perhaps,
    And either way there lies a doubt, you know.
    We’ve but one life to live, and fifty ways
    To live it in, and little time to choose
    The one in fifty that will suit us best,
    And so the end is, that we part, and say:
    “We might have loved each other after all!”

                _1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Lines on Chaucer.


    No human pomp suggests his name,
    No human pride builds up his fame,
    But croft and meadow every where
    His presence and his charm declare.

    He was an echo of the woods,
    A breath of vernal solitudes,
    An annalist of brooks and birds,
    Interpreter of sylvan words;

    He worshipt nature where he trod
    And still, through nature, worshipt God;
    And spotless as the flower he praises
    His name still blossoms with the daisies.

      [Illustration]




      What We Shall Say Fifty Years Hence, OF OUR FANCY-DRESS QUADRILLE.

     (Danced at Swanhurst, August 8th, 1878.)


    Do you remember, long ago,
      Our Fancy-dress Quadrille?
    Though many a year is past since then
      It makes me joyous still,
    To think what fun we used to have
      When we were young and gay
    And danced upon the Swanhurst lawn,
      That happy Summer day.

    As Shepherd and as Shepherdess
      We trod the graceful round,
    In pinks and blues, with buckled shoes,
      And crooks with ribands bound;
    And as with joyous step we danced
      We gaily sang in time
    The foolish words and merry tune
      Of some old Nursery rhyme.

    But often through the singing broke
      A burst of laughter gay,
    So young were we, so glad and free,
      That happy Summer day!
    And hand in hand would linger long,
      As through the dance we moved,
    For some of us were lovers then,
      And some of us were loved.

    Ah, many a year is past since then,
      And fled the merry throng,
    And yet I hear, at times quite clear,
      The echo of our song;
    And though our days are Wintry now
      I well remember still
    The happy Summer day we danced
      Our Fancy-dress Quadrille!

                _1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Nothing More.


    ’Twas the old, old story told again,
      The story we all have heard;
    A glimpse of brightness, parting and pain--
      You know it word for word.

    A stolen picture--a faded rose--
      An evening hushed and bright;
    A whisper--perhaps a kiss--who knows?
      A handclasp, and “goodnight.”

    The sum of what we call “first love,”
      That dreamflower rare and white,
    That puts its magic blossom forth
      And dies in a single night.

                _1878._

      [Illustration]




      June and December.


    When our eyes grow dim and our hair turns grey
      And we sit by the fire together,
    ’Twill seem strange to talk in a shivering way
      Of our Summertime’s rosy weather;

    When our eyes were bright, and our tresses smooth,
      And the blood in our veins leapt red,
    In the golden dawn of our long lost youth,
      With the promise of life ahead.

    Shall we talk with smiles or with sighs that day
      Of the years that are dead and gone,
    Of the cares and the joys that have passed away
      Like dewdrops beneath the sun?

    Nay, perchance we’ll see but the sunny side
      Of the vision, in looking back,
    And the trace of joys that are past may abide,
      Where our sorrow have left no track;

    And perhaps both the joys and the cares may seem
      In the light of that later day,
    Like the phantom shapes of some beautiful dream
      That has long ago passed away.

    But whate’er beside we may lose or hold
      From the hoards of the golden past,
    May the friends we loved in the days of old
      To our hearts and thoughts cling fast,

    And before the days come that are coming soon,
      And whose motto is “I remember,”
    God grant us one vision of love and June
      To brighten our life’s December.

                _October 7th, 1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      October.


    A cold grey sea, a cold grey sky
      And leafless swaying boughs,
    A wind that wanders sadly by,
      And moans about the house.

    And in my lonely heart a cry
      For days that went before;
    For joys that fly, and hopes that die,
      And the past that comes no more.

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      A Woman I Know.


    For a look from her eyes, for a smile of her mouth
    Any man might well give the best years of his youth;
    For the touch of her hand, for the warmth of her kiss
    Might well barter his chances of infinite bliss;

    For her step is like sunlight that plays on the sea
    And her bosom is snowy as snowy can be,
    And her hair is a mantle inwoven with gold
    Such as Queens might have worn in the legends of old;

    And her chin oh so white, and her cheek oh so red,
    They might well drive a man who should look at them mad;
    But beneath the bright breast where her heart ought to be,
    What is there? Why a trap to catch fools, sir, like me!

                _October, 1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Daisies.


    Daisies, does he love me?
      Daisies, tell me true.
    “Loves me * * * does not love me” * * *
      That will never do!
    Why, you know, you daisies,
      Whatever you may say,
    He stole that knot of riband
      I wore the other day.

    Daisies, one more trial;
      Let your petals fall.
    “Loves me * * * does not love me * * *
      Loves me,” after all!
    Thank you, darling daisies,
      And if it ends that way
    I’ll wear you in a garland
      Upon my wedding day.

                _1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Impromptu.

     (On being asked for some verses.)


    I love the silver dawn of night
      That melts the dark away;
    The ecstacy of pallid light
      That bathes the ended day;

    When leaf by leaf the slumbrous trees
      Begin to talk anew;
    And that sweet almoner, the breeze,
      Fills every cup with dew;

    When on the fevered brow of toil
      Eve lays a soothing palm,
    And whispers softly to the soul:
      “This hour was made for calm.”

                _1876._

      [Illustration]




      Notre Dame des Fleurs.

     To F. S. W.


    Rosy, and fair, and fragrant,
      Your vassals, the flowers, come,
    Bearing a welcome to us
      From the heart of your sunlit home;
    Delicate garlands, wreathing
      With brightness these dreary hours;
    Red lips and white lips, breathing
      Of you, our Lady of Flowers!

    Violets, blue as your eyes are
      And roses, as soft as your cheek,--
    Daphne, sweet as your words are,--
      Primroses pallid and meek;
    Feathery, waving fern-plumes,
      And blossoms from Summer bowers,
    Each one bearing a message
      From you, our Lady of Flowers!

    Giver of brightness and beauty,
      And Queen of this fragrant throng,
    How shall we thank you or praise you
      But feebly in this poor song?
    We, whom you crown with blossoms,
      Whom richly your kindness dowers,
    We must be silent and love you,--
      Love you, our Lady of Flowers!

                _November 25, 1878._

      [Illustration]




      [Illustration]

      Translations from the German.

      THREE SONGS FROM THE GERMAN OF EMANUEL GEIBEL.


      I.

     (“Mein Pferd geht langsam durch die nacht.”)

    My steed goes slowly through the night;
      The moon is half in shadow,
    With clouds that steal across her light
      Like lambs across a meadow.

    A sudden stillness fills my heart,
      With grief so lately movèd,
    For in thy thoughts I have a part,
      Tonight, my best belovèd.

    In every whisper of the wind
      Thy greeting I discover;
    O may’st thou in the breezes find
      The kisses of thy lover.

      [Illustration]


      [Illustration]

      II.

     (“Schöne Lilie.”)

    Spotless lily in the garden,
      Fair and high on slender stem,
    In the morning breeze thou wavest
      Like a dainty silver flame.

    How thy chalice opens upward
      To admit the sunlight’s gleam!
    Scarce unto the earth belonging,
      Part of Heaven dost thou seem.

    Ah, thou bearest greetings to me
      From a being pure as thou,
    Whom I called my spirit’s spirit,
      Once with many a loving vow;

    She who taught me to discover
      Love that lurks in sorrow’s smart;
    Now, if I but think upon her
      Sudden stillness fills my heart.

      [Illustration]


      III.

    There stands the ancient gabled house;
    The rooms therein how well I know!
    They’re still as once they were, when first
        I loved there, long ago.

    But, like the moon, times change, and hearts,
    And strangers now the dwelling claim;
    Another passion fills my breast;
        Yet is the house the same.

    Today I went there to the feast;
    Some memory made my bosom stir,
    I heeded not the song and jest,
        I only thought of _her_,--

    Of all that we had meant to be,
    Of all my vanisht youthful years,
    And of the love that filled her eyes,--
        Till mine o’erflowed with tears.

    And when I roused me from the thought,
    Alas, how changed did all things seem!
    As though that dream had been my life,
        And all my life a dream.




      Longing.

      FROM THE GERMAN OF SCHILLER.

     (“Ach, aus dieses Thales Gründen.”)


    From the shadows of the valley
      With the chilly mist opprest,
    Might I only find the outlet
      I should count myself as blest.
    There uprise the sunny mountains
      Green and young and fair to see,
    Had I wings to lift me upward,
      To the mountains I would flee.

    Melodies are sweetly chiming,
      I can catch the heavenly notes,
    And a balmy flower fragrance
      On the light breeze downward floats.
    Golden fruits are shining, glowing,
      Through the leafage, darkly green,
    And the flowers that there are blowing
      Winter’s snows have never seen.

    Ah, how blissful must the life be
      In that sunshine without night;
    Ah, how soft and how refreshing
      Is the air that crowns that height!
    Yet the stormy river stays me
      That between us roars of death;
    And its ghastly waves are lifted
      Till my spirit shuddereth.

    There a bark all lonely tosses
      Without steersman, on the tide;
    Leap into it, bold, untrembling,
      Sure some fate its sails will guide!
    Thou must trust, and thou must venture,
      For the gods will lend no hand;
    Nothing but a wonder lifts thee
      To thy golden Wonderland.

      [Illustration]




ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS

[Illustration:

  _Group from the Crucifixion
  San Vivaldo_
]




  ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS

  BY
  EDITH WHARTON

  ILLUSTRATED BY E. C. PEIXOTTO

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
  MCMV




  Copyright, 1905, by
  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  _Published April, 1905_

  THE DE VINNE PRESS




TABLE OF CONTENTS


                                                         PAGE
  AN ALPINE POSTING-INN                                     1

  A MIDSUMMER WEEK’S DREAM                                 15

  THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS                      39

  WHAT THE HERMITS SAW                                     63

  A TUSCAN SHRINE                                          83

  SUB UMBRA LILIORUM                                      107

  MARCH IN ITALY                                          125

  PICTURESQUE MILAN                                       153

  ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS                                     171




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  GROUP FROM THE CRUCIFIXION--SAN VIVALDO      _Frontispiece_
                                                  FACING PAGE
  BY THE PORT OF LOVERE                                    20

  THE MUNICIPIO--BRESCIA                                   28

  CHIESA DEI MIRACOLI--BRESCIA                             36

  THE INNER QUADRANGLE AT OROPA                            46

  THE MAIN COURT OF THE SACRO MONTE AT VARALLO             56

  A CHARACTERISTIC STREET                                 110

  THE “LITTLE PALACE OF THE GARDEN”                       116

  THE WORN RED LIONS OF THE ANCIENT PORCH                 120

  AN ITALIAN SKY IN MARCH                                 140

  COURT OF THE PALAZZO MARINO, NOW THE MUNICIPIO          156

  THE TOWER OF S. STEFANO                                 162

  THE CHURCH AT SARONNO                                   168




AN ALPINE POSTING-INN


To the mind curious in contrasts--surely one of the chief pleasures of
travel--there can be no better preparation for a descent into Italy
than a sojourn among the upper Swiss valleys. To pass from the region
of the obviously picturesque--the country contrived, it would seem, for
the delectation of the _cœur à poésie facile_--to that sophisticated
landscape where the face of nature seems moulded by the passions and
imaginings of man, is one of the most suggestive transitions in the
rapidly diminishing range of such experiences.

Nowhere is this contrast more acutely felt than in one of the upper
Grisons villages. The anecdotic Switzerland of the lakes is too
remote from Italy, geographically and morally, to evoke a comparison.
The toy chalet, with its air of self-conscious neatness, making one
feel that if one lifted the roof it would disclose a row of tapes
and scissors, or the shining cylinders of a musical box, suggests
cabinet-work rather than architecture; the swept and garnished streets,
the precise gardens, the subjugated vines, present the image of an
old maid’s paradise that would be thrown into hopeless disarray by
the introduction of anything so irregular as a work of art. In the
Grisons, however, where only a bald grey pass divides one from Italy,
its influence is felt, in a negative sense, in the very untidiness of
the streets, the rank growth of weeds along the base of rough glaring
walls, the drone of flies about candidly-exposed manure-heaps. More
agreeably, the same influence shows itself in the rude old centaur-like
houses, with their wrought-iron window-grilles and stone escutcheons
surmounting the odorous darkness of a stable. These are the houses
of people conscious of Italy, who have transplanted to their bleak
heights, either from poverty of invention, or an impulse as sentimental
as our modern habit of “collecting,” the thick walls, the small
windows, the jutting eaves of dwellings designed under a sultry sky.
So vivid is the reminiscence that one almost expects to see a cypress
leaning against the bruised-peach-coloured walls of the village
_douane_; but it is just here that the contrast accentuates itself.
The cypress, with all it stands for, is missing.

It is not easy, in the height of the Swiss season, to light on a nook
neglected by the tourist; but at Splügen he still sweeps by in a cloud
of diligence dust, or pauses only to gulp a flask of Paradiso and a
rosy trout from the Suretta lakes. One’s enjoyment of the place is
thus enhanced by the pleasing spectacle of the misguided hundreds who
pass it by, and from the vantage of the solitary meadows above the
village one may watch the throngs descending on Thusis or Chiavenna
with something of the satisfaction that mediæval schoolmen believed to
be the portion of angels looking down upon the damned. Splügen abounds
in such points of observation. On all sides one may climb from the
alder-fringed shores of the Rhine, through larch-thickets tremulous
with the leap of water, to grassy levels far above, whence the valley
is seen lengthening southward to a great concourse of peaks. In the
morning these upper meadows are hot and bright, and one is glad of the
red-aisled pines and the onyx-coloured torrents cooling the dusk; but
toward sunset, when the shadows make the slopes of turf look like an
expanse of tumbled velvet, it is pleasant to pace the open ledges,
watching the sun recede from the valley, where mowers are still
sweeping the grass into long curved lines like ridges of the sea, while
the pine-woods on the eastern slopes grow black and the upper snows
fade to the colour of cold ashes.

The landscape is simple, spacious and serene. The fields suggest the
tranquil rumination of generations of cattle, the woods offer cool
security to sylvan life, the mountains present blunt weather-beaten
surfaces rather than the subtle contours, wrinkled as by meditation, of
the Italian Alps. One feels that it is a scene in which _nothing has
ever happened_; the haunting adjective is that which Whitman applies to
the American landscape--“the large _unconscious_ scenery of my native
land.”

Switzerland is like a dinner served in the old-fashioned way, with
all the dishes put on the table at once: every valley has its flowery
mead, its “horrid” gorge, its chamois-haunted peaks, its wood and
water-fall. In Italy, the effects are brought on in courses, and
memory is thus able to differentiate the landscapes, even without the
help of that touch of human individuality to which, after all, the
best Italian scenery is but a setting. At Splügen, as in most Swiss
landscapes, the human interest--the evidences of man’s presence--are
an interruption rather than a climax. The village of Splügen, huddled
on a ledge above the Rhine, sheepishly turns the backs of its houses
on the view, as though conscious of making a poor show compared to
the tremendous performance of nature. Between these houses, set at
unconsidered angles, like boxes hastily piled on a shelf, cobble-stone
streets ramble up the hill; but after a few yards they lapse into
mountain paths, and the pastures stoop unabashed to the back doors of
the village. Agriculture seems, in fact, the little town’s excuse for
being. The whole of Splügen, in midsummer, is as one arm at the end of
a scythe. All day long the lines of stooping figures--men, women and
children, grandfathers and industrious babes--spread themselves over
the hill-sides in an ever-widening radius, interminably cutting, raking
and stacking the grass. The lower slopes are first laid bare; then, to
the sheer upper zone of pines, the long grass, thick with larkspur,
mountain pink and orchis, gradually recedes before the rising tide of
mowers. Even in the graveyard of the high-perched church, the scythes
swing between mounds overgrown with campanulas and martagon lilies;
so that one may fancy the dust of generations of thrifty villagers
enriching the harvests of posterity.

This, indeed, is the only destiny one can imagine for them. The past
of such a place must have been as bucolic as its present: the mediæval
keep, crumbling on its wooded spur above the Rhine, was surely perched
there that the lords of the valley might have an eye to the grazing
cattle and command the manœuvres of the mowers. The noble Georgiis who
lived in the escutcheoned houses of Splügen, and now lie under such
a wealth of quarterings in the church and graveyard, must have been
experts in fertilizers and stock-raising; nor can one figure, even for
the seventeenth-century mercenary of the name, whose epitaph declares
him to have been “captain of his Spanish Majesty’s cohorts,” emotions
more poignant, when he came home from the wars, than that evoked by the
tinkle of cow-bells in the pasture, and the vision of a table groaning
with smoked beef and cyclopean cheeses.

So completely are the peasants in the fields a part of the soil they
cultivate, that during the day one may be said to have the whole
of Splügen to one’s self, from the topmost peaks to the deserted
high-road. In the evening the scene changes; and the transformation is
not unintentionally described in theatrical terms, since the square
which, after sunset, becomes the centre of life in Splügen, has an
absurd resemblance to a stage-setting. One side of this square is
bounded by the long weather-beaten front of the posting-inn--but the
inn deserves a parenthesis. Built long ago, and then abandoned, so the
village tradition runs, by a “great Italian family,” its exterior shows
the thick walls, projecting eaves and oval attic openings of an old
Tuscan house; while within, a monastic ramification of stone-vaulted
corridors leads to rooms ceiled and panelled with sixteenth-century
woodwork. The stone terrace before this impressive dwelling forms the
proscenium where, after dinner, the spectators assemble. To the right
of the square stands the pale pink “Post and Telegraph Bureau.” Beyond,
closing in the right wing at a stage-angle, is a mysterious yellowish
house with an arched entrance. Facing these, on the left, are the
_dépendance_ of the inn and the custom-house; in the left background,
the village street is seen winding down, between houses that look
like “studies” in old-fashioned drawing-books (with the cracks in
the plaster done in very black lead), to the bridge across the Rhine
and the first loops of the post-road over the Splügen pass. Opposite
the inn is the obligatory village fountain, the rallying-point of
the chorus; beneath a stone parapet flows the torrent which acts as
an invisible orchestra; and beyond the parapet, snow peaks fill the
background of the stage.

Dinner over, the eager spectators, hastening to the terrace (with
a glimpse, as they pass the vaulted kitchen, of the Italian _chef_
oiling his bicycle amid the débris of an admirable meal), find active
preparations afoot for the event of the evening--the arrival of the
diligences. Already the orchestra is tuning its instruments, and the
chorus, recruited from the hay-fields, are gathering in the wings. A
dozen of them straggle in and squat on the jutting stone basement of
the post-office; others hang picturesquely about the fountain, or hover
up the steep street, awaiting the prompter’s call. Presently some of
the subordinate characters stroll across the stage: the owner of the
saw-mill on the Rhine, a tall man in homespun, deferentially saluted by
the chorus; two personages in black coats, with walking-sticks, who
always appear together, and have the air of being joint syndics of the
village; a gentleman of leisure, in a white cap with a visor, smoking
a long Italian cigar and attended by an inquisitive Pomeranian dog; a
citizen in white socks and carpet slippers, giving his arm to his wife,
and preceded by a Bewickian little boy with a green butterfly-box over
his shoulder; the gold-braided custom-house officer hurrying up rather
late for his cue; two or three local ladies in sunburnt millinery and
spectacles, who drop in to see the postmistress; and a showy young man,
with the look of having seen life at Chur or Bellinzona, who emerges
from the post-office conspicuously reading a letter, to the undisguised
interest of the chorus, the ladies and the Pomeranian. As these figures
pass and repass in a kind of social silence, they suggest the leisurely
opening of some play composed before the unities were abolished, and
peopled by types with generic names--the Innkeeper, the Postmistress,
the Syndic--some comedy of Goldoni’s, perhaps, but void even of
Goldoni’s simple malice.

Meanwhile the porter has lit the oil-lanterns hanging by a chain over
the door of the inn; a celestial hand has performed a similar office
for the evening star above the peaks; and through the hush that has
settled on the square comes a distant sound of bells.... Instantly
the action begins; the innkeeper appears, supported by the porter
and the waiter; a wave of acclamation runs through the chorus; the
Pomeranian trots down the road; and presently the fagged leaders
of the Thusis diligence turn their heads round the corner of the
square. The preposterous yellow coach--a landau attached to a glass
“clarence”--crosses the cobble-paved stage, swinging round with a grand
curve to the inn door; vague figures, detaching themselves from the
chorus, flit about the horses or help the guard to lift the luggage
down; the two syndics, critically aloof, lean on their sticks to watch
the scene; the Pomeranian bustles between the tired horses’ legs; and
the diligence doors let out a menagerie of the strange folk whom one
sees only on one’s travels. Here they come, familiar as the figures
in a Noah’s ark: Germans first--the little triple-chinned man with a
dachshund, out of “Fliegende Blätter,” the slippered Hercules with a
face like that at the end of a meerschaum pipe, and their sentimental
females; shrill and vivid Italians, a pleasant pig-faced priest.
Americans going “right through,” with their city and state writ large
upon their luggage; English girls like navvies, and Frenchmen like
girls; the arched doorway absorbs them, and another jingle of bells,
and a flash of lamps on the bridge, proclaim that the Chiavenna
diligence is coming.

The same ceremony repeats itself; and another detachment of the
travelling menagerie descends. This time there is a family of rodents,
who look as though they ought to be enclosed in wire netting and
judiciously nourished on lettuce; there is a small fierce man in
knickerbockers and a sash, conducting a large submissive wife and two
hypocritical little boys who might have stepped out of “The Mirror of
the Mind”; there is an unfortunate lady in spectacles, who looks like
one of the Creator’s rejected experiments, and carries a grey linen bag
embroidered with forget-me-nots; there is the inevitable youth with
an alpenstock, who sends home a bunch of edelweiss to his awe-struck
family.... These, too, disappear; the horses are led away; the chorus
disperses, the lights go out, the performance is over. Only one
spectator lingers, a thoughtful man in a snuff-coloured overcoat, who
gives the measure of the social resources of Splügen by the deliberate
way in which, evening after evening, he walks around the empty
diligences, looks into their windows, examines the wheels and poles,
and then mournfully vanishes into darkness.

At last the two diligences have the silent square to themselves. There
they stand, side by side in dusty slumber, till the morning cow-bells
wake them to departure. One goes back to Thusis; to the region of
good hotels, pure air and scenic platitudes. It may go empty for all
we care. But the other ... the other wakes from its Alpine sleep to
climb the cold pass at sunrise and descend by hot windings into the
land where the church steeples turn into _campanili_, where the vine,
breaking from perpendicular bondage, flings a liberated embrace about
the mulberries, and far off, beyond the plain, the mirage of domes and
spires, of painted walls and sculptured altars, beckons across the
dustiest tracts of memory. In that diligence our seats are taken.




A MIDSUMMER WEEK’S DREAM

AUGUST IN ITALY

          _.... Un paysage choisi
    Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques._


I

For ten days we had not known what ailed us. We had fled from the
August heat and crowd of the Vorderrheinthal to the posting-inn below
the Splügen pass; and here fortune had given us all the midsummer
tourist can hope for--solitude, cool air and fine scenery. A dozen
times a day we counted our mercies, but still privately felt them to be
insufficient. As we walked through the larch-groves beside the Rhine,
or climbed the grassy heights above the valley, we were oppressed by
the didactic quality of our surroundings--by the aggressive salubrity
and repose of this _bergerie de Florian_. We seemed to be living in
the landscape of a sanatorium prospectus. It was all pleasant enough,
according to Schopenhauer’s definition of pleasure. We had none of the
things we did not want; but then we did not particularly want any of
the things we had. We had fancied we did till we got them; and as we
had to own that they did their part in fulfilling our anticipations, we
were driven to conclude that the fault was in ourselves. Then suddenly
we found out what was wrong. Splügen was charming, but it was too near
Italy.

One can forgive a place three thousand miles from Italy for not being
Italian; but that a village on the very border should remain stolidly,
immovably Swiss was a constant source of exasperation. Even the
landscape had neglected its opportunities. A few miles off it became
the accomplice of man’s most exquisite imaginings; but here we could
see in it only endless material for Swiss clocks and fodder.

The trouble began with our watching the diligences. Every evening we
saw one toiling up the pass from Chiavenna, with dusty horses and
perspiring passengers. How we pitied those passengers! We walked among
them puffed up with all the good air in our lungs. We felt fresh and
cool and enviable, and moralized on the plaintive lot of those whose
scant holidays compelled them to visit Italy in August. But already the
poison was at work. We pictured what our less fortunate brothers had
seen till we began to wonder if, after all, they were less fortunate.
At least they had _been there_; and what drawbacks could qualify that
fact? Was it better to be cool and look at a water-fall, or to be hot
and look at Saint Mark’s? Was it better to walk on gentians or on
mosaic, to smell fir-needles or incense? Was it, in short, ever well to
be elsewhere when one might be in Italy?

We tried to quell the rising madness by interrogating the travellers.
Was it very hot on the lakes and in Milan? “Terribly!” they answered,
and mopped their brows. “Unimaginative idiots!” we grumbled, and
forbore to question the next batch. Of course it was hot there--but
what of that? Think of the compensations! To take it on the lowest
plane, think of the empty hotels and railway carriages, the absence
of tourists and Baedekers! Even the Italians were away, among the
Apennines and in the Engadine; we should have the best part of the
country to ourselves. Gradually we began to picture our sensations
should we take seats in the diligence on its return journey. From that
moment we were lost. We did not say much to each other, but one morning
at sunrise we found a travelling-carriage at the door. No one seemed
to know who had ordered it, but we noticed that our luggage was being
strapped on behind. We took our seats and the driver turned his horses
toward the Splügen pass. It was not the way to Switzerland.

[Illustration:

  _By the Port of Lovere_

  E. C. Peixotto
  LOVEIRE. 1901.

]

We mounted to ice and snow. The savage landscape led us to the top of
the pass and dogged us down to the miserable Italian custom-house on
the other side. Then began the long descent through snow-galleries and
steep pine-forests, above the lonely gorge of the Madesimo: Switzerland
still in every aspect, but with a promise of Italy in the names of
the dreary villages. Visible Italy began with the valley of the Lira,
where, in a wild Salvator Rosa landscape, the beautiful campanile
of the Madonna of Gallevaggio rises above embowering walnuts. After
that each successive village declared its allegiance more openly.
The huddled stone houses disappeared in a wealth of pomegranates and
oleanders. Vine-pergolas shaded the doorways, roses and dahlias
overflowed the terraces of rough masonry, and between the
walnut-groves there were melon-patches and fields of maize.

As we approached Chiavenna a thick bloom of heat lay on the motionless
foliage, and the mountains hung like thunder-clouds on the horizon.
There was something oppressive, menacing almost, in the still weight
of the atmosphere. It seemed to have absorbed all the ardour of the
sun-baked Lombard plain, of the shadeless rice and maize fields
stretching away to the south of us. But the eye had ample compensation.
The familiar town of Chiavenna had grown as fantastically picturesque
as the background of a fresco. The old houses, with their medallioned
doorways of worn marble; the court-yards bright with flowers and
shaded by trellised vines; the white turbulence of the Lira, rushing
between gardens, balconies and terraces set at reckless angles above
the water--were all these a part of the town we had so often seen at
less romantic seasons? The general impression was of an exuberance of
rococo--as though the sportive statue of Saint John Nepomuc on the
bridge, the grotesque figures on the balustrade of the pale-green villa
near the hotel, and the stucco shrines at the street corners, had
burst into a plastic efflorescence rivalling the midsummer wealth of
the gardens.

We had left Switzerland with the general object of going to Italy and
the specific one of exploring the Bergamasque Alps. It was the name
which had attracted us, as much from its intrinsic picturesqueness as
from its associations with the _commedia dell’ arte_ and the jolly
figures of Harlequin and Brighella. I have often journeyed thus in
pursuit of a name, and have seldom been unrewarded. In this case the
very aspect of the map was promising. The region included in the
scattered lettering--_Bergamasker Hochthäler_--had that furrowed,
serried look so encouraging to the experienced traveller. It was rich,
crowded, suggestive; and the names of the villages were enchanting.

Early the next morning we set out for Colico, at the head of the
Lake of Como, and thence took train for Sondrio, the chief town of
the Valtelline. The lake, where we had to wait for our train, lay in
unnatural loveliness beneath a breathless sky, the furrowed peaks
bathed in subtle colour-gradations of which, at other seasons, the
atmosphere gives no hint. At Sondrio we found all the dreariness of a
modern Italian town with wide unshaded streets; but taking carriage in
the afternoon for Madonna di Tirano we were soon in the land of romance
again. The Valtelline, through which we drove, is one vast fruit and
vegetable garden of extraordinary fertility. The _gran turco_ (as the
maize is called) grows in jungles taller than a man, and the grapes and
melons have the exaggerated size and bloom of their counterfeits in a
Dutch fruit-piece. The rich dulness of this foreground was relieved by
the noble lines of the hills, and the air cooled by the rush of the
Adda, which followed the windings of our road, and by a glimpse of
snow peaks at the head of the valley. The villages were uninteresting,
but we passed a low-lying deserted church, a charming bit of
seventeenth-century decay, with peeling stucco ornaments, and weeds
growing from the florid vases of the pediment; and far off, on a lonely
wooded height, there was a tantalizing glimpse of another church, a
Renaissance building rich with encrusted marbles: one of the nameless
uncatalogued treasures in which Italy still abounds.

Toward sunset we reached Madonna di Tirano, the great pilgrimage
church of the Valtelline. With its adjoining monastery it stands
alone in poplar-shaded meadows a mile or more from the town of Tirano.
The marble church, a late fifteenth-century building by Battagio
(the architect of the Incoronata of Lodi), has the peculiar charm of
that transitional period when individuality of detail was merged,
but not yet lost, in the newly-recovered sense of unity. From the
columns of the porch, with their Verona-like arabesques, to the
bronze Saint Michael poised like a Mercury on the cupola, the whole
building combines the charm and naïveté of the earlier tradition with
the dignity of a studied whole. The interior, if less homogeneous,
is, in the French sense, even more “amusing.” Owing, doubtless, to
the remote situation of the church, it has escaped the unifying
hand of the improver, and presents three centuries of conflicting
decorative treatment, ranging from the marble chapel of the Madonna,
so suggestive, in its clear-edged reliefs, of the work of Omodeo at
Pavia, to the barocco carvings of the organ and the eighteenth-century
_grisailles_ beneath the choir-gallery.

The neighbouring monastery of Saint Michael has been turned into an inn
without farther change than that of substituting tourists for monks
in the white-washed cells around the cloisters. The old building is
a dusty labyrinth of court-yards, loggias and pigeon-haunted upper
galleries, which it needs but little imagination to people with cowled
figures gliding to lauds or benediction; and the refectory where we
supped is still hung with portraits of cardinals, monsignori, and lady
abbesses holding little ferret-like dogs.

The next day we drove across the rich meadows to Tirano, one of those
unhistoried and unconsidered Italian towns which hold in reserve for
the observant eye a treasure of quiet impressions. It is difficult to
name any special “effect”: the hurried sight-seer may discover only
dull streets and featureless house-fronts. But the place has a fine
quality of age and aloofness. The featureless houses are “palaces,”
long-fronted and escutcheoned, with glimpses of arcaded courts, and of
gardens where maize and dahlias smother the broken statues and choked
fountains, and where grapes ripen on the peeling stucco walls. Here
and there one comes on a frivolous rococo church, subdued by time to
delicious harmony with its surroundings; on a fountain in a quiet
square, or a wrought-iron balcony projecting romantically from a
shuttered façade; or on one or another of the hundred characteristic
details which go to make up the _mise en scène_ of the average Italian
town. It is precisely in places like Tirano, where there are no salient
beauties to fix the eye, that one appreciates the value of these
details, that one realizes what may be called the negative strength
of the Italian artistic sense. Where the Italian builder could not be
grand, he could always abstain from being mean and trivial; and this
artistic abnegation gives to many a dull little town like Tirano an
architectural dignity which our great cities lack.


II

The return to secular life was made two days later, when we left
our monastery and set out to drive across the Aprica pass to Edolo.
Retracing for a mile or two the way toward Sondrio, we took a turn to
the left and began to mount the hills through forests of beech and
chestnut. With each bend of the road the views down the Valtelline
toward Sondrio and Como grew wider and more beautiful. No one who has
not looked out on such a prospect in the early light of an August
morning can appreciate the poetic truth of Claude’s interpretation
of nature: we seemed to be moving through a gallery hung with his
pictures. There was the same expanse of billowy forest, the same silver
winding of a river through infinite gradations of distance, the same
aërial line of hills melting into illimitable sky.

As we neared the top of the pass the air freshened, and pines and open
meadows replaced the forest. We lunched at a little hotel in a bare
meadow, among a crowd of Italians enjoying the _villeggiatura_ in their
shrill gregarious fashion; then we began the descent to Edolo in the
Val Camonica.

The scenery changed rapidly as we drove on. There was no longer
any great extent of landscape, as on the other side of the pass,
but a succession of small park-like views: rounded clumps of trees
interspersed with mossy glades, water-falls surmounted by old mills,
_campanili_ rising above villages hidden in foliage. On these smooth
grassy terraces, under the walnut boughs, one expected at each turn
to come upon some pastoral of Giorgione’s, or on one of Bonifazio’s
sumptuous picnics. The scenery has a studied beauty in which velvet
robes and caparisoned palfreys would not be out of place, and even the
villages might have been “brushed in” by an artist skilled in effects
and not afraid to improve upon reality.

It was after sunset when we reached Edolo, a dull town splendidly
placed at the head of the Val Camonica, beneath the ice-peaks of the
Adamello. The Oglio, a loud stream voluble of the glaciers, rushes
through the drowsy streets as though impatient to be gone; and we were
not sorry, the next morning, to follow its lead and continue our way
down the valley.


III

The Val Camonica, which extends from the Adamello group to the head of
the lake of Iseo, is a smaller and more picturesque reproduction of the
Valtelline. Vines and maize again fringed our way; but the mountains
were closer, the villages more frequent and more picturesque.

[Illustration:

  _The Municipio--Brescia_

  E. C. Peixotto
  BRESCIA. 1901.
]

We had read in the invaluable guide-book of Gsell-Fels a vague allusion
to an interesting church among these mountains, but we could learn
nothing of it at Edolo, and only by persistent enquiries along the
road did we finally hear that there _was_ a church with “sculptures”
in the hill-village of Cerveno, high above the reach of carriages. We
left the high-road at the point indicated, and drove in a light country
carriole up the stony mule-path, between vines and orchards, till
the track grew too rough for wheels; then we continued the ascent on
foot. As we approached the cluster of miserable hovels which had been
pointed out to us we felt sure we had been misled. Not even in Italy,
the land of unsuspected treasures, could one hope to find a church with
“sculptures” in a poverty-stricken village on this remote mountain!
Cerveno does not even show any signs of past prosperity. It has plainly
never been more than it now is--the humblest of _paesi_, huddled away
in an unvisited fold of the Alps. The peasants whom we met still
insisted that the church we sought was close at hand; but the higher we
mounted the lower our anticipations fell.

Then suddenly, at the end of a long stony lane, we came on an imposing
doorway. The church to which it belonged stood on a higher ledge of
the hill, and the door led into a vaulted ascent, with shallow flights
of steps broken by platforms or landings--a small but yet impressive
imitation of the Bernini staircase in the Vatican. As we mounted we
found that each landing opened into a dimly-lit chapel with grated
doors, through which we discerned terra-cotta groups representing the
scenes of the Passion. The staircase was in fact a Sacred Way like
the more famous one of Varallo; but there was distinct originality in
placing the chapels on each side of the long flight of steps leading to
the church, instead of scattering them on an open hill-side, according
to the traditional plan common to all the other sacred mountains of
northern Italy.

The dilettante will always allow for the heightening of emotion that
attends any unexpected artistic “find”; but, setting this subjective
impression aside, the Via Crucis of Cerveno remains in my memory as
among the best examples of its kind--excepting always the remarkable
terra-cottas of San Vivaldo in Tuscany. At Cerveno, as at Varallo,
the groups are marked by unusual vivacity and expressiveness. The
main lines of the composition are conventional, and the chief
personages--Christ and the Apostles, the Virgin and the other
holy characters--are modelled on traditional types; but the minor
figures, evidently taken from life, are rendered with frank realism
and with extraordinary truth of expression and gesture. Just such
types--the dwarf, the beggar, the hunchback, the brawny waggoner or
ploughman--had met us in every village on the way to Cerveno. As in
all the hill-regions where the goitre is prevalent, the most villanous
characters in the drama are depicted with a hideous bag of flesh
beneath the chin; and Signorelli could not have conceived more bestial
leering cruelty than that in some of the faces which press about the
dying Christ. The scenes follow the usual order of the sacred story,
without marked departure from the conventional grouping; but there is
unusual pathos in the Descent from the Cross, where the light from
the roof of the chapel falls with tragic intensity on the face of a
Magdalen full of suave Lombard beauty.

Hardly less surprising than this remarkable stairway is the church to
which it leads. The walls are hung with devotional pictures set in
the faded gilding of rich old frames, the altar-fronts are remarkable
examples of sixteenth-century wood-carving, and the high altar is
surmounted by an elaborate tabernacle, also of carved wood, painted and
gilt, that in itself repays the effort of the climb to Cerveno. This
tabernacle is a complicated architectural composition--like one of the
fantastic designs of Fontana or Bibbiena--thronged with tiny saints
and doctors, angels and _putti_, akin to the little people of the
Neapolitan _presepii:_ a celestial company fluttering

    _Si come schiera d’api che s’infiora_

around the divine group which surmounts the shrine.

This prodigality of wood-carving, surprising as it is in so remote and
humble a church, is yet characteristic of the region about Brescia
and Bergamo. Lamberti of Brescia, the sculptor of the famous frame
of Romanino’s Madonna in the church of San Francesco, was one of the
greatest wood-carvers of the Italian Renaissance; and every church
and chapel in the country through which we were travelling bore
witness to the continued practice of the art in some graceful frame or
altar-front, some saint or angel rudely but expressively modelled.

We lunched that day at Breno, a town guarded by a ruined castle on
a hill, and sunset brought us to Lovere, at the head of the lake of
Iseo. It was the stillest of still evenings, and the little town which
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu has immortalized was reflected, with every
seam and wrinkle of its mountain background, in the pearly surface
of the lake. Literal-minded critics, seeking in vain along the shore
for Lady Mary’s villa and garden, have grumbled at the inaccuracy of
her descriptions; but every lover of Italy will understand the mental
process by which she unconsciously created an imaginary Lovere. For
though the town, at first sight, is dull and disappointing, yet, taken
with its surroundings, it might well form the substructure of one of
those Turneresque visions which, in Italy, are perpetually intruding
between the most conscientious traveller and his actual surroundings.
It is indeed almost impossible to see Italy steadily and see it whole.
The onset of impressions and memories is at times so overwhelming that
observation is lost in mere sensation.

Certainly he who, on an August morning, sails from Lovere to Iseo, at
the southern end of the lake, is likely to find himself succumbing to
Lady Mary’s hallucinations. Warned by her example, and conscious of
lacking her extenuating gift, I hesitate to record my impressions of
the scene; or venture, at most, to do so in the past tense, asserting
(and this even with a mental reservation) that on a certain morning
a certain number of years ago the lake of Iseo wore such and such an
aspect. But the difficulty of rendering the aspect remains. I can only
say it was that very lake of the _carte du Tendre_ upon which, in the
eighteenth-century romances, gay parties in velvet-hung barges used
to set out for the island of Cythera. Every village on that enchanted
shore might have been the stage of some comedy in the Bergamasque
dialect, with Harlequin in striped cloak, and Brighella in conical hat
and wide green and white trousers, strutting up and down before the
shuttered house in which Dr. Graziano hides his pretty ward; every
villa reflecting its awnings and bright flowers in the lake might
have housed some Rosaura to whom Leandro, the Tuscan lover, warbled
_rispetti_ beneath the padlocked water-gate; every pink or yellow
monastery on the hill-side might have sent forth its plausible friar,
descendant of Machiavelli’s Fra Timoteo, to preach in the market-place,
beg at the villa-door, and help Rosaura and Leandro cozen the fat dupe
of a Pantaloon in black cloak and scarlet socks. The eighteenth century
of Longhi, of Tiepolo and Goldoni was reflected in the lake as in some
magic crystal. Did the vision dissolve as we landed at Iseo, or will
some later traveller find it still lying beneath the wave like the
vanished city of Ys? There is no telling, in such cases, how much the
eye receives and how much it contributes; and if ever the boundaries
between fact and fancy waver, it may well be under the spell of the
Italian midsummer madness.


IV

The sun lay heavy on Iseo; and the railway journey thence to Brescia
left in our brains a golden dazzle of heat. It was refreshing, on
reaching Brescia, to enter the streets of the old town, where the
roofs almost meet and there is always a blessed strip of shade to
walk in. The cities in Italy are much cooler than the country. It is
in August that one understands the wisdom of the old builders, who
made the streets so narrow, and built dim draughty arcades around the
open squares. In Brescia the effects of light and shade thus produced
were almost Oriental in their sharp-edged intensity; the rough stucco
surfaces gilded with vivid sunlight bringing out the depths of
contrasting shade, and the women with black veils over their heads
slipping along under the mysterious balconies and porticoes like
flitting fragments of the shadow.

[Illustration:

  _Chiesa dei Miracoli--Brescia_
]

Brescia is at all times a delightful place to linger in. Its chief
possessions--the bronze Victory, and that room in the Martinengo palace
where Moretto, in his happiest mood, depicted the ladies of the line
under arches of trellis-work backed by views of the family villas--make
it noteworthy even among Italian cities; and it has, besides, its
beautiful town-hall, its picture-gallery, and the curious court-yards
painted in perspective that are so characteristic of the place. But in
summer there is a strong temptation to sit and think of these things
rather than to go and see them. In the court-yard of the hotel, where
a fountain tinkles refreshingly, and the unbleached awnings flap in
the breeze of the electric fans, it is pleasant to feel that the
Victory and the pictures are close at hand, like old friends waiting
on one’s inclination; but if one ventures forth, let it be rather
to the churches than to the galleries. Only at this season can one
appreciate the atmosphere of the churches: that chill which cuts the
sunshine like a knife as one steps across the dusky threshold. When
we entered the cathedral its vast aisles were empty, but far off,
in the dimness of the pillared choir, we heard a drone of intoning
canons that freshened the air like the sound of a water-fall in a
forest. Thence we wandered on to San Francesco, empty too, where, in
the sun-spangled dimness, the great Romanino throned behind the high
altar. The sacristan drew back the curtain before the picture, and as
it was revealed to us in all its sun-bathed glory he exclaimed with
sudden wonder, as though he had never seen it before: “_È stupendo! È
stupendo!_” Perhaps he vaguely felt, as we did, that Romanino, to be
appreciated, must be seen in just that light, a projection of the suave
and radiant atmosphere in which his own creations move. Certainly no
Romanino of the great public galleries arrests the imagination like the
Madonna of San Francesco; and in its presence one thinks with a pang of
all the beautiful objects uprooted from their native soil to adorn the
herbarium of the art-collector....


V

It was on the last day of our journey that the most imperturbable
member of the party, looking up from a prolonged study of the
guide-books, announced that we had not seen the Bergamasque Alps after
all.

In the excited argument that followed, proof seemed to preponderate
first on one side and then on the other; but a closer scrutiny of the
map confirmed the fear that we had not actually penetrated beyond
the borders of the promised land. It must be owned that at first the
discovery was somewhat humiliating; but on reflection it left us
overjoyed to think that we had still the Bergamasque Alps to visit.
Meanwhile our pleasure had certainly been enhanced by our delusion; and
we remembered with fresh admiration Goethe’s profound saying--a saying
which Italy inspired--

    _O, wie beseliget uns Menschen ein falscher Begriff!_




THE SANCTUARIES OF THE PENNINE ALPS


When June is hot on the long yellow streets of Turin, it is pleasant to
take train for the Biellese, that romantic hill-country where the last
slopes of the Pennine Alps melt into the Piedmontese plain.

The line, crossing the lowland with its red-tiled farm-houses and
mulberry orchards, rises gradually to a region of rustling verdure.
Mountain streams flow down between alder-fringed banks, white oxen doze
under the acacia-hedges, and in the almond and cherry orchards the
vine hangs its Virgilian garlands from blossoming tree to tree. This
pastoral land rolls westward to the Graiian Alps in an undulating sea
of green, but to the north it breaks abruptly into the height against
which rises the terraced outline of Biella.

The cliffs of the Biellese are the haunt of ancient legend, and on
almost every ledge a church or monastery perpetuates the story of
some wonder-working relic. Biella, the chief town of this devout
district, covers a small conical hill and spreads its suburbs over the
surrounding level. Its hot sociable streets are full of the shrill
activity of an Italian watering-place; but the transalpine traveller
will probably be inclined to push on at once to the village of Andorno,
an hour’s drive deeper in the hills.

Biella overhangs the plain; but Andorno lies in a valley which soon
contracts to a defile between the mountains. The drive thither from
Biella skirts the Cervo, a fresh mountain stream, and passes through
villages set on park-like slopes in the ample shade of chestnut-groves.
The houses of these villages have little of the picturesqueness
mistakenly associated with Italian rural architecture; but every window
displays its pot of lavender or of carnations, and the arched doorways
reveal gardens flecked with the blue shadows of the vine-pergola.

Andorno itself is folded in hills, rounded, umbrageous, cooled with
the song of birds. A sylvan hush envelops the place, and the air one
breathes seems to have travelled over miles of forest freshened by
unseen streams. It is all as still and drowsy as the dream of a tired
brain. There is nothing to see but the country itself--acacia-fringed
banks sloping to the stream below the village; the arch of a ruined
bridge; an old hexagonal chapel with red-tiled roof and an arcade of
stunted columns; and, beyond the bridge and the chapel, rich upland
meadows where all day long the peasant women stoop to the swing of the
scythe.

In June in this high country (where patches of snow still lie in the
shaded hollows), the wild flowers of spring and summer seem to meet:
narcissus and forget-me-not lingering in the grass, while yellow
broom--Leopardi’s _lover of sad solitudes_--sheets the dry banks with
gold, and higher up, in the folds of the hills, patches of crimson
azalea mix their shy scent with the heavy fragrance of the acacia. In
the meadows the trees stand in well-spaced majestic groups, walnut,
chestnut and beech, tenting the grass with shade. The ivy hangs its
drapery over garden walls and terraces, and the streams rush down under
a quivering canopy of laburnum. The scenery of these high Pennine
valleys is everywhere marked by the same nobleness of colour and
outline, the same atmosphere of spaciousness and poetry. It is the rich
studied landscape of Bonifazio’s idyls: a scene of peace and plenitude,
not the high-coloured southern opulence but the sober wealth poured
from a glacial horn of plenty. There is none of the Swiss abruptness,
of the Swiss accumulation of effects. The southern aspect softens and
expands. There is no crowding of impressions, but a stealing sense of
harmony and completeness.

From Andorno the obvious excursion is to the famous shrine of San
Giovanni; a “sight” taking up eight pages in the excellent “Guida del
Biellese,” but remaining in the traveller’s memory chiefly as the
objective point of a charming walk or drive. The road thither winds
up the Val d’Andorno, between heights set with villages hung aloft
among the beech-groves, or thrusting their garden-parapets above the
spray and tumult of the Cervo. The densely-wooded cliffs are scarred
with quarries of sienite, and the stream, as the valley narrows,
forces its way over masses of rock and between shelving stony banks;
but the little gardens dashed by its foam overflow with irises, roses
and peonies, surrounded with box-hedges and shaded by the long mauve
panicles of the wistaria.

Presently the road leaves the valley, and ascends the beech-clothed
flank of the mountain on which the church of San Giovanni is perched.
The coolness and hush of this wooded hill-side are delicious after
the noise and sunshine of the open road, and one is struck by the
civic amenity which, in this remote solitude, has placed benches at
intervals beneath the trees. At length the brow of the hill is reached.
The beeches recede, leaving a grassy plateau flanked by a long façade
of the monastery; and from the brink of this open space the eye drops
unhindered down the long leafy reaches of the Val d’Andorno.

The scene is characterized by the tenderest gradations of colour
and line: beeches blending with walnuts, these with the tremulous
laburnum-thickets along the stream, and the curves of the hills flowing
into one another till they lose themselves in the aërial distances of
the plain. The building which commands this outlook is hardly worthy
of its station, unless, indeed, the traveller feels its sober lines
to be an admission of art’s inferiority to nature in such aspects. To
the confirmed apologist of Italy there is indeed a certain charm in
finding so insignificant a piece of architecture in so rare a spot:
as though in a land thus amply dowered no architectural emphasis
were needed to call attention to any special point of view. Yet a
tenderness for the view, one cannot but infer, must have guided the
steps of those early cenobites who peopled the romantic landscape with
wonder-working images. When did a miracle take place on a barren plain
or in a circumscribed hollow? The manifestations of divine favour
invariably sought the heights, and those who dedicated themselves to
the commemoration of such holy incidents did so in surroundings poetic
enough to justify their faith in the supernatural.

[Illustration:

  _The Inner Quadrangle at Oropa_

  E. C. Peixotto
  LOVEIRE. 1901.
]

The church, with its dignified front and sculptured portal, adjoins
the hospice, and shows little of interest within but the stone grotto
containing the venerated image of Saint John, discovered in the third
century by Saint Eusebius, Bishop of Vercelli. This grotto is protected
by an iron grating, and its dark recess twinkles with silver hearts
and other votive offerings. The place is still a favourite pilgrimage,
but there seems to be some doubt as to which Saint John has chosen it
as the scene of his posthumous thaumaturgy; for, according to the
local guide-book, it is equally frequented on the feasts of the Baptist
and of the Evangelist. This uncertainty is not without its practical
advantages; and one reads that the hospice is open the year round,
and that an excellent meal may always be enjoyed in the _trattoria_
above the arcade; while on the feasts of the respective saints it is
necessary for the devotee to bespeak his board and lodging in advance.

If San Giovanni appeals chiefly to the lover of landscape, the more
famous sanctuary of Oropa is of special interest to the architect; for
thither, in the eighteenth century, the piety of the house of Savoy
sent Juvara, one of the greatest architects of his time, to add a grand
façade and portico to the group of monastic buildings erected a hundred
years earlier by Negro di Pralungo.

The ascent to the great mountain-shrine of the Black Virgin leads the
traveller back to Biella, and up the hills behind the town. The drive
is long, but so diversified, so abounding in beauty, that in nearing
its end one feels the need of an impressive monument to close so
nobly ordered an approach. As the road rises above the vineyards of
Biella, as the house-roofs, the church-steeples and the last suburban
villas drop below the line of vision, there breaks upon the eye the
vast undulating reach of the Piedmontese plain. From the near massing
of cultivated verdure--the orchards, gardens, groves of the minutely
pencilled foreground--to the far limit where earth and sky converge
in silver, the landscape glides through every gradation of sun-lit
cloud-swept loveliness. First the Val d’Andorno unbosoms its wooded
depths; then the distances press nearer, blue-green and dappled with
forest, with the towns of Biella, Novara and Vercelli like white fleets
anchored on a misty sea. This view, with its fold on fold of woodland,
dusky-shimmering in the foreground, then dark blue, with dashes of
tawny sunlight and purple streaks of rain, till it fades into the
indeterminate light of the horizon, suggests some heroic landscape of
Poussin’s, or the boundless russet distances of Rubens’s “Château of
Stein.”

Meanwhile the foreground is perpetually changing. The air freshens, the
villages with their flower-gardens and their guardian images of the
Black Virgin are left behind, and between the thinly-leaved beeches
rise bare gravelly slopes backed by treeless hills. The Loreto of
Piedmont lies nearly four thousand feet above the sea, and even in
June there is a touch of snow in the air. For a moment one fancies
one’s self in Switzerland; but here, at the bend of the road, is a
white chapel with a classic porch, within which a group of terra-cotta
figures enact some episode of the Passion. Italy has reasserted herself
and art has humanized the landscape. More chapels are scattered through
the trees, but one forgets to note them as the carriage turns into a
wide grassy forecourt, bordered by stone pyramids and dominated at its
farther end by the great colonnade of the hospice. A _rampe douce_ with
fine iron gates leads up to an outer court enclosed in the arcaded
wings of the building. Under these arcades are to be found shops in
which the pilgrim may satisfy his various wants, from groceries, wines
and cotton umbrellas (much needed in these showery hills), to rosaries,
images of the Black Virgin, and pious histories of her miracles. Above
the arcades the pilgrims are lodged; and in the centre of the inner
façade Juvara’s marble portico unfolds its double flight of steps.

Passing through this gateway, one stands in a spacious inner
quadrangle. This again is enclosed in low buildings resting on
arcades, their alignment broken only by the modest façade of the
church. Outside there is the profane bustle of life, the clatter of
glasses at the doors of rival _trattorie_, the cracking of whips, the
stir of buying and selling; but a warm silence holds the inner court.
Only a few old peasant women are hobbling, rosary in hand, over the
sun-baked flags to the cool shelter of the church. The church is indeed
cavernously cold, with that subterranean chill peculiar to religious
buildings. The interior is smaller and plainer than one had expected;
but presently it is seen to be covered with a decoration beside which
the rarest tapestry or fresco might sink into insignificance. This
covering is composed of innumerable votive offerings, crowding each
other from floor to vaulting over every inch of wall, lighting the
chapels with a shimmer of silver and tinsel, with the yellow of old
wax legs and arms, and the gleam of tarnished picture-frames: each
overlapping scale of this strange sheath symbolizing some impulse of
longing, grief or gratitude, so that, as it were, the whole church is
lined with heart-beats. Most of these offerings are the gift of the
poor mountain-folk, and the paintings record with artless realism the
miraculous escapes of carters, quarrymen and stone-cutters. In the
choir, however, hang a few portraits of noble donators in ruffs and
Spanish jerkins; and one picture, rudely painted on the wall itself,
renders with touching fidelity the interior of a peasant’s house in the
sixteenth or seventeenth century, with the mother kneeling by a cradle
over which the Black Virgin sheds her reassuring light.

The ebony Virgin herself (another “find” of the indefatigable Saint
Eusebius) is enthroned behind the high altar, in a tiny chapel built
by her discoverer, where, in a blaze of altar-lights, the miraculous
image, nimbused in jewels and gold, showers a dazzling brightness
on the groups who succeed each other at her iron lattice. The
incense-laden air and the sweating stone walls encrusted with votive
offerings recall at once the chapel of Loreto; but here the smaller
space, the deeper dusk, heighten the sense of holiness and solemnity;
and if a few white-capped Sisters are grouped against the grating,
while before the altar a sweet-voiced young priest intones the mystic

    _Mater purissima,
    Mater admirabile,
    Mater prudentissima,_

punctuated by the wailing _Ora pro nobis!_ of the nuns, it would be
hard to picture a scene richer in that mingling of suavity and awe with
which the Church composes her incomparable effects.

After so complex an impression the pleasures of the eye may seem a
trifle thin; yet there is a great charm in the shaded walks winding
through the colony of chapels above the monastery. Nothing in nature is
lovelier than a beech-wood rustling with streams; and to come, in such
a setting, on one graceful _tempietto_ after another, to discover, in
their semi-pagan porches, groups of peasants praying before some dim
presentment of the Passion, gives a renewed sense of the way in which,
in Italy, nature, art and religion combine to enrich the humblest
lives. These Sacred Mounts, or Stations of the Cross, are scattered
everywhere on the Italian slopes of the Alps. The most famous is at
Varallo, and to find any artistic merit one must go there, or to San
Vivaldo in Tuscany, or the unknown hill-village of Cerveno in the Val
Camonica. At Oropa the groups are relatively crude and uninteresting;
but the mysterious half-light in which they are seen, and the
surrounding murmur of leaves and water, give them a value quite
independent of their plastic qualities.

       *       *       *       *       *

Varallo itself is but a day’s journey from Andorno, and in June weather
the drive thither is beautiful. The narrow country road mounts through
chestnut-groves as fine as those which cast their velvet shade for
miles about Promontogno in the Val Bregaglia. At first the way dips
continuously from one green ravine to another, but at Mosso Santa
Maria, the highest point of the ascent, the glorious plain again
bursts into view, with white roads winding toward distant cities,
and the near flanks of the hills clothed in unbroken forest. The Val
Sesia is broader than the Val d’Andorno, and proportionately less
picturesque; but its expanse of wheat and vine, checkered with shade
and overhung by piled-up mossy rocks, offers a restful contrast to the
landscape of the higher valleys. As Varallo is neared the hills close
in again and the scenery regains its sub-Alpine character. The first
unforgettable glimpse of the old town is caught suddenly at a bend of
the road, with the Sanctuary lifted high above the river, and tiled
roofs and church-towers clustered at its base. The near approach is a
disenchantment; for few towns have suffered more than Varallo under the
knife of “modern improvement,” and those who did not know it in earlier
days would hardly guess that it was once the most picturesque town in
North Italy. A dusty wide-avenued suburb, thinly scattered with cheap
villas, now leads from the station to the edge of the old town; and
the beautiful slope facing the Sacred Mountain has been cleared of its
natural growth and planted with moribund palms and camellias, to form
the “pleasure” grounds of a huge stucco hotel with failure written over
every inch of its pretentious façade.

One knows not whether to lament the impairment of such rare
completeness, or to find consolation in the fact that Varallo is rich
enough not to be ruined by its losses. Ten or fifteen years ago every
aspect was enchanting; now one must choose one’s point of view, but
one or two of the finest are still intact. Turning one’s back, for
instance, on the offending hotel, one has still, on a summer morning,
the rarest vision of wood and water and happily-blended architecture:
the Sesia with its soft meadows and leafy banks, the old houses huddled
above it, and the high cliff crowned by the chapels of the Sacred Way.
At night all melts to a diviner loveliness. The clustered darkness of
the town, twinkling with lights, lies folded in hills delicately traced
against a sky mauve with moonlight. Here and there the moon burnishes a
sombre mass of trees, or makes a campanile stand out pale and definite
as ivory; while high above, the summit of the cliff projects against
the sky, with an almost Greek purity of outline, the white domes and
arches of the Sanctuary.

The centre of the town is also undisturbed. Here one may wander through
cool narrow streets with shops full of devotional emblems, and of
the tall votive candles gaily spangled with gold, and painted with
flower-wreaths and _mandorle_ of the Virgin. These streets, on Sundays,
are thronged with the peasant women of the neighbouring valleys in
their various costumes: some with cloth leggings and short dark-blue
cloth petticoats embroidered in colours; others in skirts of plaited
black silk, with embroidered jackets, silver necklaces and spreading
head-dresses; for nearly every town has its distinctive dress, and
some happy accident seems to have preserved this slope of the Alps
from the depressing uniformity of modern fashions. In architectural
effects the town is little richer than its neighbours; but it has that
indescribable “tone” in which the soft texture of old stucco and the
bloom of weather-beaten marble combine with a hundred happy accidents
of sun and shade to produce what might be called the _patine_ of Italy.
There is, indeed, one remarkable church, with a high double flight
of steps leading to its door; but this (though it contains a fine
Gaudenzio) passes as a mere incident in the general picturesqueness,
and the only church with which the sight-seer seriously reckons is that
of Santa Maria delle Grazie, frescoed with the artist’s scenes from the
Passion.

[Illustration:

  _The Main Court of the Sacro Monte at Varallo_

  E. C. Peixotto
  VARALLO. 1901.
]

There is much beauty of detail in these crowded compositions; but, to
the inexpert, Gaudenzio lives perhaps chiefly as the painter of the
choiring angels of Saronno: so great there that elsewhere he seems
relatively unimportant. At Varallo, at least, one associates him
first with the Sacred Mountain. To this great monument of his native
valley he contributed some of his most memorable work, and it seems
fitting that on turning from his frescoes in Santa Maria one should
find one’s self at the foot of the path leading to the Sanctuary. The
wide approach, paved with tiny round pebbles polished by the feet
of thousands of pilgrims, leads round the flank of the cliff to the
park-like enclosure on its summit. Here, on the ledge overlooking the
town, stands the church built by Saint Charles Borromeo (now disfigured
by a modern façade), and grouped about it are the forty-two chapels
of the “New Jerusalem.” These little buildings, to which one mounts
or descends by mossy winding paths beneath the trees, present every
variety of pseudo-classical design. Some, placed at different levels,
are connected by open colonnades and long flights of steps; some have
airy loggias, overlooking gardens tufted with blush-roses and the lilac
iris; while others stand withdrawn in the deep shade of the beeches.
Each chapel contains a terra-cotta group representing some scene in
the divine history, and the site and architecture of each building
have been determined by a subtle sense of dramatic fitness. Thus, the
chapels enclosing the earlier episodes--the Annunciation, the Nativity
and the scenes previous to the Last Supper--are placed in relatively
open sites, with patches of flowers about their doorsteps; while as the
drama darkens the pilgrim descends into deep shady hollows, or winds
along chill stone corridors and up and down interminable stairs; a
dark subterranean passage leading at last to the image of the buried
Christ.

Of the groups themselves it is difficult to speak dispassionately,
for they are so much a part of their surroundings that one can hardly
measure them by any conventional standard. To do so, indeed, would be
to miss their meaning. They must be studied as a reflection of the
Bible story in the hearts of simple and emotional peasants; for it was
the piety of the mountain-folk that called them into being, and the
modellers and painters who contributed to the work were mostly natives
of Val Sesia or of the neighbouring valleys. The art of clay modelling
is peculiarly adapted to the rendering of strong and direct emotions.
So much vivacity of expression do its rapid evocations permit, that
one might almost describe it as intermediate between pantomime and
sculpture. The groups at Varallo have the defects inherent in such
an improvisation: the crudeness, the violence, sometimes even the
seeming absurdities of an instantaneous photograph. These faults are
redeemed by a simplicity and realism which have not had time to harden
into conventionality. The Virgin and Saint Elizabeth are low-browed
full-statured peasant women; the round-cheeked romping children, the
dwarfs and hunchbacks, the Roman soldiers and the Jewish priests,
have all been transferred alive from the market-places of Borgo Sesia
and Arona. These expressive figures, dressed in real clothes, with
real hair flowing about their shoulders, seem like the actors in some
miracle-play arrested at its crowning moment.

Closer inspection brings to light a marked difference in quality
between the different groups. Those by Tabacchetti and Fermo Stella
are the best, excepting only the remarkable scene of the Crucifixion,
attributed to Gaudenzio, and probably executed from his design.
Tabacchetti is the artist of the Adam and Eve surrounded by the
supra-terrestrial flora and fauna of Eden: a curious composition, with
a golden-haired Eve of mincing elegance and refinement. To Stella are
due some of the simplest and most moving scenes of the series: the
Adoration of the Magi, the message of the angel to Joseph, and Christ
and the woman of Samaria. Especially charming is the Annunciation,
where a yellow-wigged angel, in a kind of celestial dressing-gown of
flowered brocade, advances, lily in hand, toward a gracefully-startled
Virgin, dressed (as one is told) in a costume presented by a pious lady
of Varallo. In another scene the Mother of God, habited like a peasant
of Val Sesia, looks up smilingly from the lace-cushion on which she is
at work; while the Last Supper, probably a survival of the older wooden
groups existing before Gaudenzio and his school took up the work, shows
a lace-trimmed linen table-cloth, with bread and fruit set out on real
Faenza dishes.

After these homely details the scenes of the Passion, where Gaudenzio’s
influence probably prevailed, seem a trifle academic; but even here
there are local touches, such as the curly white dog at the foot of
Herod’s throne, the rags of the beggars, the child in the Crucifixion
holding a spotted hound in leash.

The Crucifixion is fitly the culminating point of the series. Here
Gaudenzio lined the background with one of his noblest frescoes, and
the figures placed before it are worthy, in expression and attitude, to
carry out the master’s conception. The gold-bucklered Roman knight on
his white charger, the eager gaping throng, where beggars and cripples
jostle turbaned fine ladies and their dwarfs, where oval-faced Lombard
women with children at the breast press forward to catch a glimpse of
the dying Christ, while the hideous soldiers at the foot of the cross
draw lots for the seamless garment--all these crowding careless figures
bring out with strange intensity the agony uplifted in their midst.
Never, perhaps, has the popular, the unimpressed, unrepentant side of
the scene been set forth with more tragic directness. One can fancy the
gold-armoured knight echoing in after years the musing words of Anatole
France’s _Procurateur de Judée_:--“Jésus? Jésus de Nazareth? Je ne me
rappelle pas.”

       *       *       *       *       *

From Varallo the fortunate traveller may carry his impressions
unimpaired through the chestnut-woods and across the hills to the lake
of Orta--a small sheet of water enclosed in richest verdure, with the
wooded island of San Giuliano on its bosom. Orta has a secret charm of
its own: a quality of solitude, of remoteness, that makes it seem the
special property of each traveller who chances to discover it. Here
too is a Sacred Way, surmounting the usual knoll above the town. The
groups have little artistic merit, but there is a solemn charm in the
tranquil glades, with their little white-pillared shrines, connected
by grass walks under a continuous vaulting of branches. The chief
“feature” of Orta, however, is the incredibly complete little island,
with its ancient church embosomed in gardens; yet even this counts only
as a detail in the general composition, a last touch to the prodigal
picturesqueness of the place. The lake itself is begirt by vine-clad
slopes, and in every direction roads and bridle-paths lead across the
wooded hills, through glades sheeted in spring-time with primroses and
lilies-of-the-valley, to the deeper forest-recesses at the foot of the
high Alps.

In any other country the departure from such perfect loveliness must
lead to an anti-climax; but there is no limit to the prodigality of the
Italian landscape, and the wanderer who turns eastward from Orta may
pass through scenes of undiminished beauty till, toward sunset, the
hills divide to show Lake Maggiore at his feet, with the Isola Bella
moored like a fantastic pleasure-craft upon its waters.




WHAT THE HERMITS SAW


In almost every gallery of Italy there hangs, among the pictures of
the earlier period, one which represents, with loving minuteness of
topographical detail, a rocky mountain-side honeycombed with caves and
inhabited by hermits.

As a rule, the landscape is comprehensive enough to include the whole
Thebaid, with the river at the base of the cliff, the _selva oscura_
“fledging the wild-ridged mountain steep by steep,” and the various
little edifices--huts, chapels and bridges--with which the colony
of anchorites have humanized their wild domain. This presentment of
the life of the solitaries always remained a favourite subject in
Italian art, and even in the rococo period, when piety had become
a drawing-room accomplishment, the traditional charm of the “life
apart” was commemorated by the mock “hermitages” to be found in every
nobleman’s park, or by such frescoes as adorn the entrance to the
chapel of the Villa Chigi, near Rome: a tiny room painted to represent
a rocky cleft in the mountains, with anchorites visiting each other in
their caves, or engaged in the duties of their sylvan existence.

A vast body of literature--and of a literature peculiarly accessible
to the people--has kept alive in Catholic countries the image of the
early solitary. The Golden Legend, the great Bollandist compilations,
and many other collections of pious anecdote, preserve, in simple
and almost childish form, the names and deeds of the desert saints.
In the traditions of the Latin race there still lingers, no doubt, a
sub-conscious memory of the dark days when all that was gentle and
merciful and humane turned to the desert to escape the desolation of
the country and the foulness of the town. From war and slavery and
famine, from the strife of the circus factions and the incredible
vices and treacheries of civilized life, the disenchanted Christian,
aghast at the more than pagan corruption of a converted world, fled
into the waste places to wear out his life in penance. The horrors he
left behind surpassed anything the desert could show--surpassed even
the terrors that walked by night, the airy tongues that syllabled
men’s names, the lemurs, succubi and painted demons of the tombs.
Nevertheless the lives of the early anchorites, who took refuge in
the burning solitudes of Egypt and Asia Minor, were full of fears and
anguish. Their history echoes with the groans and lamentations of souls
in pain, and had their lives been recorded by contemporary artists, the
presentment must have recalled those horribly circumstantial studies of
everlasting torment which admonished the mediæval worshipper from the
walls of every church.

But when Italian art began to chronicle the history of the desert
fathers, a change had passed over the spirit of Christianity. If
the world was still a dark place, full of fears and evil, solitary
communion with God had ceased to become a more dreadful alternative;
and when men went forth into the desert they found Christ there rather
than the devil. So at least one infers from the spirit in which the
Italian painters rendered the life of the Thebaid--transposing its
scenes from the parched African desert to their own fertile landscape,
and infusing into the lives of the desert fathers that sense of human
fellowship with which Saint Francis had penetrated the mediæval
conception of Christianity. The first hermits shunned each other as
they shunned the image of evil; every human relation was a snare,
and they sought each other out only in moments of moral or physical
extremity, when flesh or spirit quailed before the hallucinations of
solitude. But in the Italian pictures the hermits move in an atmosphere
of fraternal tenderness. Though they still lead the “life apart,” it is
shorn of its grimness and mitigated by acts of friendly ministry and
innocent childlike intercourse. The solitaries still dwell in remote
inaccessible regions, and for the most part their lives are spent
alone; but on the feasts of the Church they visit each other, and when
they go on pilgrimage they pause at each other’s thresholds.

Yet, though one feels that this new spirit has tamed the desert,
and transplanted to it enough of the leaven of human intercourse to
exorcise its evil spirits, the imagination remains chiefly struck by
the strangeness of the conditions in which these voluntary exiles must
have found themselves. The hermits brought little with them from the
world of cities and men compared to what they found in the wilderness.
Their relation to the earth--their ancient mysterious mother--must
have been the most intimate as well as the most interesting part of
their lives; as a “return to nature” the experience had a freshness
and intensity which the modern seeker after primeval sensations can
never hope to recover. For in those days, when distances were measured
by the pilgrim’s sandal or the ass’s hoof, a few miles meant exile,
and the mountain visible from the walls of his native town offered
the solitary as complete an isolation as the slopes of Lebanon. News
travelled at the same pace, when it did not drop by the way. There was
little security outside the city walls, and small incentive for the
traveller, except from devotional motives, to seek out the anchorite on
his inaccessible height.

The hermit, therefore, was thrown back on the companionship of the
wild; and what he won from it we read in the gentler legends of the
desert, and in the records of the early Italian artists. Much, for
instance, is told of the delightful nature of the intercourse between
the solitaries and wild animals. The lion having been the typical
“denizen” of the Libyan sands, the Italian painter has transplanted
him to the Umbrian hill-sides, where, jointly with the wolf and the
stag, he lives in gentle community with the anchorites. For instead
of fleeing from or fighting these lords of the wilderness, the wise
hermits at once entered into negotiations with them--negotiations
sometimes resulting in life-long friendships, and sealed by the
self-sacrificing death of the adoring animal. It was of course the
power of the cross which subjugated these savage beasts; and many
instances are recorded of the control exercised over wild animals,
and the contrition awakened in them, by the conquering sign. But the
hermits, not content with asserting their spiritual predominance over
these poor soulless creatures (_non sono Cristiani_), seemed to feel
that such a victory was too easy, and were themselves won over by the
devotion of their dumb friends, and drawn into a brotherly commerce
which no law of the Church prescribed.

The mystical natural history of the first Christian centuries
facilitated the belief in this intercourse between man and beast. When
even familiar domestic animals were credited with strange symbolic
attributes, it was natural to people the wild with the dragon, the
hydra and the cocatrix; to believe that the young of the elephant were
engendered by their mothers’ eating of the mandragora which grows on
a mount near Paradise; that those of the lion were born dead and
resuscitated by their parents’ breath; and that the old eagle renewed
his youth by plunging three times in a magic fountain. It is not
strange that creatures so marvellously endowed should have entered into
friendly relations with the human intruders upon their solitude, and
subdued their savage natures to the teachings of their new masters.
And as the lion and the wolf were gradually transformed into humble
but wise companions, so the other influences of the wilderness came
to acquire a power over the solitaries. Even after the early Thebaids
had been gathered in under one or another of the great monastic rules,
seekers after holiness continued to flee the communal life, and in
Italy every lonely height came to have its recluse. It was impossible
that these little restricted human lives, going forth singly into the
desert, should not be gradually absorbed into it and saturated with
its spirit. Think what a soul-shattering or soul-making experience it
must have been to the dweller in the narrow walled town or the narrower
monastery, to go forth alone, beyond the ploughed fields and the road
to the next village, beyond the haunts of men and hail of friendly
voices, forth into the unmapped region of hills and forests, where
wild beasts and robbers, and other presences less definable but more
baleful, lay in wait for the lonely traveller! From robbers there was
not much to fear: the solitaries were poor, and it was a great sin to
lay hands on them. The wild beasts, too, might be won over to Christian
amity; but what of those other presences of which the returning
traveller whispered over the evening fire?

At first, no doubt, the feeling of awe was uppermost, and only the
heart inflated with divine love could sustain the assaults of fear and
loneliness; but gradually, as the noise of cities died out, as the ear
became inured to the vast hush of nature, and the mind to the delicious
recurrence of untroubled hours--then, wonderfully, imperceptibly, the
spirit of the hermit must have put forth tendrils of sympathy and
intelligence toward the mysterious world about him. Think of the joy of
escaping from the ceaseless brawls, the dirt, disease and misery of the
mediæval town, or from the bickering, the tale-bearing, the mechanical
devotions of the crowded monastery! Think of the wonder of entering,
alone and undisturbed, into communion with this vast still world of
cliff and cataract, of bird and beast and flower!

There were, of course, different kinds of hermits: the dull kind whose
only object was to escape from the turmoil and rivalry of the city,
or the toil and floggings of the farm, and to live drowsily in a warm
cleft of the rocks (not too far from the other solitaries), high above
the populous plain alternately harried by war and pestilence; and
there was the ecstatic, so filled with the immanent light that he saw
neither cliff nor cataract, that the various face of nature was no more
to him than a window of clear glass opening on the brightness of the
beatific vision. But there must have been a third kind also--the kind
in whom the divine love, instead of burning like a cold inward flame,
overflowed on the whole world about him; to whom, in this new immediate
contact with nature, the swallow became a sister, the wolf a brother,
the very clods “lovers and lamps”: mute Saint Francises, born out of
their due time, to whom the life of nature revealed, inarticulately but
profoundly, the bond of brotherhood between man and the soil.

It was to these solitaries that the wilderness truly confessed itself,
yielding up once more all the terror and the poetry of its ancient
life. For the cliffs and forests shunned of men had not always been
thus deserted, and always there had throbbed in them the pulse of
that strange intermediate life, between the man and the clod, of which
the tradition lingers in all lonely places. The hermits of course knew
this: the life of ancient days was still close to them. They knew also
that the power of the cross had banished from temple and market-place,
from garden, house and vineyard, a throng of tutelary beings on whom
the welfare of men had once been thought to depend, but who had now
been declared false to their trust, and driven forth to join their
brothers of the hills and woods. This knowledge rested on no vague
rumours, but on authenticated fact. Were not many of the old temples
still standing, some built into the walls of Christian churches, others
falling into desecrated ruin on lonely cliff and promontory? And was
it not known that in these latter the wraiths of the old gods still
reassembled? Many pilgrims and travellers bore witness to the fact.
Who had not heard of the Jewish wayfarer, overtaken by night in a
lonely country, who sought shelter in a ruined temple of Apollo, and
would have been blasted by the god and his attendant demons, had he
not (converted by fear) dispelled the unholy rout with the sign of the
cross?

A tangle of classic and mediæval traditions, Greek, Etruscan and
Germanic, in which the gods of the Thessalian glades and the werewolves
of northern forests rode the midnight blast in the _chevauchée_ of a
wild Walpurgisnacht, haunted the background of life in that confused
age when “ignorant armies clashed by night” on the battleground of
the awakening human intelligence. To the citizen hugging the city
walls, this supernatural world was dark with images of sin and fear;
but to the dweller in the forest, bold enough to affront the greater
terrors of self-communion, it must have offered a mitigating sense
of fellowship. That it did so is proved even by some of the earliest
legends. It was not always in forms of peril and perdition that the
banished gods manifested themselves to the votaries of the usurper.
To the dweller in the city they may have come in vengeful shape, like
the Venus, _tout entière à sa proie attachée_, who held fast to the
Christian bridegroom’s ring (though surely here one catches a note
of the old longing); but in their native solitude they seem to have
appeared propitiatingly, with timid proffers of service, as when Saint
Anthony, travelling in search of a fellow-hermit, was guided on his
way, first by a centaur and then by “a little man with hoofs like a
goat.”

For generations indeed, for centuries even in that slow-moving time,
the divinities of the old dispensation must have remained more familiar
to the simple people than the strange new God of Israel. Often they
must have stolen back in the twilight, to surprise and comfort the
unlettered toilers who still believed in them, still secretly offered
them the dripping honeycomb and bowl of ewe’s milk, or hung garlands
in the cleft tree which they haunted. To some of these humble hearts,
grieving for their old fireside gods, and a little bewildered by the
demands of the great forbidding Christ who frowned from the golden
heights of the Byzantine apse, the “return to nature” must have been
like a coming home to the instinctive endearing ways of childhood. How
could they be alarmed by the sight of these old exiled gods, familiars
of the hearth and garden; they who had been born to the sense of such
presences, to half-human intercourse with beings who linked man to the
soil that nurtured him, and the roof beneath which he slept?

Even the most holy and learned men of the first Christian centuries did
not question the actual existence of the heathen gods, and the Fathers
of the Church expended volumes of controversy in discussing their
origin and their influence on a Christianized world. A strange conflict
of opinion waged around this burning question. By the greater number of
authorities the old gods were believed to be demons, emanations of the
mysterious spirit of evil, himself the Ahriman of the ancient Eastern
dualism, who had cleverly smuggled himself into the new Christian
creed. Yet the oracles, though usually regarded as the voices of these
demons, were always believed in and quoted by the Christian Church,
and the history of the dark ages abounds in allusion to the authority
of the Sibylline books. While Christian scholarship thus struggled
under the spell of the old beliefs, how could the artisan and serf have
freed themselves from it? Gradually, indeed, the Church, foreseeing the
perils of a divided allegiance, and fearing the baleful loveliness of
the old gods, was to transform their myths into Christian legend, and
so supply a new throng of anthropomorphic conceptions for minds unable
to keep their faith alive on the thin abstractions of the schoolmen.
The iconography of the early Church bears witness to the skill with
which these adaptations were effected, and the slender young Olympians
and their symbols pressed into the service of the new faith; but it was
long before the results of this process reached the popular mind, and
meanwhile the old gods lived on in simple fellowship with the strange
saints and angels.

Through all the middle ages the marvellous did not fail from the earth:
it simply receded farther from the centres of life, drawing after
it the hearts of the adventurous. The Polo brothers were no doubt
clear-sighted practical men while they drove their trade in Venice;
but wonders pressed upon them when they set foot in the Great Khan’s
domains. If an astute Italian prince, who lived till the middle of
the fifteenth century with the light of the new humanism flooding his
court, could yet, on his travels to the Holy Land and Greece, discover
castles inhabited by enchanted snakes, as well as wonder-working
shrines of his own creed, how could the simple hearts of the anchorite
and solitary remain closed to the old wonders?

Shapes which have once inhabited the imagination of man pass
reluctantly out of existence. Centuries of poetic belief had peopled
the old world with a race of superhuman beings, and as many centuries
would be needed to lay their ghosts. It must be remembered, moreover,
that no sudden cataclysm, political or intellectual, marked the
introduction of the Christian faith. For three centuries after the
sacrifice on Calvary, hardly an allusion to the new god is to be found
in the pages of the pagan historians and philosophers. Even after he
had led the legions of Constantine to victory, and so won official
allegiance throughout the Roman world, no violent change marked the
beginning of the new era. For centuries still, men ploughed the same
fields with ploughs fashioned on the same lines, kept the same holidays
with the same rites, and lived on the same store of accumulated
beliefs. And in the hearts of the solitaries these beliefs must have
lingered longest. For in fleeing the world they were returning to the
native habitations of the old gods. They were nature-spirits every one,
sprung from the wave, the cloud, the tree. To the cities they had been
borne triumphant by the will of men, and from the cities they might
be banished at its behest; but who should drive them from their old
stronghold in the breast of nature? Their temples might be re-dedicated
to the new god, but none could banish them from the temples not made
with hands. Daylight might deny them, but twilight confessed them
still. They made no effort to recover the supremacy which had been
wrested from them: the gods know when their hour has come. But they
lived on, shrinking back more and more into their primitive forms,
into the vapour, the tree-trunk, the moon-track on the lonely sea; or
revealing themselves, in wistful fugitive glimpses, to the mortals who
had come to share their forest exile.

In what gentle guise they showed themselves, one may see in many
pictures of the Italian _quattro cento_, some of whose lesser painters
seem to have been in actual communion with this pale woodland Olympus.
The gods they depict are not the shining lords of the Greek heaven,
but half-human, half-sylvan creatures, shy suppliants for mortal
recognition, hovering gently on the verge of evanescence. Robetta, the
Florentine engraver, transferred them to some of his plates, Luini
caught their tender grace in his Sacrifice to Pan and Metamorphosis
of Daphne, and Lorenzo Costa gives a glimpse of their sylvan revels
in the Mythological Scene of the Louvre; but it was Piero di Cosimo
who had the clearest intuition of them. The gentle furred creature of
the Death of Procris might have been the very faun who showed Saint
Anthony the way; and in all Cosimo’s mythological pictures one has the
same impression of that intermediate world, the twilight world of the
conquered, Christianized, yet still lingering gods, so different from
the clear upper air of classic art.

Was it, as the scholars would have us believe, mere lack of
book-learning and technical skill that kept the painters of the
_quattro_ cento spell-bound in this mediæval Olympus? Were these
vanishing gods and half-gods merely a clumsy attempt to formulate
the classic conception of divinity? But the Pisani had discovered
Greek plastic art two centuries earlier; but the uncovered wonders of
Rome were being daily drawn and measured by skilful hands; but the
silhouettes of the antique temples were still outlined against the
skies of Greater Greece! No--these lesser artists were not struggling
to embody a half-understood ideal. Kept nearer the soil and closer to
the past by the very limitations of their genius, they left to the
great masters the task of reconstituting classical antiquity, content
to go on painting the gods who still lived in their blood, the gods
their own forbears had known in the familiar streets and fields, the
fading gods whom the hermits were last to see in the lost recesses of
the mountain.




A TUSCAN SHRINE


One of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental
tourist is to circumvent the compiler of his guide-book. The red
volumes which accompany the traveller through Italy have so completely
anticipated the most whimsical impulses of their readers that it is now
almost impossible to plan a tour of exploration without finding, on
reference to them, that their author has already been over the ground,
has tested the inns, measured the kilometres, and distilled from the
massive tomes of Kugler, Burckhardt and Morelli a portable estimate
of the local art and architecture. Even the discovery of incidental
lapses scarcely consoles the traveller for the habitual accuracy of
his statements; and the only refuge left from his omniscience lies in
approaching the places he describes by a route which he has not taken.

Those to whom one of the greatest charms of travel in over-civilized
countries consists in such momentary escapes from the expected, will
still find here and there, even in Italy, a few miles unmeasured by
the guide-book; and it was to enjoy the brief exhilaration of such a
discovery that we stepped out of the train one morning at Certaldo,
determined to find our way thence to San Vivaldo.

For some months we had been vaguely aware that, somewhere among the
hills between Volterra and the Arno, there lay an obscure monastery
containing a series of terra-cotta groups which were said to represent
the scenes of the Passion. No one in Florence seemed to know much about
them; and many of the people whom we questioned had never even heard
of San Vivaldo. Professor Enrico Ridolfi, at that time the director
of the Royal Museums at Florence, knew by hearsay of the existence
of the groups, and told me that there was every reason to accept the
local tradition which has always attributed them to Giovanni Gonnelli,
the blind modeller of Gambassi, an obscure artist of the seventeenth
century, much praised by contemporary authors, but since fallen into
merited oblivion. Professor Ridolfi, however, had never seen any
photographs of the groups, and was not unnaturally disposed to believe
that they were of small artistic merit, since Gonnelli worked much
later, and in a more debased period of taste, than the modeller of the
well-known groups at Varallo. Still, even when the more pretentious
kind of Italian sculpture was at its lowest, a spark of its old life
smouldered here and there in the improvisations of the _plasticatore_,
or stucco modeller; and I hoped to find, in the despised groups of
San Vivaldo, something of the coarse naïveté and brutal energy which
animate their more famous rivals of Varallo. In this hope we started
in search of San Vivaldo; and as the guide-books told us that it could
be reached only by way of Castel Fiorentino, we promptly determined to
attack it from San Gimignano.

At Certaldo, the birthplace of Boccaccio, where the train left us one
April morning, we found an archaic little carriage, with a coachman
who entered sympathetically into our plan for eluding our cicerone. He
told us that he knew a road which led in about four hours across the
mountains from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo; and in his charge we were
soon crossing the poplar-fringed Elsa and climbing the steep ascent to
San Gimignano, where we were to spend the night.

The next morning, before sunrise, the little carriage awaited us at
the inn door; and as we dashed out under the gateway of San Gimignano
we felt the thrill of explorers sighting a new continent. It seemed,
in fact, an unknown world which lay beneath us in the early light.
The hills, so definitely etched at midday, at sunset so softly
modelled, had melted into a silver sea of which the farthest waves were
indistinguishably merged in billows of luminous mist. Only the near
foreground retained its precision of outline, and that too had assumed
an air of unreality. Fields, hedges and cypresses were tipped with an
aureate brightness which recalled the golden ripples running over the
grass in the foreground of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” The sunshine
had the density of gold-leaf: we seemed to be driving through the
landscape of a missal.

At first we had this magical world to ourselves, but as the light
broadened groups of labourers began to appear under the olives and
between the vines; shepherdesses, distaff in hand, drove their flocks
along the roadside, and yokes of white oxen with scarlet fringes above
their meditative eyes moved past us with such solemn deliberateness
of step that fancy transformed their brushwood-laden carts into the
sacred _carroccio_ of the past. Ahead of us the road wound through
a district of vineyards and orchards, but to the north and east the
panorama of the Tuscan hills unrolled range after range of treeless
undulations, outlined one upon the other, as the sun grew high, with
the delicately-pencilled minuteness of a mountain background of Sebald
Beham’s. Behind us the fantastic towers of San Gimignano dominated each
bend of the road like some persistent mirage of the desert; to the
north lay Castel Fiorentino, and far away other white villages gleamed
like fossil shells embedded in the hill-sides.

The elements composing the foreground of such Tuscan scenes are almost
always extremely simple--slopes trellised with vine and mulberry, under
which the young wheat runs like green flame; stretches of ash-coloured
olive orchard; and here and there a farm-house with projecting eaves
and open loggia, guarded by its inevitable group of cypresses. These
cypresses, with their velvety-textured spires of rusty black, acquire
an extraordinary value against the neutral-tinted breadth of the
landscape; distributed with the sparing hand with which a practised
writer uses his exclamation-points, they seem to emphasize the more
intimate meaning of the scene; calling the eye here to a shrine, there
to a homestead, or testifying by their mere presence to the lost
tradition of some barren knoll. But this significance of detail is one
of the chief charms of the mid-Italian landscape. It has none of the
purposeless prodigality, the extravagant climaxes, of what is called
“fine scenery”; nowhere is there any obvious largesse to the eye; but
the very reticence of its delicately-moulded lines, its seeming disdain
of facile effects, almost give it the quality of a work of art, make it
appear the crowning production of centuries of plastic expression.

For some distance the road from San Gimignano to San Vivaldo winds
continuously upward, and our ascent at length brought us to a region
where agriculture ceases and the way lies across heathery undulations,
with a scant growth of oaks and ilexes in the more sheltered hollows.
As we drove on, these copses gave way to stone-pines, and presently
we dipped over the yoke of the highest ridge and saw below us another
sea of hills, with a bare mountain-spur rising from it like a scaly
monster floating on the waves, its savage spine bristling with the
walls and towers of Volterra.

For nearly an hour we skirted the edge of this basin of hills, in sight
of the ancient city on its livid cliff; then we turned into a gentler
country, through woods starred with primroses, with a flash of streams
in the hollows; and presently a murmur of church-bells reached us
through the woodland silence. At the same moment we caught sight of a
brick campanile rising above the trees on a slope just ahead of us, and
our carriage turned from the high-road up a lane with scattered chapels
showing their white façades through the foliage. This lane, making a
sudden twist, descended abruptly between mossy banks and brought us out
on a grass-plot before a rectangular monastic building adjoining the
church of which the bells had welcomed us. Here was San Vivaldo, and
the chapels we had passed doubtless concealed beneath their cupolas
“more neat than solemn” the terra-cottas of which we were in search.

The monastery of San Vivaldo, at one time secularized by the Italian
government, has now been restored to the Franciscan order, of which
its patron saint was a member. San Vivaldo was born at San Gimignano
in the latter half of the thirteenth century, and after joining in
his youth the Tertiary Order of Saint Francis, retired to a hollow
chestnut-tree in the forest of Camporeno (the site of the present
monastery), in which cramped abode he passed the remainder of his life
“in continual macerations and abstinence.” After his death the tree
which had been sanctified in so unusual a manner became an object of
devotion among the neighbouring peasantry, who, when it disappeared,
raised on the spot an oratory to the Virgin. It is doubtful, however,
if this memorial, which fell gradually into neglect, would have
preserved San Vivaldo from oblivion, had not that Senancour of a saint
found a Matthew Arnold in the shape of a Franciscan friar, a certain
Fra Cherubino of Florence, who, early in the sixteenth century, was
commissioned by his order to watch over and restore the abandoned
sanctuary. Fra Cherubino, with his companions, took possession of the
forest of Camporeno, and proceeded to lay the foundation-stone of a
monastery which was to commemorate the hermit of the chestnut-tree.
The forgotten merits of San Vivaldo were speedily restored to popular
favour by the friar’s eloquence, and often, after one of his sermons,
three thousand people were to be seen marching in procession to the
river Evola to fetch building-materials for the monastery. Meanwhile
Fra Tommaso, another of the monks, struck by the resemblance of the
hills and valleys of Camporeno to the holy places of Palestine,
began the erection of the “devout chapels” which were to contain the
representations of the Passion; and thus arose the group of buildings
now forming the monastery of San Vivaldo.

As we drove up we saw several monks at work in the woods and in the
vegetable-gardens below the monastery. These took no notice of us, but
in answer to our coachman’s summons there appeared another, whose Roman
profile might have emerged from one of those great portrait-groups
of the sixteenth century, where grave-featured monks and chaplains
are gathered about a seated pope. This monk, whose courteous welcome
betrayed as little surprise as though the lonely glades of San Vivaldo
were daily invaded by hordes of sight-seers, informed us that it was
his duty to conduct visitors to the various shrines. The chapels of the
Passion are about twenty in number, and as many more are said to have
perished. They are scattered irregularly through the wood adjoining
the monastery, and our guide, who showed a deep interest in the works
of art committed to his charge, assured us that the terra-cotta groups
were undoubtedly due to Giovanni Gonnelli, _Il Cieco di Gambassi_, for
whose talent he seemed to entertain a profound admiration. Some of
the master’s work, he added, had been destroyed, or replaced by that
of “qualche muratore”; but he assured us that in the groups which had
been preserved we should at once recognize the touch of an eminent
hand. As he led the way he smilingly referred to Giovanni Gonnelli’s
legendary blindness, which plays a most picturesque part in the
artist’s biography. The monk explained to us that Gonnelli was blind
of only one eye, thus demolishing Baldinucci’s charming tradition of
portrait-busts executed in total darkness to the amazement of popes and
princes. Still, we suspected our guide of adapting his hero’s exploits
to the incredulity of the unorthodox, and perhaps secretly believing
in the anecdotes over which he affected to smile. On the threshold of
the first chapel he paused to explain that some of the groups had been
irreparably injured during the period of neglect and abandonment which
followed the suppression of the monastery. The government, he added,
had seized the opportunity to carry off from the church the Presepio
in high relief which was Gonnelli’s masterpiece, and to strip many of
the chapels of the escutcheons in Robbia ware that formerly ornamented
the ceilings. “Even then, however,” he concluded, “our good fathers
were keeping secret watch over the shrines, and they saved some of the
escutcheons by covering them with whitewash; but the government has
never given us back our Presepio.”

Having thus guarded us against possible disillusionment, he unlocked
the door of the first chapel on what he declared to be an undoubted
work of the master--the Descent of the Holy Ghost upon the Disciples.

This group, like all the others at San Vivaldo, is set in a little
apsidal recess at the farther end of the chapel. I had expected, at
best, an inferior imitation of the seventeenth-century groups in the
more famous Via Crucis of Varallo, but to my surprise I found myself
in the presence of a much finer, and apparently a much earlier, work.
The figures, which are of life-size, are set in a depressed arch, and
fitted into their allotted space with something of the skill which the
Greek sculptors showed in adapting their groups to the slope of the
pediment. In the centre, the Virgin kneels on a low column or pedestal,
which raises her partially above the surrounding figures of the
disciples. Her attitude is solemnly prayerful, with a touch of nun-like
severity in the folds of the wimple and in the gathered plaits of the
gown beneath her cloak. Her face, furrowed with lines of grief and age,
is yet irradiated by an inner light; and her hands, like those of all
the figures hitherto attributed to Gonnelli, are singularly graceful
and expressive. The same air of unction, of what the French call
_recueillement_, distinguishes the face and attitude of the kneeling
disciple on the extreme left; and the whole group breathes that air
of devotional simplicity usually associated with an earlier and less
worldly period of art.

Next to this group, the finest is perhaps that of “Lo Spasimo,” the
swoon of the Virgin at the sight of Christ bearing the cross. It is
the smallest of the groups, being less than life-size, and comprising
only the figure of the Virgin supported by the Marys and by two
kneeling angels. There is a trace of primitive stiffness in the attempt
to render the prostration of the Virgin, but her face expresses an
extremity of speechless anguish which is subtly contrasted with the
awed but temperate grief of the woman who bends above her; while the
lovely countenances of the attendant angels convey another shade of
tender participation: the compassion of those who are in the counsels
of the Eternal, and know that

    _In la sua volontade è nostra pace_.

In this group the artist has attained to the completest expression of
his characteristic qualities: refined and careful modelling, reticence
of emotion, and that “gift of tears” which is the last attribute one
would seek in the resonant but superficial art of the seventeenth
century.

Among other groups undoubtedly due to the same hand are those of
Christ Before Pilate, of the Ascension, and of the Magdalen bathing
the feet of Christ. In the group of the Ascension the upper part has
been grotesquely restored; but the figures of the Virgin and disciples,
who kneel below, are apparently untouched, and on their faces is seen
that look of wondering ecstasy, that reflection of the beatific vision,
which the artist excelled in representing. In every group of the series
his Saint John has this luminous look; and in that of the Ascension it
brightens even the shrewd bearded countenances of the older disciples.
In the scene of Christ before Pilate the figure of Pilate is especially
noteworthy: his delicate incredulous lips seem just framing their
immortal interrogation. Our guide pointed out that the Roman lictor in
this group, who raises his arm to strike the accused Christ, has had
his offending hand knocked off by the zeal of the faithful.

The representation of the Magdalen bathing the feet of Christ is
noticeable for the fine assemblage of heads about the supper-table.
Those of Christ and of his host are peculiarly expressive; and Saint
John’s look of tranquil tenderness contrasts almost girlishly with the
majestic gravity of the neighbouring faces. The Magdalen herself is
less happily executed; there is something actually unpleasant in her
ramping four-footed attitude as she crawls toward the Christ, and the
figure is probably by another hand. In the group of the Crucifixion,
for the most part of inferior workmanship, the figures of the two
thieves are finely modelled, and their expression of anguish has been
achieved with the same sobriety of means which marks all the artist’s
effects. The remaining groups in the chapels are without special
interest, but under the portico of the church there are three fine
figures, possibly by the artist of the Spasimo, representing Saint
Roch, Saint Linus of Volterra, and one of the Fathers of the Church.

There are, then, among the groups of San Vivaldo, five which appear
to be by the same master, in addition to several scattered figures
presumably by his hand; all of which have always been attributed to
Giovanni Gonnelli, the blind pupil of Pietro Tacca. The figures in
these groups are nearly, if not quite, as large as life; they have all
been rudely repainted, and are entirely unglazed, though framed in
glazed mouldings of the familiar Robbian style.

Professor Ridolfi’s information was confirmed by the local tradition,
and there seemed no doubt that the groups of San Vivaldo had always
been regarded as the work of Gonnelli, an obscure artist living
at a time when the greatest masters produced little to which
posterity has conceded any artistic excellence. But one glance at the
terra-cottas sufficed to show that they could not have been modelled
in mid-seventeenth century: neither their merits nor their defects
belonged to that period of art. What had the sculptor of San Vivaldo
in common with the pupils of Giovanni Bologna and Il Fiammingo, that
tribe of skilled craftsmen who peopled every church and palace in
Italy with an impersonal flock of Junos and Virgin Marys, Venuses and
Magdalens, distinguishable only by their official attributes? The more
closely I studied the groups, the more the conviction grew that they
were the work of an artist trained in an earlier tradition, and still
preserving, under the stiffening influences of convention, a touch of
that individuality and directness of expression which mark the prime of
Tuscan art. The careful modelling of the hands, the quiet grouping, so
free from effort and agitation, the simple draperies, the devotional
expression of the faces, all seemed to point to the lingering
influences of the fifteenth century; not indeed to the fresh charm of
its noon, but to the refinement, the severity, of its close. The glazed
mouldings enclosing the groups, and the coloured medallions with
which the ceilings of the chapels are decorated, suggested a direct
connection with the later school of the Robbias; and as I looked I was
haunted by a confused recollection of a Presepio seen at the Bargello,
and attributed to Giovanni della Robbia or his school. Could this be
the high-relief which had been removed from San Vivaldo?

On returning to Florence I went at once to the Bargello, and found,
as I had expected, that the Presepio I had in mind was indeed the one
from San Vivaldo. I was surprised by the extraordinary resemblance of
the heads to some of those in the groups ascribed to Gonnelli. I had
fancied that the modeller of San Vivaldo might have been inspired by
the Presepio of the Bargello; but I was unprepared for the identity
of treatment in certain details of hair and drapery, and for the
recurrence of the same type of face. The Presepio undoubtedly shows
greater delicacy of treatment; but this is accounted for by the fact
that the figures are much smaller, and only in partial relief, whereas
at San Vivaldo they are so much detached from the background that they
may be regarded as groups of statuary. Again, the glaze which covers
all but the faces of the Presepio has preserved its original beauty
of colouring, while the groups of San Vivaldo have been crudely daubed
with fresh coats of paint, and even of whitewash; and the effect of
the Presepio is farther enhanced by an excessively ornate frame of
fruit-garlanded pilasters, as well as by its charming predella with
small scenes set between panels of arabesque. Altogether, it is a far
more elaborate production than the terra-cottas of San Vivaldo, and
some of its most graceful details, such as the dance of angels on the
stable-roof, are evidently borrowed from the earlier _répertoire_ of
the Robbias; but in spite of these incidental archaisms no one can
fail to be struck by the likeness of the central figures to certain of
the statues at San Vivaldo. The head of Saint Joseph in the Presepio,
for instance, with its wrinkled penthouse forehead, and the curled
and parted beard, suggests at once that of the disciple seated on the
right of Saint John in the house of the Pharisee; the same face, though
younger, occurs again in the Pentecostal group, and the kneeling female
figure in the Presepio is treated in the same manner as the youngest
Mary in the group of the Spasimo: even the long rolled-back tresses,
with their shell-like convolutions, are the same.

The discovery of this close resemblance deepened the interest of
the problem. It seemed hardly credible that a work of such artistic
significance as the Via Crucis of San Vivaldo should not long since
have been studied and classified. In Tuscany especially, where every
phase of fifteenth-century art, including its prolongation in the
succeeding century, has been traced and analyzed with such scrupulous
care, it was inconceivable that so interesting an example of an
essentially Italian style should have escaped notice. There could
be no doubt that the groups belonged to the period in question.
Since it was impossible not to reject at once the hypothetical
seventeenth-century artist content to imitate with servile accuracy
a manner which had already fallen into disfavour, it was necessary
to assume that a remarkable example of late _quattro-cento_ art had
remained undiscovered, within a few hours’ journey from Florence, for
nearly four hundred years. The only reasonable explanation of this
oversight seemed to be that, owing to the seclusion of the monastery
of San Vivaldo, the groups had never acquired more than local fame,
and that, having possibly been restored in the seventeenth century by
Giovanni Gonnelli or one of his pupils, they had been ascribed to him
by a generation which, having ceased to value the work of the earlier
artist, was profoundly impressed by the miraculous skill of the blind
modeller, and eager to connect his name with the artistic treasures of
the monastery.

To the infrequent sight-seers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, there would be nothing surprising in such an attribution.
The perception of differences in style is a recently-developed faculty,
and even if a student of art had penetrated to the wilds of San
Vivaldo, he would probably have noticed nothing to arouse a doubt of
the local tradition. The movement toward a discrimination of styles,
which came in the first half of the nineteenth century, was marked, in
the study of Italian art, by a contemptuous indifference toward all but
a brief period of that art; and the mere fact that a piece of sculpture
was said to have been executed in the seventeenth century would, until
very lately, have sufficed to prevent its receiving expert attention.
Thus the tradition which ascribed the groups of San Vivaldo to Giovanni
Gonnelli resulted in concealing them from modern investigation as
effectually as though they had been situated in the centre of an
unexplored continent, and in procuring for me the rare sensation of
an artistic discovery made in the heart of the most carefully-explored
artistic hunting-ground of Europe.

My first care was to seek expert confirmation of my theory; and as a
step in this direction I made arrangements to have the groups of San
Vivaldo photographed by Signor Alinari of Florence. I was obliged to
leave Italy before the photographs could be taken; but on receiving
them I sent them at once to Professor Ridolfi, who had listened with
some natural incredulity to my description of the terra-cottas; and
his reply shows that I had not overestimated the importance of the
discovery.

“No sooner,” he writes, “had I seen the photographs than I became
convinced of the error of attributing them to Giovanni Gonnelli, called
_Il Cieco di Gambassi_. I saw at once that they are not the work of an
artist of the seventeenth century, but of one living at the close of
the fifteenth or beginning of the sixteenth century; of an artist of
the school of the Robbias, who follows their precepts and possesses
their style.... The figures are most beautifully grouped, and modelled
with profound sentiment and not a little _bravura_. They do not appear
to me to be all by the same author, for the Christ in the house of the
Pharisee seems earlier and purer in style, and more robust in manner;
also the swoon of the Madonna, ... which is executed in a grander style
than the other reliefs and seems to belong to the first years of the
sixteenth century.

“The fact that these terra-cottas are not glazed does not prove that
they are not the work of the Robbia school; for Giovanni della Robbia,
for example, sometimes left the flesh of his figures unglazed, painting
them with the brush; and this is precisely the case in a Presepio of
the National Museum” (this is the Presepio of San Vivaldo), “a work of
the Robbias, in which the flesh is left unglazed.

“I therefore declare with absolute certainty that it is a mistake to
attribute these beautiful works to Giovanni Gonnelli, and that they are
undoubtedly a century earlier in date.”




SUB UMBRA LILIORUM

AN IMPRESSION OF PARMA


Parma, at first sight, lacks the engaging individuality of some of the
smaller Italian towns. Of the romantic group of ducal cities extending
from Milan to the Adriatic--Parma, Modena, Ferrara, Urbino--it is
the least easy to hit off in a few strokes, to sum up in a sentence.
Its component features, however interesting in themselves, fail to
blend in one of those memorable wholes which take instant hold of the
traveller’s imagination. The “sights” of Parma must be sought for; they
remain separate isolated facts, and their quest is enlivened by few
of those happy architectural incidents which give to a drive through
Ferrara or Ravenna so fine a flavour of surprise.

[Illustration:

  _A Characteristic Street_

  E. C. Peixotto
  PARMA. 1901.
]

The devotee of the fourteenth century, trained by Ruskin to pass
without even saluting any expression of structural art more recent
than the first unfolding of the pointed style, must restrict his
investigations to the Baptistery and the outside of the Cathedral; and
even the lax eclectic who nurses a secret weakness for the baroque and
rejoices in the last frivolous flowering of the eighteenth century,
finds little immediate satisfaction for his tastes. The general aspect
of Parma is in fact distinctly inexpressive, and its more important
buildings have only the relative merit of suggesting happier examples
of the same style. This absence of the superlative is, in many Italian
cities, atoned for by the episodical charm of the streets: by glimpses
of sculptured windows, pillared court-yards, and cornices projecting
a perfect curve against the blue; but the houses of Parma are plain
almost to meanness, and though their monotonous succession is broken
here and there by a palace-front embroidered with the Farnese lilies,
it must be owned that, with rare exceptions, these façades have few
palatial qualities but that of size. Perhaps not short of Ravenna could
be found another Italian town as destitute of the more obvious graces;
and nowhere surely but in Italy could so unpromising an exterior hide
such varied treasures. To the lover of Italy--the perennial wooer whom
every spring recalls across the Alps--there is a certain charm in
this external dulness. After being steeped in the mediævalism of Siena,
Perugia or Pistoja, after breathing at Vicenza, Modena and Bergamo the
very air of Goldoni, Rosalba, and the _commedia dell’ arte_, it is
refreshing to come on a town that holds back and says: “Find me out.”
Such a challenge puts the psychologist on his mettle and gives to his
quest the stimulus of discovery.

It may seem paradoxical to connect the emotions of the explorer with
one of the most familiar centres of artistic influence, but it is
partly because Parma is still dominated by Correggio that it has
dropped out of the emotional range of the modern traveller. For though
it is scarce a hundred years since our grandparents posted thither to
palpitate over the master, their æsthetic point of view is as remote
from ours as their mode of locomotion. By a curious perversity of fate
Correggio, so long regarded as the leading exponent of “sentiment,” now
survives only by virtue of his technique, and has shrunk to the limited
immortality of the painter’s painter. A new generation may rediscover
his emotional charm, but to the untechnical picture-lover of the
present day his prodigious manipulations of light and colour seldom
atone for the Turveydrop attitudes of his saints and angels and for the
sugary loveliness of his Madonnas. Lacking alike the frank naturalism
of such masters as Palma Vecchio and Bonifazio, the sensuous mysticism
of Sodoma and the fantastic gaiety of Tiepolo, Correggio seems to
typify that phase of cold sentimentality which dwindled to its end
in the “Keepsakes” of sixty years ago. Each generation makes certain
demands on the art of its own period and seeks certain affinities in
the art of the past; and a kind of personal sincerity is perhaps what
modern taste has most consistently exacted: the term being understood
not in its technical sense, as applied to execution, but in its
imaginative significance, as qualifying the “message” of the artist. It
is inevitable that the average spectator should look at pictures from
a quite untechnical standpoint. He knows nothing of values, brushwork
and the rest; yet it is to the immense majority formed by his kind that
art addresses itself. There must therefore be two recognized ways of
judging a picture--by its technique and by its expression: that is,
not the mere story it has to tell, but its power of rendering in line
and colour the equivalent of some idea or of some emotion. There is
the less reason for disputing such a claim because, given the power of
_seeing soul_, as this faculty may be defined, the power of embodying
the impression, of making it visible and comprehensible to others, is
necessarily one of technique; and it is doubtful if any artist not
possessed of this insight has received, even from his fellow-craftsmen,
a lasting award of supremacy.

Now the sentiment that Correggio embodied is one which, from the
present point of view, seems to lack the preserving essence of
sincerity. It is true that recent taste has returned with a certain
passion to the brilliant mannerisms of the eighteenth century; but
it is because they are voluntary mannerisms, as frankly factitious
as the masquerading of children, that they have retained their hold
on the fancy. As there is a soul in the games of children, or in
any diversion entered into with conviction, so there is a soul, if
only an inconsequent spoiled child’s soul, in the laughing art of
the eighteenth century. It is the defect of Correggio’s art that it
expresses no conviction whatever. He offers us no clue to the _état
d’âme_ of his celestial gymnasts. They do not seem to be honestly in
love with this world or the next, or to take any personal part in the
transactions in which the artist has engaged them. In fact, they are
simply models, smirking and attitudinizing at so much an hour, and so
well trained that even their individuality as models remains hidden
behind the fixed professional smile. The conclusion is that if they
are only models to the spectator, it is because they were only models
to Correggio; that his art had no transmuting quality, and that he was
always conscious of the wires which held on the wings.

It may, indeed, be argued that devotional painting in Italy had
assumed, in the sixteenth century, a stereotyped form from which a
stronger genius than Correggio’s could hardly have freed it; and that
the triumphs of that day should be sought rather in the domain of
decorative art, where conventionality becomes a strength, and where
the æsthetic imagination finds expression in combinations of mere line
and colour. Many of the decorative paintings of the sixteenth century
are indeed among the most delightful products of Italian art; and it
might have been expected that Correggio’s extraordinary technical skill
and love of rhythmically whirling lines would have found complete
development in this direction. It is, of course, permissible to the
artist to regard the heavenly hosts as mere factors in a decorative
composition; and to consider Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues,
Powers only in their relation to the diameter of a dome or to the
curve of a spandril; but to the untechnical spectator such a feat is
almost impossible, and in judging a painter simply as a decorator, the
public is more at its ease before such frankly ornamental works as
the famous frescoes of the convent of Saint Paul. It might, in fact,
have been expected that Correggio would be at his best in executing
the commission of the light-hearted Abbess, who had charged him to
amplify the symbolism of her device (the crescent moon) by adorning her
apartments with the legend of Diana. There is something delightfully
characteristic of the period in this choice of the Latmian goddess to
typify the spirit of monastic chastity; and equally characteristic is
Correggio’s acceptance of the commission as an opportunity to paint
classic bas-reliefs and rosy flesh and blood, without much attempt to
express the somewhat strained symbolism of the myth.

[Illustration:

  _The “Little Palace of the Garden”_

  E. C. Peixotto
  PARMA. 1901.
]

The vaulted ceiling of the room is treated as a trellised arbour,
through which rosy loves peep down on the blonde Diana emerging from
grey drifts of evening mist: a charming composition, with much grace of
handling in the figure of the goddess and in the _grisailles_ of the
lunettes below the cornice; yet lacking as a whole just that ethereal
quality which is supposed to be the distinctive mark of Correggio’s
art. Compared with the delicate trellis-work and flitting cupids of
Zucchero’s frescoes at the Villa di Papa Giulio, Correggio’s design
is heavy and dull. The masses of foliage are too uniform and the
_putti_ too fat and stolid for their skyey task. This failure of the
decorative sense is rendered more noticeable by the happy manner in
which Araldi, a generation earlier, had solved a similar problem in the
adjoining room. Here the light arabesques and miniature divinities of
the ceiling, and the biblical and mythological scenes of the frieze,
are presented with all that earnest striving after personal truth of
expression that is the ruling principle of fifteenth-century art. It is
this faculty of personal interpretation, always kept in strict abeyance
to the laws of decorative fitness, which makes the mural painting
of the fifteenth century so satisfying that, compared with the
Mantegna room at Mantua, the Sala del Cambio at Perugia, the Sala degli
Angeli at Urbino, and the frescoed room at the Schifanoia at Ferrara,
all the later wall-decorations in Italy (save perhaps the Moretto room
at Brescia) seem to fall a little short of perfection.

Of a much earlier style of mural painting, Parma itself contains one
notable example. The ancient octagon of the Baptistery, with its
encircling arcade and strange frieze of leaping, ramping and running
animals, is outwardly one of the most interesting buildings in Italy;
while its interior has a character of its own hardly to be matched
even in that land of fiercely competing individualism. Downward from
the apex of the dome the walls are frescoed in successive tiers with
figures of saints in rigid staring attitudes, interspersed with awkward
presentments of biblical story. All these designs are marked by a
peculiar naïveté of composition and great vehemence of gesture and
expression. Those in the dome and between the windows are attributed
to the thirteenth century, while the lower frescoes are of the
fourteenth; but so crude in execution are the latter that they combine
with the upper rows in producing an effect of exceptional decorative
value, to which a note of strangeness is given by the introduction,
here and there, of high-reliefs of saints and angels, so placed that
the frescoes form a background to their projecting figures. The most
successful of these sculptures is the relief of the flight into Egypt:
a solemn procession led by a squat square-faced angel with unwieldy
wings and closed by two inscrutable-looking figures in Oriental dress.

Seen after the Baptistery, the Cathedral is perhaps something of a
disappointment; yet to pass from its weather-beaten front, between the
worn red lions of the ancient porch, into the dusky magnificence of the
interior, is to enjoy one of those contrasts possible only in a land
where the humblest wayside chapel may disclose the stratified art of
centuries. In the great cupola, Correggio lords it with the maelstrom
of his heavenly host; and the walls of the nave are covered with
frescoes by Mazzola and Gambara, to which time has given a golden-brown
tone, as of sumptuous hangings, that atones for the pretentious
insignificance of their design. There is a venerable episcopal throne
attributed to Benedetto Antelami, that strangely dramatic sculptor
to whom the reliefs of the Baptistery are also ascribed, and one of
the chapels contains a magnificent Descent from the Cross with his
signature; but except for these works the details of the interior,
though including several fine sepulchral monuments and a ciborium by
Alberti, are not exceptional enough to make a lasting impression.

On almost every Italian town, whatever succession of masters it may
have known, some one family has left its dominant mark; and Parma is
distinctively the city of the Farnesi. Late-comers though they were,
their lilies are everywhere, over gateways, on palace-fronts and in the
aisles of churches; and they have bequeathed to the town a number of
its most characteristic buildings, from the immense unfinished Palazzo
della Pilotta to the baroque fountain of parti-coloured marbles which
enlivens with its graceful nymphs and river-gods the grassy solitude of
the palace-square. It is to Rannuccio I, the greatest of these ducal
builders, that Parma owes the gigantic project of the Pilotta, as well
as the Farnese theatre and the University. To this group Duke Ottavio,
at a later date, added the charming “Little Palace of the Garden,” of
which the cheerful yellow façade still overlooks the pleached alleys
of a formal pleasance adorned, under the Bourbon rulers who succeeded
him, with groups of statuary by the court sculptor, a Frenchman named
Jean Baptiste Boudard. Ottavio commissioned Agostino Carracci to
decorate the interior of the ducal villa, and even now, after years
of incredible neglect and ill-usage, the walls of several rooms show
remains of the work executed, as the artist’s pious inscription runs,
_sub umbra liliorum_. The villa has been turned into barracks, and
it is difficult to gain admission; but the persistent sight-seer may
succeed in seeing one room, where large-limbed ruddy immortals move,
against a background of bluish summer landscape, through the slow
episodes of some Olympian fable. This apartment shows the skill of the
Carracci as decorators of high cool ceremonious rooms, designed to
house the midsummer idleness of a court still under the yoke of Spanish
etiquette, and living in a climate where the linear vivacities of
Tiepolo might have been conducive to apoplexy.

[Illustration:

  _The Worn Red Lions
  of the Ancient Porch_

  E. C. Peixotto
  PARMA. 1901.
]

The most noteworthy building which arose in Parma under the shadow
of the lilies is, however, the famous theatre built by Aleotti for
Duke Rannuccio, and opened in 1620 to celebrate the marriage of
Odoardo Farnese with Margaret of Tuscany. Externally it is a mere
outgrowth of the palace; but to those who feel a tenderness for the
vivacious figures of the _commedia dell’ arte_ and have followed
their picturesque wanderings through the pages of Gozzi and Goldoni,
the interior is an immediate evocation of the strolling theatrical
life of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--that strange period
when players were passed on from duchy to principality to perform at
wedding-feasts and to celebrate political victories; when kings and
princes stood sponsors to their children, and the Church denied them
Christian burial.

The Farnese theatre is one of those brilliant improvisations in wood
and plaster to which Italian artists were trained by centuries of
hurriedly-organized _trionfi_, state processions, religious festivals,
returns from war, all demanding the collaboration of sculptor,
architect and painter in the rapid creation of triumphal arches,
architectural perspectives, statuary, chariots, flights of angels, and
galleons tossing on simulated seas: evanescent visions of some _pays
bleu_ of Boiardo or of Ariosto, destined to crumble the next day like
the palace of an evil enchanter. To those who admire the peculiarly
Italian gift of spontaneous plastic invention, the art of the
_plasticatore_, to borrow an untranslatable term, such buildings are of
peculiar interest, since, owing to the nature of their construction,
so few have survived; and of these probably none is as well preserved
as Aleotti’s theatre. The ceiling of painted canvas is gone, and the
splendid Farnese dukes bestriding their chargers in lofty niches on
each side of the proscenium are beginning to show their wooden anatomy
through the wounds in their plaster sides; but the fine composition of
the auditorium, and the throng of stucco divinities attitudinizing in
the niches and on the balustrades, and poised above the arch of the
proscenium, still serve to recall the original splendour of the scene.
The dusty gloom of the place suggests some impending transformation,
and when fancy has restored to the roof the great glass chandeliers
now hanging in the neighbouring museum, their light seems to fall once
more on boxes draped with crimson velvet and filled with lords and
ladies in the sumptuous Spanish habit, while on the stage, before a
gay perspective of colonnades and terraces, Isabel and Harlequin and
the Capitan Spavento, _plasticatori_ of another sort, build on the
scaffolding of some familiar intrigue the airy superstructure of their
wit.

In the adjoining palace no such revival is possible. Most museums
in Italy are dead palaces, and none is more inanimate than that of
Parma. Many of the ducal treasures are still left--family portraits
by Suttermans and Sir Antony Mor, Bernini-like busts of the Bourbon
dukes of Parma, with voluminous wigs and fluttering steinkerks; old
furniture, old majolica, and all those frail elaborate trifles that
the irony of fate preserves when brick and marble crumble. All these
accessories of a ruined splendour, catalogued, numbered and penned up
in glass cases, can no more revive the life of which they formed a part
than the contents of an herbarium can renew the scent and murmur of a
summer meadow. The transient holders of all that pomp, from the great
Alexander to the Duchess Marie Louise of Austria, his last unworthy
successor, look down with unrecognizing eyes on this dry alignment of
classified objects; and one feels, in passing from one room to another,
as though some fanciful heroic poem, depicting the splendid vanities
of life, and depending for its effect on a fortunate collocation of
words, had been broken up and sorted out into the different parts of
speech.

This is the view of the sentimentalist; but from that of the student
of art the museum of Parma is perhaps more interesting than the palace
could ever have been. The Correggios are in themselves an unmatched
possession; the general collection of pictures is large and varied, and
the wealth of bronzes and marbles, of coins, medals and architectural
fragments of different schools and periods, would be remarkable in any
country but Italy, where the inexhaustible richness of the small towns
is a surprise to the most experienced traveller.

On the whole, the impression carried away from Parma is incomplete
and confusing. The name calls forth as many scattered images as
contradictory associations. It is doubtful if the wanderer reviewing
from a distance his Italian memories will be able to put any distinct
picture of the place beside the concrete vision of Siena, Mantua or
Vicenza. It will not hang as a whole in the gallery of his mental
vignettes; but in the mosaic of detached impressions some rich and
iridescent fragments will represent his after-thoughts of Parma.




MARCH IN ITALY


I

March is in some respects the most exquisite month of the Italian year.
It is the month of transitions and surprises, of vehement circling
showers with a golden heart of sunlight, of bare fields suffused
overnight with fruit-blossoms, and hedgerows budding as suddenly as the
staff of Tannhäuser. It is the month in which the northern traveller,
grown distrustful of the promised clemency of Italian skies, and with
the winter bitterness still in his bones, lighting on a patch of
primroses under a leafless bank, or on the running flame of tulips
along the trenches of an olive orchard, learns that Italy _is_ Italy,
after all, and hugs himself at thought of the black ultramontane March.

It must be owned, however, that it is not, even in Italy, the safest
month for excursions. There are too many _voltes-face_ toward winter,
too many moody hesitating dawns, when the skies will not declare
themselves for or against rain, but hanging neutral till the hesitating
traveller sets forth, seem then to take a cruel joy in proving that
he should have stayed at home. Yet there are rare years when some
benign influence tames the fitfulness of March, subduing her to a long
sequence of golden days, and then he who has trusted to her promise
receives the most exquisite reward. It takes faith in one’s luck to
catch step with such a train of days, and fare with them northward
across the wakening land; but now and then this fortune befalls the
pilgrim, and then he sees a new Italy, an Italy which discovery seems
to make his own. The ancient Latin landscape, so time-furrowed and
passion-scarred, lies virgin to the eye, fresh-bathed in floods of
limpid air. The scene seems recreated by the imagination, it wears the
pristine sparkle of those

    _Towers of fables immortal fashioned from mortal dreams_

which lie beyond the geographer’s boundaries, like the Oceanus of the
early charts; it becomes, in short, the land in which anything may
happen, save the dull, the obvious and the expected.


II

It was, for instance, on such a March day that we rowed across the
harbour of Syracuse to the mouth of the Anapus.

Our brown rowers, leaping overboard, pushed the flat-bottomed boat
through the line of foam where bay and river meet, and we passed
over to the smooth current which slips seaward between flat banks
fringed with arundo donax and bamboo. The bamboo grows in vast
feathery thickets along these Sicilian waters, and the slightly
angular precision of its stem and foliage allies itself well with
the classic clearness of the landscape--a landscape which, in spite
of an occasional excess of semi-tropical vegetation, yet retains the
Greek quality of producing intense effects with a minimum of material.
There is nothing tropical about the shores of the Anapus; but as the
river turns and narrows, the boat passes under an arch of Egyptian
papyrus, that slender exotic reed, brought to Sicily, it is supposed,
by her Arabian colonizers, and thriving, strangely enough, in no other
European soil. This plumy tunnel so enclosed us as we advanced, that
for long stretches of our indolent progress we saw only the face of
the stream, the summer insects flickering on it, and the continuous
golden line of irises along its edge. Now and then, however, a gap in
the papyrus showed, as through an arch in a wall, a prospect of flat
fields with grazing cattle, or a solitary farm-house, low, brown,
_tassée_, with a date-palm spindling against its well-curb, or the
white flank of Etna suddenly thrust across the sky-line.

So, after a long dreamy lapse of time, we came to the source of
the river, the azure bowl of the nymph Cyane, who pours her pure
current into the broader Anapus. The haunt of the nymph is a circular
reed-fringed pool, supposedly so crystalline that she may still be seen
lurking on its pebbly bed; but the recent spring rains had clouded her
lair, and though, in this legend-haunted land, one always feels the
nearness of

    _The faun pursuing, the nymph pursued_,

the pool of Cyane revealed no sign of her presence.

Disappointed in our quest, we turned back and glided down the Anapus
again to visit her sister-nymph, the more famed but less fortunate
Arethusa, whose unhappy fate it is to mingle her wave with the
brackish sea-tide in the very harbour of Syracuse, where, under the
wall of the quay, the poor creature languishes in a prison of masonry,
her papyrus wreath sending up an anæmic growth from the slimy bottom
filled with green.

We were glad to turn from this desecrated fount to the long
russet-coloured town curving above its harbour. Syracuse, girt with
slopes of flowering orchard-land, lies nobly against the fortified
ridge of Epipolæ. But the city itself--richer in history than any
other on that crowded soil, and characteristically symbolized by its
Greek temple welded into the masonry of a mediæval church--even the
thronging associations of the city could not, on a day so prodigal of
sunlight, hold us long within its walls. These walls, the boundaries
of the Greek Ortygia, have once more become the limits of the shrunken
modern town, and crossing the moat beyond them, we found ourselves
at once in full country. There was a peculiar charm in the sudden
transition from the old brown streets saturated with history to this
clear smiling land where only the spring seemed to have written its
tale--its ever-recurring, ever-fresh record of blossom and blade
miraculously renewed. The country about Syracuse is peculiarly fitted
to be the exponent of this gospel of renewal. The land stretches away
in mild slopes laden with acre on acre of blossoming fruit-trees, and
of old olive orchards under which the lilac anemones have room to
spread in never-ending sheets of colour. The open pastures are plumed
with silvery asphodel, and every farm-house has its glossy orange-grove
fenced from the road by a rampart of prickly pear.

The highway itself, as we drove out toward Epipolæ, was thronged with
country-folk who might have been the descendants of Theocritan nymphs
and mortal shepherds, brown folk with sidelong agate eyes, trudging
dustily after their goats and asses, or jogging townward in their
little blue or red carts painted with legends of the saints and stories
from Ariosto. After a mile or two the road curved slowly upward and we
began to command a widening prospect. At our feet lay Syracuse, girt by
the Plemmyrian marsh, and by the fields and orchards which were once
the crowded Greek suburbs of Neapolis, Tyche and Achradina; and beyond
the ridge of Epipolæ and the nearer hills, Etna rose white and dominant
against the pale Calabrian coast-line.

The fortress of Euryalus, on the crest of Epipolæ, might be called the
Greek Carcassonne, since it is the best-preserved example of ancient
military architecture in Europe. Archways, galleries, massive flights
of stairs and long subterranean passages may still be traced by the
archæologically minded in the mass of fallen stones marking the site
of the ruin; and even the idler unversed in military construction will
feel the sudden nearness of the past when he comes upon the rock-hewn
sockets to which the cavalry attached their horses.

Euryalus, however, more fortunate than Carcassonne, has escaped the
renovating hand of a Viollet-le-Duc, and its broken ramparts lie in
mellow ruin along the backbone of the ridge, feathered with those
delicate growths which, in the Mediterranean countries, veil the
fallen works of man without concealing them. That day, indeed, the
prodigal blossoming of the Sicilian March had covered the ground with
a suffusion of colour which made even the mighty ruins of the fortress
seem a mere background for the triumphant pageant of the spring. From
the tall silhouette of the asphodel, classic in outline as in name, to
the tendrils of scarlet and yellow vetch capriciously fretting the
ancient stones with threads of richest colour, every inch of ground and
every cleft of masonry was overrun with some delicate wild tracery of
leaf and blossom.

But to those who first see Syracuse in the month of March--the heart of
the Sicilian spring--it must appear pre-eminently as one vast unbounded
garden. The appeal of architecture and history pales before this vast
glory of the loosened soil. The walls and towers will remain--but
this transient beauty must be caught upon the wing. And so from the
flowered slopes of Euryalus we passed to the richer profusion of the
gardens that adjoin the town. Fringing the road by which we descended,
a hundred spring flowers--anemones, lupins, sweet alyssum, herb-Robert,
snapdragon and the fragrant wild mignonette--linked the uncultivated
country-side to the rich horticulture of the suburbs; and in the
suburbs the vegetation reached so tropical an excess that the spring
pilgrim’s memory of Syracuse must be a blur of golden-brown ruins
immersed in a sea of flowers.

There are gardens everywhere, gardens of all kinds and classes, from
the peasant’s hut hedged with pink geraniums to the villa with its
terraced sub-tropical growths; but most wonderful, most unexpected of
all, are the famous gardens of the quarries. Time has perhaps never
done a more poetic thing than in turning these bare unshaded pits of
death, where the Greek captives of Salamis died under the lash of the
Sicilian slave-driver and the arrows of the Sicilian sun, into deep
cool wells of shade and verdure. Here, where the chivalry of Athens
perished of heat and thirst, a damp mantle of foliage pours over the
red cliff-sides, fills the depths with the green freshness of twilight,
and effaces, like a pitiful hand on a burning brow, the record of
that fiery martyrdom. And the quarries are as good to grow flowers in
as to torture men. The equable warmth of these sheltered ravines is
as propitious to vegetation as it was destructive to human life; and
wherever soil has accumulated, on the ledges and in the hollows, the
“blood of the martyrs” sends up an exuberant growth.

On the edge of one of these hell-pits a monastery has been built; above
another stands a villa; and monastic and secular hands have transformed
the sides of the quarries into gardens of fantastic beauty. Paths and
rocky stairways fringed with fern wind down steeply from the upper
world, now tunnelled through dense growths of cypress and olive, now
skirting cliff-walks dripping with cataracts of ivy, or tufted with
the glaucous spikes and scarlet rockets of gigantic cactuses. In the
depths, where time has amassed a soil incredibly rich, the vegetation
becomes prodigious, febrile, like that of the delirious garden in “La
Faute de l’Abbé Mouret.” Here the paths wind under groves of orange
and lemon trees, over a dense carpeting of violets, stocks, narcissus
and honey-scented hyacinths. Trellises of red roses lift their network
against the light, and damp clefts of the rock are black with dripping
maidenhair. Here are tall hedges of blue rosemary and red-gold
abutilon, there shrubby masses of anthemisia, heliotrope and lavender.
Overhead, black cypress-shafts spring from the bright sea of foliage,
and at the pit’s brink, where the Syracusan citizens, under their white
umbrellas, used to lean over and taunt the captives dying in the sun, a
great hedge of prickly pear writhes mockingly against the sky.


III

At noon of such another day we set out from Rome for Caprarola.

The still air had a pearly quality and a mauve haze hung upon the
hills. Our way lay north-westward, toward the Ciminian mountains. Once
free of the gates, our motor started on its steady rush along the white
highway, first past the walls of vineyard and garden, and then across
the grey waste spaces of the Campagna. The Roman champaign is the type
of variety in monotony. Seen from the heights of the city, it reaches
in silvery sameness toward all points of the compass; but to a near
view it reveals a dozen different physiognomies. Toward Frascati and
the Alban hills it wears the ordered garb of fertility: wheat-fields,
vineyards and olive-groves. South-eastward, in the direction of the
Sabine range, its white volcanic reaches are tufted with a dark _maqui_
of sullen and reluctant growth, while in the west the Agro Romano rolls
toward Monterosi and Soracte in sere reaches of pasture-land mottled
with hillock and ravine.

Gradually, as we left the outskirts of Rome, the grandeur of this
stern landscape declared itself. To the right and left the land
stretched out in endless grassy reaches, guarded here and there by
a lonely tomb or by the tall gateway of some abandoned vineyard.
Presently the road began to rise and dip, giving us, on the ascent,
sweeping views over a wider range of downs which rolled away in
the north-west to the Ciminian forest, and in the east to the hazy
rampart of the Sabine hills. Ahead of us the same undulations swept on
interminably, the road undulating with them, now engulfed in the trough
of the land, now tossed into view on some farther slope, like a streak
of light on a flying sea. There was something strangely inspiriting
in the call of this fugitive road. From ever-lengthening distances it
seemed to signal us on, luring us up slope after slope, and racing
ahead of us down the long declivities where the motor panted after it
like a pack on the trail.

For some time the thrill of the chase distracted us from a nearer view
of the foreground; but gradually there stole on us a sense of breadth
and quietude, of sun-bathed rugged fields with black cattle grazing
in their hollows, and here and there a fortified farm-house lifting
its bulk against the sky. These fortress-farms of the Campagna,
standing sullen and apart among the pacific ruins of pagan Rome--tombs,
aqueducts and villas--give a glimpse of that black age which rose on
the wreck of the Imperial civilization. All the violence and savagery
of the mediæval city, with its great nobles forever in revolt, its
popes plotting and trembling within the Lateran walls, or dragging
their captive cardinals from point to point as the Emperor or the
French King moved his forces--all the mysterious crimes of passion and
cupidity, the intrigues, ambushes, massacres with which the pages of
the old chronicles reek, seem symbolized in one of those lowering brown
piles with its battlemented sky-line, crouched on a knoll of the waste
land which its masters helped to devastate.

At length a blue pool, the little lake of Monterosi, broke the expanse
of the downs; then we flashed through a poor roadside village of the
same name, and so upward into a hill-region where hedgerows and copses
began to replace the brown tufting of the Campagna. On and on we fled,
ever upward to the town of Ronciglione, perched, like many hill-cities
of this region, on the sheer edge of a ravine, and stretching its line
of baroque churches and stately crumbling palaces along one steep
street to the edge of a lofty down.

Across this plateau, golden with budding broom, we flew on to the next
height, and here paused to embrace the spectacle--beneath us, on the
left, the blue volcanic lake of Vico in its oak-fringed crater; on the
right, far below, the plain of Etruria, scattered with ancient cities
and ringed in a mountain-range still touched with snow; and rising from
the middle of the plain, Soracte, proud, wrinkled, solitary, with the
ruined monastery of Sant’ Oreste just seen on its crest.

[Illustration:

  _An Italian Sky in March_
]

From this mount of vision we dropped abruptly downward by a road cut
in the red tufa-banks. Presently there began to run along the crest
of the tufa on our left a lofty wall gripping the flanks of the rock,
and overhung by dark splashes of ivy and clumps of leafless trees--one
of those rugged Italian walls which are the custodians of such hidden
treasures of scent and verdure. This wall continued to run parallel
with us till our steep descent ended in a stone-paved square, with the
roofs of a town sliding abruptly away below it on one side, and above,
on the other, the great ramps and terraces of a pentagonal palace
clenched to the highest ledge of the cliff. Such is the first sight of
Caprarola.

Never, surely, did feudal construction so insolently dominate its
possessions. The palace of the great Farnese Cardinal seems to lord
it not only over the golden-brown town which forms its footstool, but
over the far-reaching Etrurian plain, the forests and mountains of the
horizon: over Nepi, Sutri, Cività Castellana, and the lonely pride of
Soracte. And the grandeur of the site is matched by the arrogance of
the building: no villa, but a fortified and moated palace, or rather a
fortress planned in accordance with the most advanced military science
of the day, but built on the lines of a palace. Yet on such a March day
as this, with the foreground of brown oak-woods all slashed and fringed
with rosy almond-bloom; with the haze of spring just melting from the
horizon, and revealing depth after depth of mountain-blue; with March
clouds fleeing overhead, and flinging trails of shadow and showers of
silver light across the undulations of the plain--on such a day, the
insolent Farnese keep, for all its background of gardens, frescoes, and
architectural splendour, seems no longer the lord of the landscape,
but a mere point of vantage from which to view the outspread glory at
our feet.


IV

The drive from Viterbo to Montefiascone lies across the high plateau
between the Monte Cimino and the lake of Bolsena.

For the best part of the way, the landscape is pastoral and
agricultural, with patches of oak-wood to which in March the leaves
still cling; and on this fitful March morning, with rain in the
shifting clouds, the ploughmen move behind their white oxen under
umbrellas as vividly green as the young wheat. Here are none of the
great bursts of splendour which mark the way from Rome to Caprarola;
and it seems fitting that this more prosaic road should be travelled
at a sober pace, in a Viterban posting-chaise, behind two plodding
horses. The horses are not so plodding, however, but that they swing us
briskly enough down the short descents of the rolling country, which
now becomes wilder and more diversified, with stretches of woodland
interspersed with a heathy growth of low fragrant shrubs. Here the
slopes are thick with primroses, and the blue vinca and violet peep
through the ivy trails of the hedgerows; but the trees are still
leafless, for it is a high wind-swept region, where March practises
few of her milder arts. A lonely country too: no villages, and only
a few solitary farm-houses, are to be seen as we jog up and down the
monotonous undulations of the road to the foot of Montefiascone.

The town overhangs us splendidly, on a spur above the lake of Bolsena;
and a long ascent between fortified walls leads to the summit on which
its buildings are huddled. Through the curtain of rain which the skies
have now let down, the crooked streets with their archways and old
blackened stone houses present no striking effects, though doubtless
a bright day would draw from them some of that latent picturesqueness
which is never far to seek when Italian masonry and Italian sunlight
meet. Meanwhile, however, the rain persists, and the environment of
Montefiascone remains so obstinately shrouded that, for all we know,
the town may be situated “Nowhere,” like the famous scene in Festus.

Through this rain-muffled air, led blindfold as it were, we presently
descend again by the same windings to the city gates, and thence,
following the road to Bagnorea, come on the desolate church of San
Flaviano, lying by itself in a hollow beneath the walls of the town.
In our hasty dash from the carriage to the door, there is just time
to receive the impression of an immensely old brick façade, distorted
and scarred with that kind of age which only the Latin sense of
antiquity has kept a word to describe--then we are in a low-arched
cavernous interior, with spectral frescoes emerging here and there
from the universal background of whitewash, and above the choir a
spreading gallery or upper church, which makes of the lower building
a species of crypt above ground. And here--O irony of fate!--in this
old, deserted and damp-dripping church, under a worn slab before
the abandoned altar (for it is only in the upper church that mass
continues to be said)--here, a castaway as it were from both worlds,
lies that genial offshoot of a famous race, the wine-loving Bishop
Fugger, whose lust of the palate brought him to this lonely end. It
would have been impossible to pass through Montefiascone without
dropping a commemorative tear on the classic Est-Est-Est upon which,
till so lately, a good cask of Montefiascone has been yearly broached
in memory of the prelate’s end; yet one feels a regret, almost, in
carrying away such a chill recollection of the poor Bishop’s fate,
in leaving him to the solitude of that icy limbo which seems so
disproportionate a punishment for his amiable failing.

Leaving San Flaviano, we press on toward Orvieto through an unbroken
blur of rain. The weary miles leave no trace in memory, and we are
still in an indeterminate region of wood and pasture and mist-muffled
hills when gradually the downpour ceases, and streaks of sunset begin
to part the clouds. Almost at the same moment a dip of the road brings
us out above a long descent, with a wavy plain at its base, and reared
up on a cliff above the plain a fierce brown city, walled, towered
and pinnacled, which seems to have dropped from the sky like some
huge beast of prey and locked its talons in the rock. All about the
plain, in the watery evening light, rises a line of hills, with Monte
Amiata thrusting its peak above the circle; the nearer slopes are
clothed in olive and cypress, with castles and monasteries jutting from
their ledges, and just below us the sight of an arched bridge across
a ravine, with a clump of trees at its approach, touches a spring
of memory and transports us from the actual scene to its pictured
presentment--Turner’s “Road to Orvieto.”

It was, in fact, from this point that the picture was painted; and
looking forth on the landscape, with its stormy blending of sepia-hues
washed in pallid sunlight, one sees in it the vindication of Turner’s
art--that true impressionism which consists not in the unimaginative
noting of actual “bits,” but in the reconstruction of a scene as it
has flowed into the mould of memory, the merging of fragmentary facts
into a homogeneous impression. This is what Turner has done to the view
of Orvieto from the Bolsena road, so summing up and interpreting the
spirit of the scene that the traveller pausing by the arched bridge
above the valley loses sense of the boundaries between art and life,
and lives for a moment in that mystical region where the two are one.


V

Our friends and counsellors had for many years warned us against
visiting Vallombrosa in March--the month which oftenest finds us in
Tuscany.

“Wait till June,” they advised--and knowing the complexity of
influences which go to make up an Italian “sensation,” and how, for
lack of one ingredient, the whole mixture may lose its savour, we
had obediently waited for June. But June in Florence never seemed to
come--“the time and the place” were no more to meet in our horoscope
than in the poet’s; and so, one year when March was playing at April,
we decided to take advantage of her mood and risk the adventure.

We set out early, in that burnished morning air which seems, as with a
fine burin, to retrace overnight every line of the Tuscan landscape.
The railway runs southward along the Arno valley to Sant’ Ellero; and
we might have been travelling through some delicately-etched background
of Mantegna’s or Robetta’s, in which the clear pale colours of early
spring were but an effect of subtle blendings of line. This Tuscan hill
scenery, which for purity of modelling has no match short of Greece, is
seen to the best advantage in March, when the conformation of the land
is still unveiled by foliage, and every line tells like the threads of
silver in a _niello_.

From Sant’ Ellero, where the train is exchanged for a little funicular
car of primitive construction, we were pushed jerkily uphill by a
gasping engine which had to be constantly refreshed by long draughts of
water from wayside tanks. On such a day, however, it was impossible to
grudge the slowness of the ascent. As we mounted higher, the country
developed beneath us with that far-reaching precision of detail which
gives to extended views in mid-Italy a curiously pre-Raphaelite
look--as though they had been wrought out by a hand enamoured of
definition and unskilled in the creation of general effects. The new
wheat springing under the olives was the only high note of colour: all
else was sepia-brown of new-turned earth, grey-brown of weather-mottled
farm-houses and village belfries, golden-black of rusty cypresses
climbing the hill-sides in straight interminable lines, and faint blush
of peach-blossoms floating against grey olives.

Then we gained a new height, and the details of the foreground were
lost in a vast unfolding of distances--hill on hill, blurred with
olive-groves, or bare and keen-cut, with a sprinkling of farm-houses
on their slopes, and here and there a watch-tower on a jutting spur;
and beyond these again, a tossing sunlit sea of peaks, its farthest
waves still crested with snow. Half way up, the abrupt slopes of
oak-forest which we had skirted gave way to a plateau clothed with
vines and budding fruit orchards; then another sharp climb through
oak-scrub, across the dry beds of mountain-streams and up slopes of
broom and heather, brought us to the topmost ledge, where the railway
ends. On this ledge stands the dreary village of Saltina--a cluster
of raw-looking houses set like boxes on a shelf (with a Hôtel Milton
among them), and a background of Swiss chalets dotted forlornly on a
treeless slope. Saltina must be arid even in midsummer, and in March
it was a place to fly from. Our flight, however, was regulated by the
leisurely gait of a small white donkey who was the only _bête de somme_
to be had at that early season, and behind whom we slowly turned the
shoulder of the cliff, and entered the pillared twilight of a great
fir-wood. The road ran through this wood for a mile or two, carrying
us straight to the heart of the Etrurian shades. As we advanced,
byways branched off to the right and left, climbing the hill-sides
through deep-perspectives of verdure; and presently we came to a wide
turfy hollow, where the great trees recede, leaving a space for the
monastery and its adjacent buildings.

The principal _corps-de-bâtiment_ faces on a walled entrance-court with
box-bordered paths leading to the fine arcaded portico of the church.
These buildings are backed by a hanging wood with a hermitage on its
crest--the Paradiso--but before them lies an open expanse studded with
ancient trees, with a stone-bordered fish-pond, and grass walks leading
down to mossy glens with the sound of streams in their depths. Facing
the monastery stands the low building where pilgrims were formerly
lodged, and which now, without farther modification than the change of
name, has become the Albergo della Foresta; while the monastery itself
has been turned into a government school of forestry.

Since change was inevitable, it is a fortunate accident which has
housed a sylvan college in these venerable shades, and sent the
green-accoutred foresters to carry on the husbandry of the monks.
Never, surely, were the inevitable modifications of time more gently
tempered to the survivor of earlier conditions. The monastery of
Vallombrosa has neither the examinate air of a _monument historique_,
nor that look of desecration and decadency that too often comes with
altered uses. It has preserved its high atmosphere of meditative
peace, and the bands of students flitting through the forest with
surveying-implements and agricultural tools seem the lawful successors
of the monks.

We had been told in Florence that winter still held the mountains, that
we should find snow in the shady hollows and a glacial wind from the
peaks. But spring airs followed us to the heights. Through the aromatic
fir-boughs the sunlight slanted as warmly as down the ilex-walks of
the Boboli gardens, and over the open slopes about the monastery there
ran a rosy-purple flush of crocuses--not here and there in scattered
drifts, or starring the grass as in the foregrounds of Mantegna and
Botticelli, but so close-set that they formed a continuous sheet of
colour, a tide of lilac which submerged the turf and, flowing between
the ancient tree-boles, invaded even the dark edges of the forest. It
was probably the one moment of the year at which the forest flushes
into colour; its hour of transfiguration--we might have tried every
other season, and missed the miracle of March in Vallombrosa. At first
the eye was dazzled by this vast field of the cloth-of-purple, and
could take in none of the more delicate indications of spring; but
presently we found our way to the lower glens, where the crocuses
ceased, and pale-yellow primroses poured over ivy-banks to the brink
of agate-coloured brooks. In the forest, too, ferns were uncurling and
violets thrusting themselves through the close matting of fir-needles;
while the terraces of the monks’ garden, which climbs the hill-side
near the monastery, were fragrant with budding box and beds of tulip
and narcissus.

It was an air to idle in, breathing deep the stored warmth of
immemorial springs; but the little donkey waited between the shafts of
his _calessina_, and on the ledge of Saltina we knew that our engine
was taking a last draught before the descent. Reluctantly we jogged
back through the forest, and, regaining our seats in the train, plunged
downward into a sea of translucent mountains, and valleys bathed in
haze, a great reach of irradiated heights flowing by imperceptible
gradations into amber depths of air, while below us the shadows fell,
and the Arno gleamed white in the indistinctness of evening.




PICTURESQUE MILAN


I

It is hard to say whether the stock phrase of the stock tourist--“there
is so little to see in Milan”--redounds most to the derision of the
speaker or to the glory of Italy. That such a judgment should be
possible, even to the least instructed traveller, implies a surfeit
of impressions procurable in no other land; since, to the hastiest
observation, Milan could hardly seem lacking in interest when
compared to any but Italian cities. From comparison with the latter,
even, it suffers only on a superficial estimate, for it is rich in
all that makes the indigenous beauty of Italy, as opposed to the
pseudo-Gothicisms, the trans-Alpine points and pinnacles, which Ruskin
taught a submissive generation of art critics to regard as the typical
expression of the Italian spirit. The guide-books, long accustomed
to draw their Liebig’s extract of art from the pages of this school
of critics, have kept the tradition alive by dwelling only on the
monuments which conform to perpendicular ideals, and by apologetic
allusions to the “monotony” and “regularity” of Milan--as though
endeavouring in advance to placate the traveller for its not looking
like Florence or Siena!

[Illustration:

  _Court of the Palazzo Marino,
  now the Municipio_
]

Of late, indeed, a new school of writers, among whom Mr. J. W.
Anderson, and the German authors, Messrs. Ebe and Gurlitt, deserve
the first mention, have broken through this conspiracy of silence,
and called attention to the intrinsically Italian art of the
post-Renaissance period; the period which, from Michael Angelo to
Juvara, has been marked in sculpture and architecture (though more
rarely in painting) by a series of memorable names. Signor Franchetti’s
admirable monograph on Bernini, and the recent volume on Tiepolo in the
Knackfuss series of Künstler-Monographien have done their part in this
redistribution of values; and it is now possible for the traveller to
survey the course of Italian art with the impartiality needful for its
due enjoyment, and to admire, for instance, the tower of the Mangia
without scorning the palace of the Consulta.


II

But, it may be asked, though Milan will seem more interesting to the
emancipated judgment, will it appear more picturesque? Picturesqueness
is, after all, what the Italian pilgrim chiefly seeks; and the current
notion of the picturesque is a purely Germanic one, connoting Gothic
steeples, pepper-pot turrets, and the huddled steepness of the northern
burgh.

Italy offers little, and Milan least of all, to satisfy these
requirements. The Latin ideal demanded space, order, and nobility of
composition. But does it follow that picturesqueness is incompatible
with these? Take up one of Piranesi’s etchings--those strange
compositions in which he sought to seize the spirit of a city or a
quarter by a mingling of its most characteristic features. Even the
northern conception of the picturesque must be satisfied by the sombre
wildness of these studies--here a ruined aqueduct, casting its shade
across a lonely stretch of ground tufted with acanthus, there a palace
colonnade through which the moonlight sweeps on a winter wind, or the
recesses of some mighty Roman bath where cloaked figures are huddled
in dark confabulation.

Canaletto’s black-and-white studies give, in a lesser degree, the
same impression of the grotesque and the fantastic--the under-side
of that _barocchismo_ so long regarded as the smirk on the face of a
conventional age.

But there is another, a more typically Italian picturesqueness, gay
rather than sinister in its suggestions, made up of lights rather
than of shadows, of colour rather than of outline, and this is the
picturesqueness of Milan. The city abounds in vivid effects, in
suggestive juxtapositions of different centuries and styles--in
all those incidental contrasts and surprises which linger in the
mind after the catalogued “sights” have faded. Leaving behind the
wide modern streets--which have the merit of having been modernized
under Eugène Beauharnais rather than under King Humbert--one enters
at once upon some narrow byway overhung by the grated windows of a
seventeenth-century palace, or by the delicate terra-cotta apse of a
_cinque-cento_ church. Everywhere the forms of expression are purely
Italian, with the smallest possible admixture of that Gothic element
which marks the old free cities of Central Italy. The rocca Sforzesca
(the old Sforza castle) and the houses about the Piazza de’ Mercanti
are the chief secular buildings recalling the pointed architecture of
the north; and the older churches are so old that they antedate Gothic
influences, and lead one back to the round-arched basilican type. But
in the line of national descent what exquisite varieties the Milanese
streets present! Here, for instance, is the Corinthian colonnade of San
Lorenzo, the only considerable fragment of ancient Mediolanum, its last
shaft abutting on a Gothic archway against which clings a flower-decked
shrine. Close by, one comes on the ancient octagonal church of San
Lorenzo, while a few minutes’ drive leads to where the Borromeo palace
looks across a quiet grassy square at the rococo front of the old
family church, flanked by a fine bronze statue of the great saint and
cardinal.

The Palazzo Borromeo is itself a notable factor in the picturesqueness
of Milan. The entrance leads to a court-yard enclosed in an ogive
arcade surmounted by pointed windows in terra-cotta mouldings. The
walls of this court are still frescoed with the Borromean crown, and
the _Humilitas_ of the haughty race; and a doorway leads into the
muniment-room, where the archives of the house are still stored, and
where, on the damp stone walls, Michelino da Milano has depicted the
scenes of a fifteenth-century villeggiatura. Here the noble ladies of
the house, in high fluted turbans and fantastic fur-trimmed gowns, may
be seen treading the measures of a mediæval dance with young gallants
in parti-coloured hose, or playing at various games--the _jeu de
tarots_, and a kind of cricket played with a long wooden bat; while in
the background rise the mountains about Lake Maggiore and the peaked
outline of the Isola Bella, then a bare rock unadorned with gardens and
architecture. These frescoes, the only existing works of a little-known
Lombard artist, are suggestive in style of Pisanello’s dry and vigorous
manner, and as records of the private life of the Italian nobility in
the fifteenth century they are second only to the remarkable pictures
of the Schifanoia at Ferrara.

Not far from the Borromean palace, another doorway leads to a different
scene: the great cloister of the Ospedale Maggiore, one of the most
glorious monuments that man ever erected to his fellows. The old
hospitals of Italy were famous not only for their architectural
beauty and great extent, but for their cleanliness and order and the
enlightened care which their inmates received. Northern travellers have
recorded their wondering admiration of these lazarets, which seemed as
stately as palaces in comparison with the miserable pest-houses north
of the Alps. What must have been the astonishment of such a traveller,
whether German or English, on setting foot in the principal court of
the Milanese hospital, enclosed in its vast cloister enriched with
traceries and medallions of terra-cotta, and surmounted by the arches
of an open loggia whence the patients could look down on a peaceful
expanse of grass and flowers! Even now, one wonders whether this
poetizing of philanthropy, this clothing of charity in the garb of
beauty, may not have had its healing uses: whether the ugliness of the
modern hospital may not make it, in another sense, as unhygienic as the
more picturesque buildings it has superseded? It is at least pleasant
to think of the poor sick people sunning themselves in the beautiful
loggia of the Ospedale Maggiore, or sitting under the magnolia-trees
in the garden, while their blue-gowned and black-veiled nurses move
quietly through the cloisters at the summons of the chapel-bell.

[Illustration:

  _The Tower of S. Stefano_

  E. C. Peixotto
  MILANO. 1901.
]

But one need not enter a court-yard or cross a threshold to appreciate
the variety and colour of Milan. The streets themselves are full of
charming detail--_quattro-cento_ marble portals set with medallions of
bushy-headed Sforzas in round caps and plaited tunics; windows framed
in terra-cotta wreaths of fruit and flowers; iron balconies etching
their elaborate arabesques against the stucco house-fronts; mighty
doorways flanked by Atlantides, like that of Pompeo Leoni’s house (the
_Casa degli Omenoni_) and of the Jesuit seminary; or yellow-brown
rococo churches with pyramids, broken pediments, flying angels, and
vases filled with wrought-iron palm-branches. It is in summer that
these streets are at their best. Then the old gardens overhanging
the Naviglio--the canal which intersects Milan with a layer of
Venice--repeat in its waters their marble loggias hung with the vine,
and their untrained profusion of roses and camellias. Then, in the more
aristocratic streets, the palace doorways yield vistas of double and
triple court-yards, with creeper-clad arcades enclosing spaces of
shady turf, and terminating perhaps in a fountain set in some splendid
architectural composition against the inner wall of the building. In
summer, too, the dark archways in the humbler quarters of the town are
brightened by fruit-stalls embowered in foliage, and heaped with such
melons, figs and peaches as would have driven to fresh extravagance
the exuberant brush of a Flemish fruit-painter. Then again, at the
turn of a street, one comes across some little church just celebrating
the feast of its patron saint with a brave display of garlands and red
hangings; while close by a cavernous _bottegha_ has been festooned with
more garlands and with bright nosegays, amid which hang the painted
candles and other votive offerings designed to attract the small coin
of the faithful.


III

Yet Milan is not dependent on the seasons for this midsummer magic
of light and colour. For dark days it keeps its store of warmth and
brightness hidden behind palace walls and in the cold dusk of church
and cloister. Summer in all its throbbing heat has been imprisoned
by Tiepolo in the great ceiling of the Palazzo Clerici: that revel of
gods and demi-gods, and mortals of all lands and races, who advance
with linked hands out of the rosy vapours of dawn. Nor are loftier
colour-harmonies wanting. On the walls of San Maurizio Maggiore,
Luini’s virgin martyrs move as in the very afterglow of legend: that
hesitating light in which the fantastic becomes probable, and the
boundaries between reality and vision fade; while tints of another
sort, but as tender, as harmonious, float through the dusk of the
sacristy of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a dim room panelled with
intarsia-work, with its grated windows veiled by vine-leaves.

But nothing in Milan approaches in beauty the colour-scheme of the
Portinari chapel behind the choir of Sant’ Eustorgio. In Italy,
even, there is nothing else exactly comparable to this masterpiece
of collaboration between architect and painter. At Ravenna, the tomb
of Galla Placidia and the apse of San Vitale glow with richer hues,
and the lower church of Assisi is unmatched in its shifting mystery
of chiar’-oscuro; but for pure light, for a clear shadowless scale
of iridescent tints, what can approach the Portinari chapel? Its
most striking feature is the harmony of form and colour which makes
the decorative design of Michelozzo flow into and seem a part of the
exquisite frescoes of Vincenzo Foppa. This harmony is not the result
of any voluntary feint, any such trickery of the brush as the later
decorative painters delighted in. In the Portinari chapel, architecture
and painting are kept distinct in treatment, and the fusion between
them is effected by unity of line and colour, and still more, perhaps,
by an identity of sentiment, which keeps the whole chapel in the same
mood of blitheness,--a mood which makes it difficult to remember that
the chapel is the mausoleum of a martyred saint. But Saint Peter
Martyr’s marble sarcophagus, rich and splendid as it is, somehow fails
to distract the attention from its setting. There are so many mediæval
monuments like it in Italy--and there is but one Portinari chapel.
From the cupola, with its scales of pale red and blue, overlapping
each other like the breast-plumage of a pigeon, and terminating in a
terra-cotta frieze of dancing angels, who swing between them great
bells of fruit and flowers, the eye is led by insensible gradations
of tint to Foppa’s frescoes in the spandrils--iridescent saints and
angels in a setting of pale classical architecture--and thence to
another frieze of terra-cotta seraphs with rosy-red wings against a
background of turquoise-green; this lower frieze resting in turn on
pilasters of pale-green adorned with white stucco _rilievi_ of little
bell-ringing angels. It is only as a part of this colour-scheme that
the central sarcophagus really affects one--the ivory tint of its old
marble forming a central point for the play of light, and allying
itself with the sumptuous hues of Portinari’s dress, in the fresco
which represents the donator of the chapel kneeling before his patron
saint.


IV

The picturesqueness of Milan has overflowed on its environs, and there
are several directions in which one may prolong the enjoyment of its
characteristic art. The great Certosa of Pavia can, alas, no longer be
included in a category of the picturesque. Secularized, catalogued,
railed off from the sight-seer, who is hurried through its endless
corridors on the heels of a government custodian, it still ministers to
the sense of beauty, but no longer excites those subtler sensations
which dwell in the atmosphere of a work of art rather than in itself.
Such sensations must be sought in the other deserted Certosa at
Chiaravalle. The abbey church, with its noble colonnaded cupola, is
still one of the most conspicuous objects in the flat landscape about
Milan; but within all is falling to ruin, and one feels the melancholy
charm of a beautiful building which has been allowed to decay as
naturally as a tree. The disintegrating touch of nature is less cruel
than the restoring touch of man, and the half-ruined frescoes and
intarsia-work of Chiaravalle retain more of their original significance
than the carefully-guarded treasures of Pavia.

Less melancholy than Chiaravalle, and as yet unspoiled by the touch
of official preservation, is the pilgrimage church of the Madonna of
Saronno. A long avenue of plane-trees leads from the village to the
sumptuous marble façade of the church, an early Renaissance building
with ornamental additions of the seventeenth century. Within, it is
famous for the frescoes of Luini in the choir, and of Gaudenzio Ferrari
in the cupola. The Luini frescoes are full of a serene impersonal
beauty. Painted in his latest phase, when he had fallen under the
influence of Raphael and the “grand manner,” they lack the intimate
charm of his early works; yet the Lombard note, the Leonardesque
quality, lingers here and there in the side-long glance of the women,
and in the yellow-haired beauty of the adolescent heads; while it finds
completer expression in the exquisite single figures of Saint Catherine
and Saint Apollonia.

[Illustration:

  _The Church at Saronno_

  E. C. Peixotto
  1901.
]

If these stately compositions are less typical of Luini than, for
instance, the frescoes of San Maurizio Maggiore, or of the Casa Pelucca
(now in the Brera), Gaudenzio’s cupola seems, on the contrary, to sum
up in one glorious burst of expression all his fancy had ever evoked
and his hand longed to embody. It seems to have been given to certain
artists to attain, once at least, to this full moment of expression: to
Titian, for instance, in the Bacchus and Ariadne, to Michael Angelo in
the monuments of the Medici, to Giorgione in the Sylvan Concert of the
Louvre. In other works they may reveal greater powers, more magnificent
conceptions; but once only, perhaps, is it given to each to achieve
the perfect equipoise of mind and hand; and in that moment even the
lesser artists verge on greatness. Gaudenzio found his opportunity
in the cupola of Saronno, and for once he rises above the charming
anecdotic painter of Varallo to the brotherhood of the masters. It
is as the expression of a mood that his power reveals itself--the
mood of heavenly joyousness, so vividly embodied in his circle of
choiring angels that form seems to pass into sound, and the dome to
be filled with a burst of heavenly jubilation. With unfaltering hand
he has sustained this note of joyousness. Nowhere does his invention
fail or his brush lag behind it. The sunny crowding heads, the flying
draperies, the fluttering scores of the music, are stirred as by a wind
of inspiration--a breeze from the celestial pastures. The walls of the
choir seem to resound with one of the angel-choruses of “Faust,” or
with the last chiming lines of the “Paradiso.” Happy the artist whose
full powers find voice in such a key!


V

The reader who has followed these desultory wanderings through Milan
has but touched the hem of her garment. In the Brera, the Ambrosiana,
the Poldi-Pezzoli gallery, and the magnificent new Archæological
Museum, now fittingly housed in the old castle of the Sforzas, are
treasures second only to those of Rome and Florence. But these are
among the catalogued riches of the city. The guide-books point to
them, they lie in the beaten track of sight-seeing, and it is rather
in the intervals between such systematized study of the past, in
the parentheses of travel, that one obtains those more intimate
glimpses which help to compose the image of each city, to preserve its
personality in the traveller’s mind.




ITALIAN BACKGROUNDS


I

In the Italian devotional pictures of the early Renaissance there are
usually two quite unrelated parts: the foreground and the background.

The foreground is conventional. Its personages--saints, angels and Holy
Family--are the direct descendants of a long line of similar figures.
Every detail of dress and attitude has been settled beforehand by laws
which the artist accepts as passively as the fact that his models
have two eyes apiece, and noses in the middle of their faces. Though
now and then some daring painter introduces a happy modification,
such as the little violin-playing angels on the steps of the Virgin’s
throne, in the pictures of the Venetian school, such changes are too
rare and unimportant to affect the general truth of the statement.
It is only in the background that the artist finds himself free to
express his personality. Here he depicts not what some one else has
long since designed for him, in another land and under different
conceptions of life and faith, but what he actually sees about him, in
the Lombard plains, in the delicately-modelled Tuscan hill-country,
or in the fantastic serrated landscape of the Friulian Alps. One must
look past and beyond the central figures, in their typical attitudes
and symbolical dress, to catch a glimpse of the life amid which the
painting originated. Relegated to the middle distance, and reduced to
insignificant size, is the real picture, the picture which had its
birth in the artist’s brain and reflects his impression of the life
about him.

Here, for instance, behind a Madonna of Bellini’s, white oxen graze
the pasture, and a shepherd lolls on a bank beside his flock; there,
in the train of the Eastern Kings, real soldiers, clerks, pedlars,
beggars, and all the miscellaneous rabble of the Italian streets wind
down a hill-side crowned by a mediæval keep, and cross a bridge with a
water-mill--just such a bridge and water-mill as the artist may have
sketched in his native village. And in the scenes of the life of the
Virgin, what opportunities for _genre_-painting present themselves! In
Ghirlandaio’s fresco of the Birth of the Virgin, in the apse of Santa
Maria Novella, fine ladies in contemporary costume are congratulating
the conventionally-draped Saint Anna, while Crivelli’s Annunciation, in
the National Gallery, shows an ornate Renaissance palace, with peacocks
spreading their tails on the upper loggia, a sumptuous Eastern rug
hanging over a marble balustrade, and the celestial messenger tripping
up a flight of marble stairs to a fashionable front door.

No painter was more prodigal than Carpaccio of these intimate details,
or more audacious in the abrupt juxtaposition of devotional figures
with the bustling secular life of his day. His Legend of Saint Ursula,
in the Accademia of Venice, is a storehouse of fifteenth-century
anecdote, an encyclopædia of dress, architecture and manners; and
behind his agonizing Saint Sebastian, tied to a column and riddled with
arrows, the traffic of the Venetian canals goes on unregardingly, as in
life the most trivial activities revolve unheeding about a great sorrow.

Even painters far less independent of tradition than Carpaccio and
Crivelli succeeded in imparting the personal note, the note of direct
observation, to the background of their religious pictures. If the
figures are placed in a landscape, the latter is not a conventional
grouping of hill, valley and river: it has the unmistakable quality of
the _chose vue_. No one who has studied the backgrounds of old Italian
pictures can imagine that realistic landscape-painting is a modern
art. The technique of the early landscape-painters was not that of the
modern interpreter of nature, but their purpose was the same; they
sought to render with fidelity and precision what they saw about them.
It is this directness of vision which gives to their backgrounds such
vividness and charm. In these distances one may discover the actual
foreground of the artist’s life. Here one may learn what was veritably
happening in fifteenth-century Venice, Florence and Perugia; here see
what horizons the old masters looked out on, and note that the general
aspect of the country is still almost as unchanged as the folds of the
Umbrian mountains and the curves of the Tuscan streams.


II

As with the study of Italian pictures, so it is with Italy herself.
The country is divided, not in _partes tres_, but in two: a foreground
and a background. The foreground is the property of the guide-book
and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that
of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy. This
distinction does not imply any depreciation of the foreground. It must
be known thoroughly before the middle distance can be enjoyed: there
is no short cut to an intimacy with Italy. Nor must the analogy of the
devotional picture be pushed too far. The famous paintings, statues
and buildings of Italy are obviously the embodiment of its historic
and artistic growth; but they have become slightly conventionalized by
being too long used as the terms in which Italy is defined. They have
stiffened into symbols, and the life of which they were once the most
complete expression has evaporated in the desiccating museum-atmosphere
to which their fame has condemned them. To enjoy them, one must let in
on them the open air of an observation detached from tradition. Since
they cannot be evaded they must be deconventionalized; and to effect
this they must be considered in relation to the life of which they are
merely the ornamental façade.

Thus regarded, to what an enchanted region do they form the approach!
Like courteous hosts they efface themselves, pointing the way, but
giving their guests the freedom of their domain. It is not too
fanciful to say that each of the great masterpieces of Italy holds the
key to some secret garden of the imagination. One must know Titian
and Giorgione to enjoy the intimacy of the Friulian Alps, Cima da
Conegliano to taste the full savour of the strange Euganean landscape,
Palladio and Sansovino to appreciate the frivolous villa-architecture
of the Brenta, nay, the domes of Brunelleschi and Michael Angelo to
feel the happy curve of some chapel cupola in a nameless village of the
hills.

“Une civilisation,” says Viollet-le-Duc, “ne peut prétendre posséder
un art que si cet art pénètre partout, s’il fait sentir sa présence
dans les œuvres les plus vulgaires.” It is because Italian art
so interpenetrated Italian life, because the humblest stonemason
followed in some sort the lines of the great architects, and the
modeller of village Madonnas the composition of the great sculptors,
that the monumental foreground and the unregarded distances behind
it so continually interpret and expound each other. Italy, to her
real lovers, is like a great illuminated book, with here and there
a glorious full-page picture, and between these, page after page of
delicately-pencilled margins, wherein every detail of her daily life
may be traced. And the pictures and the margins are by the same hand.


III

As Italy is divided into foreground and background, so each city has
its perspective; its _premier plan_ asterisked for the hasty traveller,
its middle distance for the “happy few” who remain more than three
days, and its boundless horizon for the idler who refuses to measure
art by time. In some cases the background is the continuation, the
amplification, of the central “subject”; in others, its direct
antithesis. Thus in Umbria, and in some parts of Tuscany and the
Marches, art, architecture, history and landscape all supplement and
continue each other, and the least imaginative tourist must feel that
in leaving the galleries of Siena or Florence for the streets and the
surrounding country, he is still within the bounds of conventional
sight-seeing.

In Rome, on the contrary, in Milan, and to some extent in Venice, as
well as in many of the smaller towns throughout Italy, there is a sharp
line of demarcation between the guide-book city and its background.
In some cases, the latter is composed mainly of objects at which the
guide-book tourist has been taught to look askance, or rather which he
has been counselled to pass by without a look. Goethe has long been
held up to the derision of the enlightened student of art because he
went to Assisi to see the Roman temple of Minerva, and omitted to visit
the mediæval church of Saint Francis; but how many modern sight-seers
visit the church and omit the temple? And wherein lies their superior
catholicity of taste? The fact is that, in this particular instance,
foreground and background have changed places, and the modern tourist
who neglects Minerva for Saint Francis is as narrowly bound by
tradition as his eighteenth-century predecessor, with this difference,
that whereas the latter knew nothing of mediæval art and architecture,
the modern tourist knows that the temple is there and deliberately
turns his back on it.


IV

Perhaps Rome is, of all Italian cities, the one in which this
one-sidedness of æsthetic interest is most oddly exemplified. In the
Tuscan and Umbrian cities, as has been said, the art and architecture
which form the sight-seer’s accepted “curriculum,” are still the
distinctive features of the streets through which he walks to his
gallery or his museum. In Florence, for instance, he may go forth from
the Riccardi chapel, and see the castle of Vincigliata towering on its
cypress-clad hill precisely as Gozzoli depicted it in his fresco; in
Siena, the crenellated palaces with their iron torch-holders and barred
windows form the unchanged setting of a mediæval pageant. But in Rome
for centuries it has been the fashion to look only on a city which has
almost disappeared, and to close the eyes to one which is still alive
and actual.

The student of ancient Rome moves among painfully-reconstructed
débris; the mediævalist must traverse the city from end to end to
piece together the meagre fragments of his “epoch.” Both studies are
absorbing, and the very difficulty of the chase no doubt adds to its
exhilaration; but is it not a curious mental attitude which compels
the devotee of mediæval art to walk blindfold from the Palazzo Venezia
to Santa Sabina on the Aventine, or from the Ara Cœli to Santa Maria
Sopra Minerva, because the great monuments lying between these points
of his pilgrimage belong to what some one has taught him to regard as a
“debased period of art”?

Rome is the most undisturbed baroque city of Italy. The great revival
of its spiritual and temporal power coincided with the development
of that phase of art of which Michael Angelo sowed the seed in Rome
itself. The germs of Bernini and Tiepolo must be sought in the Sistine
ceiling and in the Moses of San Pietro in Vincoli, however much the
devotees of Michael Angelo may resent the tracing of such a lineage.
But it is hard at this date to be patient with any form of artistic
absolutism, with any critical criteria not based on that sense of
the comparative which is the nineteenth century’s most important
contribution to the function of criticism. It is hard to be tolerant of
that peculiar form of intolerance which refuses to recognize in art
the general law of growth and transformation, or, while recognizing
it, considers it a subject for futile reproach and lamentation. The
art critic must acknowledge a standard of excellence, and must be
allowed his personal preferences within the range of established
criteria: æsthetically, the world is divided into the Gothically and
the classically minded, just as intellectually it is divided into those
who rise to the general idea and those who pause at the particular
instance. The lover of the particular instance will almost always have
a taste for the Gothic, which is the personal and anecdotic in art
carried to its utmost expression, at the cost of synthetic effect; but
if he be at all accessible to general ideas, he must recognize the
futility of battling against the inevitable tendencies of taste and
invention. Granted that, from his standpoint, the art which evolved
from Michael Angelo is an art of decadence: is that a reason for
raging at it or ignoring it? The autumn is a season of decadence;
but even by those who prefer the spring, it has not hitherto been an
object of invective and reprobation. Only when the art critic begins
to survey the modifications of art as objectively as he would study
the alternations of the seasons, will he begin to understand and
to sympathize with the different modes in which man has sought to
formulate his gropings after beauty. If it be true in the world of
sentiment that _il faut aimer pour comprendre_, the converse is true in
the world of art. To enjoy any form of artistic expression one must not
only understand what it tries to express, but know

    _The hills where its life rose,
    And the sea where it goes._

Thus philosophically viewed, the baroque Rome--the Rome of Bernini,
Borromini and Maderna, of Guercino, the Caracci and Claude
Lorrain--becomes of great interest even to those who are not in
sympathy with the exuberances of seventeenth-century art. In the
first place, the great number of baroque buildings, churches, palaces
and villas, the grandeur of their scale, and the happy incidents of
their grouping, give a better idea than can elsewhere be obtained of
the collective effects of which the style is capable. Thus viewed,
it will be seen to be essentially a style _de parade_, the setting
of the spectacular and external life which had developed from the
more secluded civilization of the Renaissance as some blossom of
immense size and dazzling colour may develop in the atmosphere of the
forcing-house from a smaller and more delicate flower. The process was
inevitable, and the result exemplifies the way in which new conditions
will generate new forms of talent.

It is in moments of social and artistic transformation that original
genius shows itself, and Bernini was the genius of the baroque
movement. To those who study his work in the light of the conditions
which produced it, he will appear as the natural interpreter of that
sumptuous _bravura_ period when the pomp of a revived ecclesiasticism
and the elaborate etiquette of Spain were blent with a growing taste
for country life, for the solemnities and amplitudes of nature.
The mingling of these antagonistic interests has produced an art
distinctive enough to take rank among the recognized “styles”: an art
in which excessive formality and ostentation are tempered by a free
play of line, as though the winds of heaven swept unhindered through
the heavy draperies of a palace. It need not be denied that delicacy
of detail, sobriety of means and the effect of repose were often
sacrificed to these new requirements; but it is more fruitful to
observe how skilfully Bernini and his best pupils managed to preserve
the balance and rhythm of their bold compositions, and how seldom
profusion led to incoherence. How successfully the Italian sense of
form ruled over this semi-Spanish chaos of material, and drew forth
from it the classic line, may be judged from the way in which the
seventeenth-century churches about the Forum harmonize with the ruins
of ancient Rome. Surely none but the most bigoted archæologist would
wish away from that magic scene the façades of San Lorenzo in Miranda
and of Santa Francesca Romana!

In this connection it might be well for the purist to consider what
would be lost if the seventeenth-century Rome which he affects to
ignore were actually blotted out. The Spanish Steps would of course
disappear, with the palace of the Propaganda; so would the glorious
Barberini palace, and Bernini’s neighbouring fountain of the Triton;
the via delle Quattro Fontane, with its dripping river-gods emerging
from their grottoes, and Borromini’s fantastic church of San Carlo at
the head of the street, a kaleidoscope of whirling line and ornament,
offset by the delicately classical circular cortile of the adjoining
monastery. On the Quirinal hill, the palace of the Consulta would go,
and the central portal of the Quirinal (a work of Bernini’s), as well
as the splendid gateway of the Colonna gardens. The Colonna palace
itself, dull and monotonous without, but within the very model of a
magnificent pleasure-house, would likewise be effaced; so would many
of the most characteristic buildings of the Corso--San Marcello, the
Gesù, the Sciarra and Doria palaces, and the great Roman College. Gone,
too, would be the Fountain of Trevi, and Lunghi’s gay little church
of San Vincenzo ed Anastasio, which faces it so charmingly across the
square; gone the pillared court-yard and great painted galleries of
the Borghese palace, and the Fontana dei Termini with its beautiful
group of adjoining churches; the great fountain of the piazza Navona,
Lunghi’s stately façade of the Chiesa Nuova, and Borromini’s Oratory
of San Filippo Neri; the monumental Fountain of the Acqua Paola on the
Janiculan, the familiar “Angels of the Passion” on the bridge of Sant’
Angelo, and, in the heart of the Leonine City itself, the mighty sweep
of Bernini’s marble colonnades and the flying spray of his Vatican
fountains.

This enumeration includes but a small number of the baroque buildings
of Rome, and the villas encircling the city have not been named,
though nearly all, with their unmatched gardens, are due to the art
of this “debased” period. But let the candid sight-seer--even he
who has no tolerance of the seventeenth century, and to whom each
of the above-named buildings may be, individually, an object of
reprobation--let even this sectary of art ask himself how much of
“mighty splendent Rome” would be left, were it possible to obliterate
the buildings erected during the fever of architectural renovation
which raged from the accession of Sixtus V to the last years of the
seventeenth century. Whether or no he would deplore the loss of any one
of these buildings, he would be constrained to own that collectively
they go far toward composing the physiognomy of the Rome he loves.
So far-spreading was the architectural renascence of the seventeenth
century, and so vast were the opportunities afforded to its chief
exponents, that every quarter of the ancient city is saturated with
the _bravura_ spirit of Bernini and Borromini. Some may think that
Rome itself is the best defence of the baroque: that an art which
could so envelop without eclipsing the mighty monuments amid which
it was called to work, which could give expression to a brilliant
present without jarring on a warlike or ascetic past, which could, in
short, fuse Imperial and early Christian Rome with the city of Spanish
ceremonial and post-Tridentine piety, needs no better justification
than the _Circumspice_ of Wren. But even those who remain unconverted,
who cannot effect the transference of artistic and historic sympathy
necessary to a real understanding of seventeenth-century architecture,
should at least realize that the Rome which excites a passion of
devotion such as no other city can inspire, the Rome for which
travellers pine in absence, and to which they return again and again
with the fresh ardour of discovery, is, externally at least, in great
part the creation of the seventeenth century.


V

In Venice the foreground is Byzantine-Gothic, with an admixture
of early Renaissance. It extends from the church of Torcello to
the canvases of Tintoretto. This foreground has been celebrated in
literature with a vehemence and profusion which have projected it still
farther into the public consciousness, and more completely obscured the
fact that there is another Venice, a background Venice, the Venice of
the eighteenth century.

Eighteenth-century Venice was not always thus relegated to the
background. It had its day, when tourists pronounced Saint Mark’s an
example of “the barbarous Gothick,” and were better acquainted with
the ridotto of San Moisè than with the monuments of the Frari. It
is instructive to note that the Venice of that day had no galleries
and no museums. Travellers did not go there to be edified, but to be
amused; and one may fancy with what relief the young nobleman on the
grand tour, sated with the marbles of Rome and the canvases of Parma
and Bologna, turned aside for a moment to a city where enjoyment was
the only art and life the only object of study. But while travellers
were flocking to Venice to see its carnival and gaming-rooms, its
public festivals and private _casini_, a generation of artists were
at work brushing in the gay background of the scene, and quiet hands
were recording, in a series of memorable little pictures, every phase
of that last brilliant ebullition of the _joie de vivre_ before “the
kissing had to stop.”

Longhena and his pupils were the architects of this bright _mise en
scène_, Tiepolo was its great scene-painter, and Canaletto, Guardi
and Longhi were the historians who captured every phrase and gesture
with such delicacy and precision that under their hands the glittering
Venice of the “Toccata of Galuppi” lies outspread like a butterfly with
the bloom on its wings.

Externally, Venice did not undergo the same renovation as Rome. As she
was at the close of the Renaissance, with the impress of Palladio and
Sansovino on her religious and secular architecture, so she remains
to this day. One original architect, Baldassare Longhena, struck the
note of a brilliant _barocchismo_ in the churches of Santa Maria della
Salute and the Scalzi, and in the Pesaro and Rezzonico palaces on the
Grand Canal; and his pupils, developing his manner with infinitely
less talent, gave to Venice the long squat Dogana with its flying
Fortune fronting the Lagoon, the churches of Santa Maria Zobenigo,
San Moisè and the Gesuiti, the Monte di Pietà, and a score of imposing
palaces. The main effect of the city was, however, little modified by
this brief flowering of the baroque. Venice has always stamped every
new fashion with her own personality, and Longhena’s architecture
seems merely the hot-house efflorescence of the style of Sansovino and
Scamozzi. Being, moreover, less under the sway of the Church than any
other Italian state, she was able to resist the architectural livery
with which the great Jesuit subjugation clad the rest of Italy. The
spirit of the eighteenth century therefore expressed itself rather in
her expanding social life, and in the decorative arts which attend
on such drawing-room revivals. Skilful _stuccatori_ adorned the old
saloons and galleries with fresh gilding and mirrors, slender furniture
replaced the monumental cabinets which Venice had borrowed from Spain,
and little _genre_-pictures by Longhi and landscapes by Canaletto and
Battaglia were hung on the large-patterned damask of the boudoir walls.
Religion followed the same lines, adapting itself to the elegancies
of the drawing-room, and six noble families recognized their social
obligations to heaven by erecting the sumptuous church of Santa Maria
degli Scalzi, with its palatial interior, in which one may well imagine
the heavenly hostess saying to her noble donators: “Couvrez-vous, mes
cousins.”

Though begun by Longhena about 1650, the church of the Scalzi is so
identified with the genius of Tiepolo that it may be regarded as an
epitome of eighteenth-century Venetian art. Herr Cornelius Gurlitt,
the most penetrating critic of the Venetian baroque, has indeed justly
pointed out that Longhena was the forerunner and _Geistesgenossen_ of
the great master of eighteenth-century decorative painting, and that
the architect’s bold and sumptuous structural effects might have been
designed as a setting for those unsurpassed audacities of the brush
which, a hundred years later, were to continue and complete them.

On the soaring vault of the Scalzi, above an interior of almost
Palladian elegance and severity, the great painter of atmosphere, the
first of the _pleinairistes_, was required to depict the transportation
of the Holy House from Palestine to Loreto. That Tiepolo, with his
love of ethereal distances, and of cloud-like hues melting into thin
air, should have accepted the task of representing a stone house
borne through the sky by angels, shows a rare sense of mastery; that
he achieved the feat without disaster justifies the audacity of the
attempt.

Tiepolo was above all a lover of open spaces. He liked to suspend
his fluttering groups in great pellucid reaches of sky, and the vast
ceiling of the Scalzi gave him an exceptional opportunity for the
development of this effect. The result is that the angels, whirling
along the Virgin’s house with a vehemence which makes it seem a
mere feather in the rush of their flight, appear to be sweeping
through measureless heights of air above an unroofed building. The
architectural propriety of such a _trompe l’œil_ is not only open to
criticism but perhaps quite indefensible; yet, given the demand for
this particular illusion, who but Tiepolo could have produced it?

The same ethereal effect, but raised to a higher heaven of
translucency, is to be found in the ceiling of the Gesuati (not to be
confounded with the Gesuiti), on the quay of the Zattere. This charming
structure, built in the early eighteenth century by Massari, one of
the pupils of Longhena, but obviously inspired by the great churches
of Palladio, is dedicated to Saint Mary of the Rosary; and Tiepolo, in
three incomparable frescoes, has represented on its ceiling the legend
of Saint Dominick receiving the chaplet from the Virgin in glory.

The guide-books, always on the alert to warn the traveller against an
undue admiration of Tiepolo, are careful to point out that the Mother
of God, bending from her starry throne above the ecstatic saint, looks
like a noble Venetian lady of the painter’s day. No doubt she does.
It is impossible to form an intelligent estimate of Tiepolo’s genius
without remembering that the Catholicism of his time was a religion
of _bon ton_, which aimed to make its noble devotees as much at home
in church as in the drawing-room. He took his models from real life
and composed his celestial scenes without much thought of their inner
significance; yet by sheer force of technique he contrived to impart
to his great religious pictures a glow of supernatural splendour which
makes it not inapt to apply to them the lines of the “Paradiso”:

    _Che la luce divina è penetrante
    Per l’universo, secondo ch’è degno,
    Sichè nulla le puote essere ostante._


VI

It is quite true, however, that Tiepolo was not primarily a devotional
painter. He was first of all a great decorative artist, a master of
emotion in motion, and it probably mattered little to him whether he
was called on to express the passion of Saint Theresa or of Cleopatra.
This does not imply that he executed his task indifferently. Whatever
it was, he threw into it the whole force of his vehement imagination
and incomparable _maestria_; but what he saw in it, whether it was
religious or worldly, was chiefly, no doubt, the opportunity to obtain
new effects of light and line.

If he had a special bent, it was perhaps toward the depicting of
worldly pageants. In the Labia palace on the Canareggio, a building
in which Cominelli, the ablest Venetian architect of the eighteenth
century, nobly continued the “grand manner” of Sansovino and Scamozzi,
Tiepolo found an unequalled opportunity for the exercise of this
side of his talent. Here, in the lofty saloon of the _piano nobile_,
he painted the loves of Antony and Cleopatra transposed to the
key of modern patrician life. He first covered the walls with an
architectural improvisation of porticoes, loggias and colonnades, which
might have been erected to celebrate the “triumph” of some magnificent
Este or Gonzaga. In this splendid setting he placed two great scenes:
Cleopatra melting the pearl, and Antony and Cleopatra landing from
their barge; while every gallery, balcony and flight of steps is filled
with courtiers, pages and soldiers, with dwarfs and blackamoors holding
hounds in leash, and waiting-maids and lacqueys leaning down to see the
pageant.

From this throng of figures the principal characters detach themselves
with a kind of delicate splendour. Royal Egypt,

    _On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed_,

in her brocaded gown of white and gold, with a pearl collar about
her throat, and a little toy spaniel playing at her feet, is an
eighteenth-century Dogaressa; Antony is a young Procurator travestied
as a Roman hero; while the turbaned black boy, the maid-servants,
the courtiers, the pages, are all taken _sur le vif_ from some
brilliant rout in a Pisano or Mocenigo palace. And yet--here comes
the wonder--into these “water-flies” and triflers of his day, the
ladies engrossed in cards and scandal, the abatini preoccupied with
their acrostics, the young nobles intriguing with the _prima amorosa_
of San Moisè or engaged in a sentimental correspondence with a nun of
Santa Chiara--into this throng of shallow pleasure-seekers Tiepolo has
managed to infuse something of the old Roman state. As one may think of
Dante beneath the vault of the Gesuati, one may recall Shakespeare in
the presence of these rouged and powdered Venetians. The scene of the
landing suggests with curious vividness the opening scene of “Antony
and Cleopatra”--

              _Look where they come!
    The triple pillar of the world transformed
    Into a strumpet’s fool--_

and one can almost hear the golden Antony, as he brushes aside the
importunate Roman messengers, whispering to his Queen: “What sport
to-night?”

Still more Shakespearian is the scene of the pearl. Cleopatra,
enthroned in state at the banqueting-table, lifts one hand to drop the
jewel into her goblet, and in her gesture and her smile are summed up
all the cruel grace of the “false soul of Egypt.” It is Tiepolo’s
best praise that such phrases and associations as these are evoked by
his art, and that, judged from the painter’s standpoint, it recalls
the glory of another great tradition. Studied in the light of Venetian
painting, Tiepolo is seen to be the direct descendant of Titian and
Veronese. If the intervening century has taken something from the
warmth of his colour, leaving it too often chalky where that of the
Renaissance was golden, he has recovered the lines, the types and the
radiant majesty of the Venetian _cinque cento_, and Veronese’s Venice
Enthroned, in the Ducal Palace, is the direct forbear of his Virgins
and Cleopatras.


VII

It is perhaps no longer accurate to describe Tiepolo as forming a part
of the Venetian background. Recent criticism has advanced him to the
middle distance, and if there are still comparatively few who know his
work, his name is familiar to the cultivated minority of travellers.

Far behind him, however, still on the vanishing-point of the tourist’s
horizon, are the other figures of the Venetian background: Longhi,
Guardi, Canaletto, and their humbler understudies. Of these, Canaletto
alone emerges into relative prominence. His views of Venice are to
be found in so many European galleries, and his name so facilitates
the association of ideas, that, if few appreciate his work, many are
superficially acquainted with it; whereas Guardi, a painter of greater
though more unequal talent, is still known only to the dilettante.

The work of both is invaluable as a “document” for the study of
eighteenth-century Venice; but while Canaletto in his charming canvases
represented only the superficial and obvious aspect of the city, as it
might appear to any appreciative stranger, Guardi, one of the earliest
impressionists, gives the real life of the streets, the _grouillement_
of the crowd in Saint Mark’s square, the many-coloured splash of a
church procession surging up the steps of the Redentore, the flutter of
awnings over market-stalls on a fair-day, or the wide black trail of a
boat-race across the ruffled green waters of the Canalazzo.

Far beneath these two men in talent, but invaluable as a chronicler of
Venetian life, is Canaletto’s son-in-law, Bellotti, who, in a stiff
topographical manner, has faithfully and minutely recorded every
detail of eighteenth-century life on the canals. Being of interest
only to the student of manners, he is seldom represented in the public
galleries; but many private collections in the north of Italy contain
a series of his pictures, giving all the Venetian festivals, from the
Marriage of the Adriatic to the great feat of the _Vola_, which took
place in the Piazzetta on the last Thursday before Lent.

As unknown to the general public as Bellotti, but more sought after by
connoisseurs than any other Italian artist of the eighteenth century
save Tiepolo, is Pietro Longhi, the _genre_-painter, whose exquisite
little transcripts of Venetian domestic life now fetch their weight in
gold at Christie’s or the Hôtel Drouot. Longhi’s talent is a peculiar
one. To “taste” him, as the French say, one must understand the
fundamental naïveté of that brilliant and corrupt Venetian society,
as it is revealed in the comedies of Goldoni and in the memoirs of
contemporary writers. The Venetians were, in fact, amoral rather
than immoral. There was nothing complex or morbid in their vice; it
was hardly vice at all, in the sense which implies the deliberate
saying of “Evil, be thou my good.” Venetian immorality was a mere
yielding to natural instincts, to the _joie de vivre_ of a gay and
sensuous temperament. There was no intellectual depravity in Venice
because there was hardly any intellect: there was no thought of evil
because there was no thought. The fashionable sinners whom posterity
has pictured as revelling in the complexities of vice sat enchanted
before the simple scenes of Goldoni’s drama, and the equally simple
pictures of their favourite _genre_-painter. Nor must it be thought
that this taste for simplicity and innocence was evidence of a subtler
perversion. The French profligate sought in imagination the contrast of
an ideal world, the milk and rose-water world of Gessner’s Idylls and
the _bergerie de Florian_. But Goldoni and Longhi are not idealists,
or even sentimentalists. They draw with a frank hand the life of their
day, from the fisherman’s hut to the patrician’s palace. Nothing can
be more unmistakable than the realism of Goldoni’s dialect plays, and
a people who could enjoy such simple pictures of the life about them
must, in a sense, have led simple lives themselves.

Longhi’s easel-pictures record every phase of Venetian middle-class
and aristocratic existence. To some, indeed, it is difficult to find
a clue, and it has been conjectured that these represent scenes from
the popular comedies of the day. The others depict such well-known
incidents as the visit to the convent parlour, where the nuns are
entertaining their gallants with a marionette-show; the masked _nobil
donna_ consulting the fortune-teller, or walking with her _cicisbeo_
in Saint Mark’s square; the same lady’s _lever_, where she is seen at
her toilet-table surrounded by admirers; the family party at breakfast,
with the nurse bringing in a swaddled baby; the little son and heir
riding out attended by his governor; the actress rehearsing her aria
with the _maestro di cappella_; the visit to the famous hippopotamus
in his tent in the Piazzetta; the dancing-lesson, the music-lesson,
the portrait-painting, and a hundred other episodes of social and
domestic life. The personages who take part in these scenes are always
of one type: the young women with small oval faces, powdered but
unrouged, with red lips and sloping foreheads; the men in cloaks and
masks, or gay embroidered coats, with square brows and rather snub
features, gallant, flourishing, _empressés_, but never in the least
idealized or sentimentalized. The scenes of “high life” take place
for the most part in tall bare rooms, with stone window-frames, a
family portrait of a doge or an admiral above the chimney-piece, and a
few stiff arm-chairs of the heavy Venetian baroque. There is nothing
sumptuous in the furnishing of the apartments or in the dress of their
inmates. The ladies, if they are going abroad or paying a visit, wear
a three-cornered hat above the black lace _zendaletto_ which hides
their hair and the lower part of the face, while their dresses are
covered by the black silk _bauto_ or domino. Indoors, they are attired
in simple short gowns of silk or brocade, with a kerchief on the
shoulders, and a rose or a clove-pink in the unpowdered hair. That
pleasure in the painting of gorgeous stuffs, and in all the material
splendours of life, derived by Tiepolo from his great predecessors of
the Renaissance, was not shared by Longhi. His charm lies in a less
definable quality, a quality of unstudied simplicity and naturalness,
which gives to his easel-pictures the value of actual transcripts from
life. One feels that he did not “arrange” his scenes, any more than
Goldoni constructed his comedies. Both were content to reflect, in the
mirror of a quietly humorous observation, the every-day incidents of
the piazza, the convent and the palace.

The fact that Longhi, in his _genre_-pictures, sought so little
variety of grouping, and was content to limit his figures to so small
a range of gestures, has given rise to the idea that he was incapable
of versatility and breadth of composition. To be undeceived on this
point, however, one has only to see his frescoes in the Palazzo Grassi
(now Sina) on the Grand Canal. This fine palace, built about 1740
by Massari, the architect of the Gesuati, has a magnificent double
stairway leading from the colonnaded court to the state apartments
above; and on the walls of this stairway Longhi, for once laying aside
his small canvases and simple methods, has depicted, in a series of
charmingly-animated groups, the members of the Grassi family leaning
over a marble balustrade to see their guests ascending the stairs.
The variety of these groups, the expressiveness of the faces, and the
general breadth of treatment, prove that Longhi had far more technical
and imaginative power than he chose to put into his little pictures,
and that his naïveté was a matter of choice. Probably no one who knows
his work regrets this self-imposed limitation. Additional movement and
complexity of grouping would destroy the sense of leisure, of spacious
rooms and ample time, of that absence of hurry and confusion so typical
of a society untroubled by moral responsibilities or social rivalries,
and pursuing pleasure with the well-bred calmness which was one of the
most charming traits obliterated by the French Revolution.


VIII

On a quiet canal not far from the church of the Frari there stands an
old palace where, in a series of undisturbed rooms, may be seen the
very setting in which the personages of Goldoni and Longhi played out
their social comedy.

The Palazzo Querini-Stampaglia was bequeathed to the city of Venice
some fifty years since by the last Count Querini, and with its gallery,
its library and its private apartments has since then stood open to
a public which never visits it. Yet here the student of Venetian
backgrounds may find the unchanged atmosphere of the eighteenth
century. The gallery, besides some good paintings of earlier schools,
contains a large collection of Bellotti’s pictures, representing all
the great religious and popular festivals of Venice, as well as a
half-dozen Longhis and a charming series of _genre_-pictures by unknown
artists of his school.

Of far greater interest, however, are the private apartments, with
their seventeenth and eighteenth century decorations still intact,
and the walls lined with the heavy baroque consoles and arm-chairs
so familiar to students of Longhi’s interiors, and of the charming
prints in the first edition of Goldoni. Here is the typical _chambre
de parade_, with its pale-green damask curtains and bed-hangings, and
its furniture painted with flowers on a ground of pale-green _laque_;
here the tapestried saloon with its Murano chandeliers, the boudoir
with looking-glass panels set in delicately carved and painted wreaths
of flowers and foliage, and the portrait-room hung with pictures of the
three great Querini: the Doge, the Cardinal and the Admiral. Here, too,
is the long gallery, with a bust of the Cardinal (a seventeenth-century
prince of the Church) surrounded by marble effigies of his seven
_bravi_: a series of Berniniesque heads of remarkable vigour and
individuality, from that of the hoary hang-dog scoundrel with
elf-locks drooping over an evil scowl, to the smooth young villain with
bare throat and insolent stare, who seems to glory in his own sinister
beauty.

These busts give an insight into a different phase of Italian life:
the life of the violent and tragical seventeenth century, when every
great personage, in the Church no less than in the world, had his
bodyguard of hardened criminals, outlaws and galley-slaves, who
received sanctuary in their patron’s palace, and performed in return
such acts of villany and violence as the Illustrissimo required. It
seems a far cry from the peaceable world of Goldoni and Longhi to this
prelate surrounded by the effigies of his hired assassins; yet _bravi_,
though no longer openly acknowledged or immortalized in marble, lurked
in the background of Italian life as late as the end of the eighteenth
century, and Stendhal, who knew Italy as few foreigners have known
it, declares that in his day the great Lombard nobles still had their
retinue of _bauli_, as the knights of the stiletto were called in the
Milanese.

It is not in art only that the _bravi_ have been commemorated. Lovers
of “I Promessi Sposi,” the one great Italian novel, will not soon
forget the followers of Don Rodrigo; and an idea of the part they
played at the end of the eighteenth century may be obtained from the
pages of Ippolito Nievo’s “Confessioni di un Ottuagenario,” that
delightful book, half romance, half autobiography, which, after many
years of incredible neglect, has just been republished in Italy.
Ippolito Nievo, one of Garibaldi’s young soldiers, was among those
who perished in the wreck of the _Ercole_, on the return from Palermo
in 1860. He was but twenty-nine at the time of his death, and it is
said that his impatience to see a lady to whom he was attached caused
him, despite the entreaties of his friends, to take passage in the
notoriously unseaworthy _Ercole_. Four years earlier he had written the
“Confessioni,” a volume which, for desultory charm and simple rendering
of domestic incidents, is not unworthy to take rank with “Dichtung
und Wahrheit,” while its capricious heroine, La Pisana, is as vivid a
creation as Goethe’s Philina or (one had almost said) as the Beatrix of
Thackeray.

Ippolito Nievo was himself a native of the Veneto, and intimately
acquainted, through family tradition, with the life of the small
towns and villa-castles of the Venetian mainland at the close of the
eighteenth century. The “Confessioni” picture the life of a young
lad in a nobleman’s castle near the town of Portogruaro, and later
in Venice; and not the least remarkable thing about the book is the
fact that, at a period when other Italian novelists were depicting the
high-flown adventures of mediæval knights and ladies, its young author,
discarding the old stage-properties of romanticism, should have set
himself to recording, with the wealth of detail and quiet humour of a
Dutch _genre_-painter, the manners and customs of his own little corner
of Italy, as his parents had described it to him. Nievo’s account of
the provincial nobles in the Veneto shows that to the very end of the
eighteenth century, mediæval customs, with all their violence and
treachery, prevailed within a day’s journey of polished and peaceful
Venice. His nobles in their fortified castles, of which the drawbridges
are still raised at night, have their little trains of men-at-arms,
composed in general of the tattered peasantry on their estates, but
sometimes of professional fighters, smugglers or outlaws, who have been
taken into the service of some truculent lord of the manor; and Nievo
describes with much humour the conflicts between these little armies,
and the ruses, plots and negotiations of their quarrelsome masters.

In another novel, published at about the same time, Pietro Scudo,
a Venetian who wrote in French, has drawn, with far less talent, a
picture of another side of Venetian life: the life of the musical
schools and the Opera, which George Sand had attempted to represent in
“Consuelo.” Scudo’s book, “Le Chevalier Sarti,” has fallen into not
unmerited oblivion. It is written in the insipid style of the romantic
period--that style which Flaubert, in a moment of exasperation,
described as “les embêtements bleuâtres du lyrisme poitrinaire”; and
its heroine, like Châteaubriand’s unhappy Madame de Beaumont, dies of
the fashionable ailment of the day, _une maladie de langueur_. The
book, moreover, is badly constructed to the verge of incoherence, and
the characters are the stock mannikins of romantic fiction; yet in
spite of these defects, Scudo has succeeded (where George Sand failed)
in reproducing the atmosphere of eighteenth-century Venice. He has
done this not by force of talent but by the patient accumulation of
detail. Though not the most important feature in the construction
of a good historical novel, this is an essential part of the
process. George Sand, however, was above such humble methods. Totally
lacking in artistic sensibility and in its accompanying faculty,
the historic imagination, she was obliged to confine herself to the
vaguest generalities in describing scenes and manners so alien to the
“romantic” conception of life. Nature and passion were the only things
which interested her, and in the Venice of the eighteenth century
there was no nature and little passion. Hence the Venetian scenes of
“Consuelo” give the impression of having been done _de chic_, while
Scudo’s bear the impress of an unimaginative accuracy. In “Le Chevalier
Sarti” the lover of “decadent” Venice will find innumerable curious
details, descriptions of life in the villas of the Brenta, of concerts
in the famous Scuole, carnival scenes at the ridotto, and _parties
fines_ at the Orto di San Stefano, the favourite resort of the world
of gallantry; while the minor characters of the book, who have escaped
the obligatory romanticism of the hero and heroine, help to make up the
crowded picture of a world as bright and brittle as a sun-shot Murano
glass.


IX

But it is, after all, not in Nievo or Scudo, nor even in Longhi
and Goldoni, that one comes closest to the vanished Venice of the
eighteenth century.

In the Museo Correr, on the Grand Canal, there has recently been opened
a room containing an assemblage of life-sized mannikins dressed in the
various costumes of the _sette cento_.

Here are the red-robed Senator, the proud Procuratessa in brocade and
Murano lace, the Abatino in his plum coloured taffeta coat and black
small-clothes, the fashionable reveller in _bauto_ and mask, the
lacquey in livery of pale-blue silk, the lawyer, the gondolier, the
groom, and the noble Marquess in his hunting-dress of white buckskin.
Surely nowhere else does one come into such actual contact with that
little world which was so essentially a world of _appearances_--of fine
clothes, gay colours and graceful courtly attitudes. The mannikins
indeed are not graceful. The Cavaliere Leandro can no longer execute a
sweeping bow at the approach of the Procuratessa, or slip a love-letter
into the muff of the charming Angelica; the Senator may stare as
haughtily as he pleases at the Abate and the lawyer, without compelling
those humble clients to stir an inch from his path; and the noble
Marquess, in his spotless buckskin leggings and gauntlets, will never
again be off to shoot thrushes from a “bird-tower” in the Euganeans.
But the very rigidity of their once supple joints seems an allegory of
their latter state. There they stand, poor dolls of destiny, discarded
playthings of the gods, in attitudes of puzzled wonder, as if arrested
in their revels by the stroke of the dread Corsican magician--for it
was not Death but Napoleon who “stepped tacitly and took them” from the
plots and pleasures, the sunshine and music of the canals, to that pale
world of oblivion where only now and then some dreamer curious of the
day of little things revisits their melancholy ghosts.




THE MARNE

A Tale of the War

by

EDITH WHARTON







Macmillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1918

Macmillan and Co., Limited
London · Bombay · Calcutta · Madras
Melbourne

Copyright




THE MARNE




I


Ever since the age of six Troy Belknap of New York had embarked for
Europe every June on the fastest steamer of one or another of the most
expensive lines.

With his family he had descended at the dock from a large noiseless
motor, had kissed his father good-bye, turned back to shake hands with
the chauffeur (a particular friend), and trotted up the gang-plank
behind his mother's maid, while one welcoming steward captured Mrs.
Belknap's bag, and another led away her miniature French bull-dog--also
a particular friend of Troy's.

From that hour all had been delight. For six golden days Troy had ranged
the decks, splashed in the blue salt water brimming his huge porcelain
tub, lunched and dined with the grown-ups in the Ritz restaurant, and
swaggered about in front of the children who had never crossed before,
and didn't know the stewards, or the purser, or the captain's cat, or on
which deck you might exercise your dog, or how to induce the officer on
the watch to let you scramble up for a minute to the bridge. Then, when
these joys began to pall, he had lost himself in others deeper and
dearer. Another of his cronies, the library steward, had unlocked the
book-case doors for him, and, buried for hours in the depths of a huge
library armchair (there weren't any to compare with it on land), he had
ranged through the length and breadth of several literatures.

These six days of bliss would have been too soon over if they had not
been the mere prelude to intenser sensations. On the seventh
morning--generally at Cherbourg--Troy Belknap followed his mother, and
his mother's maid, and the French bull, up the gang-plank and into
another large noiseless motor, with another chauffeur (French, this one)
to whom he was also deeply attached, and who sat grinning and
cap-touching at the wheel. And then--in a few minutes, so swiftly and
smilingly was the way of Mrs. Belknap smoothed--the noiseless motor was
off, and they were rushing eastward through the orchards of Normandy.

The little boy's happiness would have been complete if there had been
more time to give to the beautiful things that flew past them: thatched
villages with square-towered churches in hollows of the deep green
country, or grey shining towns above rivers on which cathedrals seemed
to be moored like ships; miles and miles of field and hedge and park
falling away from high terraced houses, and little embroidered stone
manors reflected in reed-grown moats under ancient trees.

Unfortunately Mrs. Belknap always had pressing engagements in Paris. She
had made appointments beforehand with all her dressmakers, and, as Troy
was well aware, it was impossible, at the height of the season, to break
such engagements without losing one's turn, and having to wait weeks and
weeks to get a lot of nasty rags that one had seen, by that time, on the
back of every other woman in the place.

Luckily, however, even Mrs. Belknap had to eat; and during the halts in
the shining towns, where a succulent luncheon was served in a garden or
a flowery courtyard, Troy had time (as he grew bigger) to slip away
alone, and climb to the height where the cathedral stood, or at least to
loiter and gaze in the narrow crooked streets, between gabled
cross-beamed houses, each more picture-bookishly quaint than its
neighbours.

In Paris, in their brightly-lit and beflowered hotel drawing-room, he
was welcomed by Madame Lebuc, an old French lady smelling of crape, who
gave him lessons and took him and the bull-dog for walks, and who, as he
grew older, was supplemented, and then replaced, by an ugly vehement
young tutor, of half-English descent, whose companionship opened fresh
fields and pastures to Troy's dawning imagination.

Then in July--always at the same date--Mr. Belknap was deposited at the
door by the noiseless motor, which had been down to Havre to fetch him;
and a few days later they all got into it, and while Madame Lebuc
(pressing a packet of chocolates into her pupil's hand) waved a damp
farewell from the doorway, the Pegasus motor flew up the Champs Élysées,
devoured the leafy alleys of the Bois, and soared away to new horizons.

Most often they were mountain horizons, for the tour invariably ended in
the Swiss Alps. But there always seemed to be new ways (looked out by
Mr. Belknap on the map) of reaching their destination; ways lovelier,
more winding, more wonderful, that took in vast sweeping visions of
France from the Seine to the Rhone. And when Troy grew older the
vehement young tutor went with them, and once they all stopped and
lunched at his father's house, on the edge of a gabled village in the
Argonne, with a view stretching away for miles toward the Vosges and
Alsace. Mr. and Mrs. Belknap were very kind people, and it would never
have occurred to them to refuse M. Gantier's invitation to lunch with
his family; but they had no idea of the emotions stirred in their son's
eager bosom by what seemed to them merely a rather inconvenient
deviation from their course. Troy himself was hardly aware of these
emotions at the time, though his hungry interest in life always made him
welcome the least deflection from the expected. He had simply thought
what kind jolly people the Gantiers were, and what fun it was to be
inside one of the quaint stone houses, with small window-panes looking
on old box-gardens, that he was always being whisked past in the motor.
But later he was to re-live that day in all its homely details.




II


They were at St Moritz--as usual.

He and M. Gantier had been for a tramp through the Val Suvretta, and,
coming home late, were rushing into their evening clothes to join Mr.
and Mrs. Belknap at dinner (as they did now regularly, Troy having
reached the virile age of fifteen, and having to justify the possession
of a smoking-jacket and patent-leather shoes). He was just out of his
bath, and smothered in towels, when the tutor opened the door and thrust
in a newspaper.

"There will be war--I must leave to-morrow."

Troy dropped the towels.

War! War! War against his beautiful France! And this young man, his
dearest friend and companion, was to be torn from him suddenly,
senselessly, torn from their endless talks, their long walks in the
mountains, their elaborately planned courses of study--archæology,
French literature, mediæval philosophy, the Divine Comedy, and vistas
and vistas beyond--to be torn from all this, and to disappear from Troy
Belknap's life into the black gulf of this unfathomable thing called
War, that seemed suddenly to have escaped out of the history books like
a dangerous lunatic escaping from the asylum in which he was supposed to
be securely confined!

Troy Belknap was stunned.

He pulled himself together to bid a valiant farewell to M. Gantier (the
air was full of the "Marseillaise" and Sambre-et-Meuse, and everybody
knew the Russians would be in Berlin in six weeks); but once his tutor
was gone the mystery and horror again closed in on him.

France, his France, attacked, invaded, outraged; and he, a poor helpless
American boy, who adored her, and could do nothing for her--not even
cry, as a girl might! It was bitter.

His parents, too, were dreadfully upset; and so were all their friends.
But what chiefly troubled them was that they could get no money, no
seats in the train, no assurance that the Swiss frontier would not be
closed before they could cross the border. These preoccupations seemed
to leave them, for the moment, no time to think about France; and Troy,
during those first days, felt as if he were an infant Winkelried, with
all the shafts of the world's woe gathered into his inadequate breast.

For France was his holiday world, the world of his fancy and
imagination, a great traceried window opening on the universe. And now,
in the hour of her need, all he heard about him was the worried talk of
people planning to desert her!

Safe in Paris, Mr. and Mrs. Belknap regained their balance. Having
secured (for a sum that would have fitted up an ambulance) their
passages on a steamer sailing from England, they could at length look
about them, feel sorry, and subscribe to all the budding war charities.
They even remembered poor Madame Lebuc, stranded by the flight of all
her pupils, and found a job for her in a refugee bureau. Then, just as
they were about to sail, Mrs. Belknap had a touch of pneumonia, and was
obliged to postpone her departure; while Mr. Belknap, jamming his
possessions into a single suit-case, dashed down to Spain to take ship
at Malaga. The turn affairs were taking made it advisable for him to get
back as quickly as possible, and his wife and son were to follow from
England in a month.

All the while there came no news of M. Gantier. He had rejoined his
depot at once, and Troy had had a post-card from him, dated the 6th of
August, and saying that he was leaving for the front. After that,
silence.

Troy, poring over the morning papers, and slipping out alone to watch
for the noon communiqués in the windows of the Paris _Herald_, read of
the rash French advance in Alsace, and the enemy's retaliatory descent
on the region the Belknaps had so often sped over. And one day, among
the names of the ruined villages, he lit on that of the little town
where they had all lunched with the Gantiers. He saw the box-garden with
the horn-beam arbour where they had gone to drink coffee, old M.
Gantier ceremoniously leading the way with Mrs. Belknap; he saw Mme.
Gantier, lame and stout, hobbling after with Mr. Belknap; a little old
aunt with bobbing curls; the round-faced Gantier girl, shy and rosy; an
incredibly dried and smoked and aged grandfather, with Voltairian eyes
and sly snuff-taking gestures; and his own friend, the eldest of the
three brothers; he saw all these modest beaming people grouped about
Mme. Gantier's coffee and Papa Gantier's best bottle of "_Fine_," he
smelt the lime-blossoms and box, he heard the bees in the lavender, he
looked out on the rich fields and woods and the blue hills bathed in
summer light. And he read: "Not a house is standing. The curé has been
shot. A number of old people were burnt in the Hospice. The mayor and
five of the principal inhabitants have been taken to Germany as
hostages."

The year before the war, he remembered, old M. Gantier was mayor!

He wrote and wrote, after that, to his tutor; wrote to his depot, to his
Paris address, to the ruin that had been his home; but had no answer.
And finally, amid the crowding horrors of that dread August, he forgot
even M. Gantier, and M. Gantier's family, forgot everything but the
spectacle of the Allied armies swept back from Liège, from Mons, from
Laon, from Charleroi, and the hosts of evil surging nearer and ever
nearer to the heart of France.

His father, with whom he might have talked, was gone; and Troy could not
talk to his mother. Not that Mrs. Belknap was not kind and full of
sympathy: as fast as the bank at home cabled funds she poured them out
for war charities. But most of her time was spent in agitated
conference with her compatriots, and Troy could not bear to listen to
their endlessly reiterated tales of flight from Nauheim or Baden or
Brussels, their difficulties in drawing money, hiring motors, bribing
hotel-porters, battling for seats in trains, recovering lost luggage,
cabling for funds, and their general tendency to regard the war as a
mere background to their personal grievances.

"You were exceedingly rude to Mrs. Sampson, Troy," his mother said to
him, surprised one day by an explosion of temper. "It is so natural she
should be nervous at not being able to get staterooms; and she had just
given me five hundred dollars for the American ambulance."

"Giving money's no use," the boy growled, obscurely irritated; and when
Mrs. Belknap exclaimed, "Why, Troy, _how callous_--with all this
suffering!" he slunk out without answering, and went downstairs to lie
in wait for the evening papers.

The misery of feeling himself a big boy, long-limbed, strong-limbed, old
enough for evening clothes, champagne, the classics, biology, and views
on international politics, and yet able to do nothing but hang about
marble hotels and pore over newspapers, while rank on rank, and regiment
on regiment, the youth of France and England, swung through the dazed
streets and packed the endless trains--the misery of this was so great
to Troy that he became, as the days dragged on, more than ever what his
mother called "callous," sullen, humiliated, resentful at being
associated with all the rich Americans flying from France.

At last the turn of the Belknaps came too; but, as they were preparing
to start, news came that the German army was at Lille, and civilian
travel to England interrupted.

It was the fateful week, and every name in the bulletins--Amiens,
Compiègne, Rheims, Meaux, Senlis--evoked in Troy Belknap's tortured
imagination visions of ancient beauty and stability. He had done that
bit of France alone with M. Gantier the year before, while Mrs. Belknap
waited in Paris for belated clothes; and the thought of the great
stretch of desolation spreading and spreading like a leprosy over a land
so full of the poetry of the past, and so rich in a happy prosperous
present, was added to the crueller vision of the tragic and magnificent
armies that had failed to defend it.

Troy, as soon as he was reassured about his mother's health, had
secretly rejoiced at the accident which had kept them in France. But now
his joy was turned to bitterness. Mrs. Belknap, in her horrified
surprise at seeing her plans again obstructed, lost all sense of the
impending calamity except as it affected her safety and Troy's, and
joined in the indignant chorus of compatriots stranded in Paris, and
obscurely convinced that France ought to have seen them safely home
before turning her attention to the invader.

"Of course I don't pretend to be a strategist," whimpering or wrathful
ladies used to declare, their jewel-boxes clutched in one hand, their
passports in the other, "but one can't help feeling that if only the
French Government had told our Ambassador in _time_, trains might have
been provided...."

"Or why couldn't _Germany_ have let our Government know? After all,
Germany has no grievance against America...."

"And we've really spent enough money in Europe for some consideration
to be shown us ..." the woeful chorus went on.

The choristers were all good and kindly persons, shaken out of the rut
of right feeling by the first real fright of their lives. But Troy was
too young to understand this, and to foresee that, once in safety, they
would become the passionate advocates of France, all the more fervent in
their championship because of their reluctant participation in her
peril.

("What did I do?--Why, I just simply _stayed in Paris_.... Not to run
away was the only thing one _could_ do to show one's sympathy," he heard
one of the passport-clutchers declare, a year later, in a New York
drawing-room.)

Troy, from the height of his youthful indignation, regarded them all as
heartless egoists, and fled away into the streets from the sound of
their lamentations.

But in the streets was fresh food for misery; for every day the once
empty vistas were filled with trains of farm-waggons, drawn by slow
country horses, and heaped with furniture and household utensils; and
beside the carts walked lines of haggard people, old men and women with
vacant faces, mothers hugging hungry babies, and children limping after
them with heavy bundles. The fugitives of the Marne were pouring into
Paris.

Troy dashed into the nearest shops, bought them cakes and fruit,
followed them to the big hippodrome where they were engulfed in the
dusty arena, and finally, in despair at his inability to do more than
gape and pity, tried to avoid the streets they followed on their way
into Paris from St. Denis and Vincennes.

Then one day, in the sunny desert of the Place de la Concorde, he came
on a more cheering sight. A motley band of civilians, young,
middle-aged, and even grey-headed, were shambling along together, badged
and beribboned, in the direction of the Invalides; and above them
floated the American flag. Troy flew after it, and caught up with the
last marchers.

"Where are we going?... Foreign Legion," an olive-faced "dago" answered
joyously in broken American. "All 'nited States citizens.... Come and
join up, sonnie...." And for one mad moment Troy thought of risking the
adventure.

But he was too visibly only a schoolboy still; and with tears of envy in
his smarting eyes he stood, small and useless, on the pavement, and
watched the heterogeneous band under the beloved flag disappearing in
the doorway of the registration office.

When he got back to his mother's drawing-room the tea-table was still
surrounded, and a lady was saying: "I've offered _anything_ for a
special train, but they won't listen...." And another, in a stricken
whisper: "If they _do_ come, what do you mean to do about your pearls?"




III


Then came the Marne, and suddenly the foreigners caught in Paris by the
German advance became heroes--or mostly heroines--who had stayed to
reassure their beloved city in her hour of need.

"We all owe so much to Paris," murmured Mrs. Belknap, in lovely
convalescent clothes, from her sofa-corner. "I'm sure we can none of us
ever cease to be thankful for this chance of showing it...."

She had sold her staterooms to a compatriot who happened to be in
England, and was now cabling home to suggest to Mr. Belknap that she
should spend the winter in France and take a job on a war charity. She
was not strong enough for nursing, but she thought it would be
delightful to take convalescent officers for drives in the Bois in the
noiseless motor. "Troy would love it too," she cabled.

Mr. Belknap, however, was unmoved by these arguments. "Future too
doubtful," he cabled back. "Insist on your sailing. Staterooms November
tenth paid for. Troy must return to school."

"Future too doubtful" impressed Mrs. Belknap more than "Insist," though
she made a larger use of the latter word in explaining to her friends
why, after all, she was obliged to give up her projected war work.
Meanwhile, having quite recovered, she rose from her cushions, donned a
nurse's garb, poured tea once or twice at a fashionable hospital, and,
on the strength of this effort, obtained permission to carry supplies
(in her own motor) to the devastated regions. Troy of course went with
her, and thus had his first glimpse of war.

Fresh in his mind was a delicious July day at Rheims with his tutor, and
the memory of every detail noted on the way, along the green windings of
the Marne, by Meaux, Montmirail and Epernay. Now, traversing the same
towns, he seemed to be looking into murdered faces, vacant and stony.
Where he had seen the sociable gossiping life of the narrow streets,
young men lounging at the blacksmith's, blue-sleeved carters sitting in
the wine-shops while their horses shook off the flies in the hot
sunshine of the village square, black-pinafored children coming home
from school, the fat curé stopping to talk to little old ladies under
the church porch, girls with sleek hair calling to each other from the
doorways of the shops, and women in sunburnt gingham bending over the
village wash-trough or leaning on their rakes among the hayricks--where
all this had been, now only a few incalculably old people sat in the
doorways and looked with bewildered eyes at strange soldiers fulfilling
the familiar tasks.

This was what war did! It emptied towns of their inhabitants as it
emptied veins of their blood; it killed houses and lands as well as men.
Out there, a few miles beyond the sunny vineyards and the low hills, men
were dying at that very moment by hundreds, by thousands--and their
motionless young bodies must have the same unnatural look as these wan
ruins, these gutted houses and sterile fields.... War meant Death,
Death, Death--Death everywhere and to everything.

By a special favour, the staff-officer who accompanied them managed to
extend their trip to the ruined château of Mondement, the pivot on which
the battle had turned. He had himself been in the thick of the fight,
and standing before the shattered walls of the old house he explained
the struggle for the spur of Mondement: the advance of the grey masses
across the plain, their capture of the ridge that barred the road to
Paris; then the impetuous rush of General Humbert's infantry, repulsed,
returning, repulsed again, and again attacking; the hand-to-hand
fighting in court and gardens; the French infantry's last irresistible
dash, the batteries rattling up, getting into place on the ridge, and
flinging back the grey battalions from the hillside into the marshes.

Mrs. Belknap smiled and exclaimed, with vague comments and a wandering
glance (for the officer, carried away by his subject, had forgotten her
and become technical); while Troy, his map spread on the top of a
shot-riddled wall, followed every word and gesture with eyes that
absorbed at the same time all the details of the immortal landscape.

The Marne--this was the actual setting of the battle of the Marne! This
happy temperate landscape, with its sheltering woods, its friendly
fields and downs flowing away to a mild sky, had looked on at the most
awful conflict in history. Scenes of anguish and heroism that ought to
have had some Titanic background of cliff and chasm had unrolled
themselves among harmless fields, and along wood-roads where wild
strawberries grew and children cut hazel-switches to drive home their
geese. A name of glory and woe was attached to every copse and hollow,
and to each grey steeple above the village roofs....

Troy listened, his heart beating higher at each exploit, till he forgot
the horror of war, and thought only of its splendours. Oh, to have been
there too! To have had even the smallest share in those great hours! To
be able to say, as this young man could say: "Yes, I was in the battle
of the Marne"; to be able to break off, and step back a yard or two,
correcting one's self critically: "No ... it was _here_ the General
stood when I told him our batteries had got through ..." or: "This is
the very spot where the first seventy-five was trained on the valley. I
can see the swathes it cut in the Bavarians as they swarmed up at us a
third and fourth time...."

Troy suddenly remembered a bit of _Henry V._ that M. Gantier had been
fond of quoting:

    And gentlemen in England now abed
    Shall think themselves accurst they were not here,
    And hold their manhood cheap, when any speaks
    That fought with us....

Ah, yes--ah, yes--to have been in the battle of the Marne!

       *       *       *       *       *

On the way back, below the crest of the hill, the motor stopped at the
village church and the officer jumped down. "Some of our men are buried
here," he said.

Mrs. Belknap, with a murmur of sympathy, caught up the bunch of roses
she had gathered in the ravaged garden of the château, and they picked
their way among the smashed and slanting stones of the cemetery to a
corner behind the church where wooden crosses marked a row of fresh
graves. Half-faded flowers in bottles were thrust into the loose earth,
and a few tin wreaths hung on the arms of the crosses.

Some of the graves bore only the date of the battle, with "Pour la
France," or "Priez pour lui"; but on others names and numbers had been
roughly burnt into the crosses.

Suddenly Troy stopped short with a cry.

"What is it?" his mother asked. She had walked ahead of him to the
parapet overhanging the valley, and forgetting her roses she leaned
against the low cemetery wall while the officer took up his story.

Troy made no answer. Mrs. Belknap stood with her back to him, and he did
not ask her to turn. He did not want her, or any one else, to read the
name he had just read; of a sudden there had been revealed to him the
deep secretiveness of sorrow. But he stole up to her and drew the
flowers from her hand, while she continued, with vague inattentive
murmurs, to follow the officer's explanations. She took no notice of
Troy, and he went back to the grave and laid the roses on it.

On the cross he had read: "September 12, 1914. Paul Gantier, --th
Chasseurs à pied."

"Oh, poor fellows ... poor fellows. Yes, that's right, Troy; put the
roses on their graves," Mrs. Belknap assented approvingly, as she picked
her way back to the motor.




IV


The 10th of November came, and they sailed.

The week in the steamer was intolerable, not only because they were
packed like herrings, and Troy (who had never known discomfort before)
had to share his narrow cabin with two young German-Americans full of
open brag about the Fatherland; but also because of the same eternally
renewed anecdotes among the genuine Americans about the perils and
discomforts they had undergone, and the general disturbance of their
plans.

Most of the passengers were in ardent sympathy with the Allies, and hung
anxiously on the meagre wirelesses; but a flat-faced professor with
lank hair, having announced that "there were two sides to every case,"
immediately raised up a following of unnoticed ladies, who "couldn't
believe all that was said of the Germans" and hoped that America would
never be "drawn in"; while, even among the right-minded, there subsisted
a vague feeling that war was an avoidable thing, which one had only to
reprobate enough to prevent its recurrence.

They found New York--Mrs. Belknap's New York--buzzing with
war-charities, yet apparently unaware of the war. That at least was
Troy's impression during the twenty-four hours before he was packed off
to school to catch up with his interrupted studies.

At school he heard the same incessant war-talk, and found the same
fundamental unawareness of the meaning of the war. At first the boys
were very keen to hear his story, but he described what he had seen so
often--and especially his haunting impressions of the Marne--that they
named him "Marny Belknap," and finally asked him to cut it out.

The masters were mostly frankly for the Allies, but the Rector had given
out that neutrality was the attitude approved by the Government, and
therefore a patriotic duty; and one Sunday after chapel he gave a little
talk to explain why the President thought it right to try to keep his
people out of the dreadful struggle. The words duty and responsibility
and fortunate privilege recurred often in this address, and it struck
Troy as odd that the lesson of the day happened to be the story of the
Good Samaritan.

When he went home for the Christmas holidays everybody was sending toys
and sugar-plums to the Belgian war-orphans, with little notes from
"Happy American children" requesting to have their gifts acknowledged.

"It makes us so _happy_ to help," beaming young women declared with a
kind of ghoulish glee, doing up parcels, planning war-tableaux and
charity dances, rushing to "propaganda" lectures given by handsome
French officers, and keeping up a kind of continuous picnic on the ruins
of civilization.

Mr. and Mrs. Belknap had inevitably been affected by the surrounding
atmosphere.

"The tragedy of it--the _tragedy_--no one can tell who hasn't seen it
and been through it," Mrs. Belknap would begin, looking down her long
dinner-table between the orchids and the candelabra; and the pretty
women and prosperous men would interrupt their talk, and listen for a
moment, half absently, with spurts of easy indignation that faded out
again as they heard the story oftener.

After all, Mrs. Belknap wasn't the _only_ person who had seen a
battlefield! Lots and lots more were pouring home all the time with
fresh tales of tragedy: the Marne had become--in a way--an old story.
People wanted something newer ... different....

And then, why hadn't Joffre followed up the offensive? The Germans were
wonderful soldiers after all.... Yes, but such beasts ... sheer
devils.... Here was Mr. So-and-so, just back from Belgium--such horrible
stories--really unrepeatable! "Don't you want to come and hear them, my
dear? Dine with us to-morrow; he's promised to come unless he's summoned
to Washington. But do come anyhow; the Jim Cottages are going to dance
after dinner...."

In time Mrs. Belknap, finding herself hopelessly out-storied,
out-charitied, out-adventured, began insensibly to take a calmer and
more distant view of the war. What was the use of trying to keep up her
own enthusiasm when that of her audience had flagged? Wherever she went
she was sure to meet other ladies who had arrived from France much more
recently, and had done and seen much more than she had. One after
another she saw them received with the same eagerness--"Of course we all
know about the marvellous things you've been doing in France--your
wonderful war-work"--then, like herself, they were superseded by some
later arrival, who had been nearer the front, or had raised more money,
or had had an audience of the Queen of the Belgians, or an autograph
letter from Lord Kitchener. No one was listened to for long, and the
most eagerly-sought-for were like the figures in a movy-show, forever
breathlessly whisking past to make way for others.

Mr. Belknap had always been less eloquent about the war than his wife;
but somehow Troy had fancied he felt it more deeply. Gradually, however,
he too seemed to accept the situation as a matter of course, and Troy,
coming home for the Easter holidays, found at the family table a large
sonorous personage--a Senator, just back from Europe--who, after rolling
out vague praises of France and England, began insidiously to hint that
it was a pity to see such wasted heroism, such suicidal determination on
the part of the Allies to resist all offers of peace from an enemy so
obviously their superior.

"She wouldn't be if America came in!" Troy blurted out, reddening at the
sound of his voice.

"America?" some one playfully interjected; and the Senator laughed, and
said something about geographical immunity. "They can't touch _us_. This
isn't our war, young man."

"It may be by the time I'm grown up," Troy persisted, burning redder.

"Well," returned the Senator good-humouredly, "you'll have to hurry, for
the economists all say it can't last more than a year longer. Lord
Reading told me----"

"There's been misery enough, in all conscience," sighed a lady, playing
with her pearls; and Mr. Belknap added gravely: "By the time Troy grows
up I hope wars and war-talk will be over for good and all."

"Oh, well--at his age every fellow wants to go out and kill something,"
remarked one of his uncles sympathetically.

Troy shuddered at the well-meant words. _To go out and kill something!_
They thought he regarded the war as a sport, just as they regarded it
as a moving-picture show! As if any one who had had even a glimpse of it
could ever again think with joy of killing! His boy's mind was sorely
exercised to define the urgent emotions with which it laboured. _To save
France_--that was the clear duty of the world, as he saw it. But none of
these kindly careless people about him knew what he meant when he said
"France." Bits of M. Gantier's talk came back to him, embodying that
meaning.

"Whatever happens, keep your mind keen and clear: open as many windows
on the universe as you can...." To Troy, France had been the biggest of
those windows.

The young tutor had never declaimed about his country; he had simply
told her story and embodied her ideals in his own impatient, questioning
and yet ardent spirit. "Le monde est aux enthousiastes," he had once
quoted; and he had shown Troy how France had always been alive in every
fibre, and how her inexhaustible vitality had been perpetually nourished
on criticism, analysis and dissatisfaction. "Self-satisfaction is
death," he had said; "France is the phoenix-country always rising from
the ashes of her recognized mistakes."

Troy felt what a wonderful help it must be to have that long rich past
in one's blood. Every stone that France had carved, every song she had
sung, every new idea she had struck out, every beauty she had created in
her thousand fruitful years, was a tie between her and her children.
These things were more glorious than her battles, for it was because of
them that all civilization was bound up in her, and that nothing that
concerned her could concern her only.




V


"It seems too absurd," said Mrs. Belknap; "but Troy will be eighteen
to-morrow. And that means," she added with a sigh, "that this horrible
war has been going on for three whole years. Do you remember, dearest,
your fifteenth birthday was on the very day that odious Archduke was
assassinated? We had a picnic on the Morterasch."

"Oh, dear," cried Sophy Wicks, flinging her tennis-racket into the air
with a swing that landed it in the middle of the empty court--"perhaps
that's the reason he's never stopped talking about the war for a single
minute since!"

Around the big tea-table under the trees there was a faint hush of
disapproval. A year before, Sophy Wicks's airy indifference to the
events that were agitating the world had amused some people and won the
frank approval of others. She did not exasperate her friends by
professions of pacifism, she simply declared that the war bored her; and
after three years of vain tension, of effort in the void, something in
the baffled American heart whispered that, things being as they were,
she was perhaps right.

But now things were no longer as they had been. Looking back, Troy
surveyed the gradual development of the war-feeling as it entered into a
schoolboy's range of vision. He had begun to notice the change before
the sinking of the _Lusitania_. Even in the early days, when his
school-fellows had laughed at him and called him "Marny," some of them
had listened to him and imitated him. It had become the fashion to have
a collection of war-trophies from the battlefields. The boys' sisters
were "adopting war-orphans" at long distance, and when Troy went home
for the holidays he heard more and more talk of war-charities, and
noticed that the funds collected were no longer raised by dancing and
fancy-balls. People who used the war as an opportunity to have fun were
beginning to be treated almost as coldly as the pacifists.

But the two great factors in the national change of feeling were the
_Lusitania_ and the training-camps.

The _Lusitania_ showed America what the Germans were, Plattsburg tried
to show her the only way of dealing with them.

Both events called forth a great deal of agitated discussion, for if
they focussed the popular feeling for war, they also gave the opponents
of war in general a point of departure for their arguments. For a while
feeling ran high, and Troy, listening to the heated talk at his parents'
table, perceived with disgust and wonder that at the bottom of the
anti-war sentiment, whatever specious impartiality it put on, there was
always the odd belief that life-in-itself--just the mere raw fact of
being alive--was the one thing that mattered, and getting killed the one
thing to be avoided.

This new standard of human dignity plunged Troy into the lowest depths
of pessimism. And it bewildered him as much as it disgusted him, since
it did away at a stroke with all that gave any interest to the fact of
living. It killed romance, it killed poetry and adventure, it took all
the meaning out of history and conduct and civilization. There had never
been anything worth while in the world that had not had to be died for,
and it was as clear as day that a world which no one would die for could
never be a world worth being alive in.

Luckily most people did not require to reason the matter out in order to
feel as Troy did, and in the long run the _Lusitania_ and Plattsburg won
the day. America tore the gag of neutrality from her lips, and with all
the strength of her liberated lungs claimed her right to a place in the
struggle. The pacifists crept into their holes, and only Sophy Wicks
remained unconverted.

Troy Belknap, tall and shy and awkward, lay at her feet and blushed and
groaned inwardly at her wrong-headedness. All the other girls were
war-mad; with the rupture of diplomatic relations the country had burst
into flame, and with the declaration of war the flame had become a
conflagration. And now, having at last a definite and personal concern
in the affair, every one was not only happier but more sensible than
when a perpetually thwarted indignation had had to expend itself in
vague philanthropy.

It was a peculiar cruelty of fate that made Troy feel Miss Wicks's
indifference more than the zeal of all the other young women gathered
about the Belknap tennis-court. In spite of everything, he found her
more interesting, more inexhaustible, more "his size" (as they said at
school), than any of the gay young war-goddesses who sped their
tennis-balls across the Belknap court.

It was a Long Island Sunday in June. A caressing warmth was in the air,
and a sea-breeze stirred the tops of the lime branches. The smell of
fresh hay-cocks blew across the lawn, and a sparkle of blue water and a
dipping of white sails showed through the trees beyond the hay-fields.

Mrs. Belknap smiled indulgently on the pleasant scene: her judgement of
Sophy Wicks was less severe than that of the young lady's
contemporaries. What did it matter if a chit of eighteen, having taken
up a foolish attitude, was too self-conscious to renounce it?

"Sophy will feel differently when she has nursed some of our own
soldiers in a French base hospital," she said, addressing herself to the
disapproving group.

The young girl raised her merry eyebrows. "Who'll stay and nurse Granny
if I go to a French base hospital? Troy, will _you_?" she suggested.

The other girls about the tea-table laughed. Though they were only
Troy's age, or younger, they did not mind his being teased, for he
seemed only a little boy to them, now that they all had friends or
brothers in the training-camps or on the way to France. Besides, though
they disapproved of Sophy's tone, her argument was unanswerable. They
knew her precocious wisdom and self-confidence had been acquired at the
head of her grandmother's household, and that there was no one else to
look after poor old paralytic Mrs. Wicks and the orphan brothers and
sisters to whom Sophy was mother and guardian.

Two or three of the young men present were in uniform, and one of them,
Mrs. Belknap's nephew, had a captain's double bar on his shoulder. What
did Troy Belknap and Sophy Wicks matter to young women playing a last
tennis-match with heroes on their way to France?

The game began again, with much noise and cheerful wrangling. Mrs.
Belknap walked toward the house to welcome a group of visitors, and Miss
Wicks remained beside the tea-table, alone with Troy. She was leaning
back in a wide basket-chair, her thin ankles in white open-work
stockings thrust out under her short skirt, her arms locked behind her
thrown-back head. Troy lay on the ground and plucked at the tufts of
grass at his elbow. Why was it that, with all the currents of vitality
flowing between this group of animated girls and youths, he could feel
no nearness but hers? The feeling was not particularly agreeable, but
there was no shaking it off: it was like a scent that has got into one's
clothes. He was not sure that he liked her, but he wanted to watch her,
to listen to her, to defend her against the mockery and criticism in the
eyes of the others. At this point his powers of analysis gave out, and
his somewhat extensive vocabulary failed him. After all, he had to fall
back on the stupid old school phrase: she was "his size"--that was all.

"Why do you always say the war bores you?" he asked abruptly, without
looking up.

"Because it does, my boy; and so do you, when you hold forth about it."

He was silent, and she touched his arm with the tip of her swinging
tennis-shoe. "Don't you see, Troy, it's not our job--not just now,
anyhow. So what's the use of always jawing about it?"

She jumped up, recovered her racket, and ran to take her place in a new
set beside Troy's cousin, the captain.




VI


It was not "his job"--that was the bitter drop in all the gladness.

At last what Troy longed for had come: his country was playing her part.
And he, who had so watched and hoped and longed for the divine far-off
event, had talked of it early and late to old and young, had got himself
laughed at, scolded, snubbed, ridiculed, nicknamed, commemorated in a
school-magazine skit in which "Marne" and "yarn" and "oh, darn," formed
the refrain of a lyric beginning "Oh _say_, have you _heard_ Belknap
_flap_ in the breeze?"--he, who had borne all the scoldings and all the
ridicule, sustained by a mysterious secret faith in the strength of his
cause, now saw that cause triumph, and all his country waving with flags
and swarming with khaki, while he had to stand aside and look on,
because his coming birthday was only his nineteenth.... He remembered
the anguish of regret with which he had seen M. Gantier leave St. Moritz
to join his regiment, and thought now with passionate envy of his
tutor's fate. "Dulce et decorum est ..." the old hackneyed phrase had
taken on a beauty that filled his eyes with tears.

Eighteen--and "nothing doing" till he was twenty-one! He could have
killed the cousins and uncles strutting about in uniform and saying:
"Don't fret, old man--there's lots of time. The war is sure to last
another four years." To say that, and laugh, how little they must know
of what war meant!

It was an old custom in the Belknap family to ask Troy what he wanted
for his birthday. The custom (according to tradition) had originated on
his sixth anniversary, when, being given a rabbit with ears that
wiggled, he had grown very red and stammered out: "I _did_ so want a
'cyclopedia...."

Since then he had always been consulted on the subject with a good deal
of ceremony, and had spent no little time and thought in making a
judicious choice in advance. But this year his choice took no thinking
over.

"I want to go to France," he said immediately.

"To France----?" It struck his keen ears that there was less surprise
than he had feared in Mr. Belknap's voice.

"To France, my boy? The Government doesn't encourage foreign travel just
now."

"I want to volunteer in the Foreign Legion," said Troy, feeling as if
the veins of his forehead would burst.

Mrs. Belknap groaned, but Mr. Belknap retained his composure.

"My dear chap, I don't think you know much about the Foreign Legion.
It's a pretty rough berth for a fellow like you. And they're as likely
as not," he added carelessly, "to send you to Morocco or the Cameroon."

Troy, knowing this to be true, hung his head.

"Now," Mr. Belknap continued, taking advantage of his silence, "my
counter-proposition is that you should go to Brazil for three months
with your Uncle Tom Jarvice, who is being sent down there on a big
engineering job. It's a wonderful opportunity to see the country--see it
like a prince too, for he'll have a special train at his disposal. Then,
when you come back," he continued, his voice weakening a little under
the strain of Troy's visible inattention, "we'll see...."

"See what?"

"Well--I don't know ... a camp ... till it's time for Harvard...."

"I want to go to France at once, father," said Troy, with the voice of a
man.

"To do _what_?" wailed his mother.

"Oh, any old thing--drive an ambulance," Troy struck out at random.

"But, dearest," she protested, "you could never even learn to drive a
Ford runabout!"

"That's only because it never interested me."

"But one of those huge ambulances--you'll be killed!"

"Father!" exclaimed Troy, in a tone that seemed to say: "Aren't we out
of the nursery, at least?"

"Don't talk to him like that, Josephine," said Mr. Belknap, visibly
wishing that he knew how to talk to his son himself, but perceiving that
his wife was on the wrong tack.

"Don't you see, father, that there's no use talking at all? I'm going to
get to France anyhow."

"In defiance of our wishes?"

"Oh, you'll forget all that later," said Troy.

Mrs. Belknap began to cry, and her husband turned on her.

"My dear, you're really--really--_I understand Troy!_" he blurted out,
his veins swelling too.

"But if the Red Cross is to send you on that mission to Italy, why
shouldn't Troy wait and go as your secretary?" Mrs. Belknap said,
tacking skilfully.

Mr. Belknap, who had not yet made up his mind to accept the mission,
made it up on the instant. "Yes, Troy--why not? I shall be going
myself--in a month or so."

"I want to go to France," said his son. And he added, laughing with
sudden courage: "You see, you've never refused me a birthday present
yet."




VII


France again--France at last! As the cliffs grew green across the bay he
could have knelt to greet them--as he hurried down the gang-plank with
the eager jostling crowd he could have kissed the sacred soil they were
treading.

The very difficulties and delays of the arrival thrilled and
stimulated him, gave him a keener sense of his being already a humble
participant in the conflict. Passports, identification papers, sharp
interrogatories, examinations, the enforced surrendering of keys and
papers: how different it all was from the old tame easy landings, with
the noiseless motor waiting at the dock, and France lying safe and open
before them whichever way they chose to turn!

On the way over many things had surprised and irritated him--not least
the attitude of some of his fellow-passengers. The boat swarmed with
young civilians, too young for military service, or having, for some
more or less valid reason, been exempted from it. They were all pledged
to some form of relief work, and all overflowing with zeal: "France" was
as often on their lips as on Troy's. But some of them seemed to be
mainly concerned with questions of uniform and rank. The steamer seethed
with wrangles and rivalries between their various organisations, and now
and then the young crusaders seemed to lose sight of the object of their
crusade--as had too frequently been the case with their predecessors.

Very few of the number knew France or could speak French, and most of
them were full of the importance of America's mission. This was
Liberty's chance to Enlighten the World; and all these earnest youths
apparently regarded themselves as her chosen torch-bearers.

"We must teach France efficiency," they all said with a glowing
condescension.

The women were even more sure of their mission; and there were plenty of
them, middle-aged as well as young, in uniform too, cocked-hatted,
badged and gaitered--though most of them, apparently, were going to sit
in the offices of Paris war-charities, and Troy had never noticed that
Frenchwomen had donned khaki for that purpose.

"France must be purified," these young Columbias proclaimed. "Frenchmen
must be taught to respect Women. We must protect our boys from
contamination ... the dreadful theatres ... and the novels ... and the
Boulevards.... Of course we mustn't be hard on the French, for they've
never known Home Life, or the Family ... but we must show them ... we
must set the example...."

Troy, sickened by their blatancy, had kept to himself for the greater
part of the trip; but during the last days he had been drawn into talk
by a girl who reminded him of Miss Wicks, though she was in truth
infinitely prettier. The evenings below decks were long, and he sat at
her side in the saloon and listened to her.

Her name was Hinda Warlick, and she came from the Middle West. He
gathered from her easy confidences that she was singing in a suburban
church choir while waiting for a vaudeville engagement. Her studies had
probably been curtailed by the task of preparing a repertory, for she
appeared to think that Joan of Arc was a Revolutionary hero, who had
been guillotined with Marie Antoinette for blowing up the Bastille; and
her notions of French history did not extend beyond this striking
episode. But she was ready and eager to explain France to Troy, and to
the group of young men who gathered about her, listening to her piercing
accents and gazing into her deep blue eyes.

"We must carry America right into the heart of France--for she has got a
great big heart, in spite of _everything_," Miss Warlick declared. "We
must teach her to love children and home and the outdoor life, and you
American boys must teach the young Frenchmen to love their mothers. You
must set the example.... Oh, boys, do you know what my ambition is? It's
to organize an Old Home Week just like ours, all over France from
Harver right down to Marseilles--and all through the devastated regions
too. Wouldn't it be lovely if we could get General Pershing to let us
keep Home Week right up at the front, at 'Eep and Leal and Rams, and all
those martyr cities--right close up in the trenches? So that even the
Germans would see us and hear us, and perhaps learn from us too?--for
you know we mustn't despair even of teaching the Germans!"

Troy, as he crept away, heard one young man, pink and shock-headed,
murmur shyly to the Prophetess: "Hearing you say this has made it all so
clear to me----" and an elderly Y.M.C.A. leader, adjusting his
eye-glasses, added with nasal emphasis: "Yes, Miss Warlick has expressed
in a very lovely way what we all feel: that America's mission is to
contribute the _human element_ to this war."

"Oh, good God!" Troy groaned, crawling to his darkened cabin. He
remembered M. Gantier's phrase, "Self-satisfaction is death," and felt a
sudden yearning for Sophy Wicks's ironic eyes and her curt "What's the
use of jawing?"

       *       *       *       *       *

He had been for six months on his job, and was beginning to know
something about it: to know, for instance, that nature had never meant
him for an ambulance-driver.

Nevertheless he had stuck to his task with such a dogged determination
to succeed that after several months about the Paris hospitals he was
beginning to be sent to exposed sectors.

His first sight of the desolated country he had traversed three years
earlier roused old memories of the Gantier family, and he wrote once
more to their little town, but again without result. Then one day he
was sent to a sector in the Vosges which was held by American troops.
His heart was beating hard as the motor rattled over the hills, through
villages empty of their inhabitants, like those of the Marne, but
swarming with big fair-haired soldiers. The land lifted and dipped
again, and he saw ahead of him the ridge once crowned by M. Gantier's
village, and the wall of the terraced garden, with the horn-beam arbour
putting forth its early green. Everything else was in ruins: pale
weather-bleached ruins over which the rains and suns of three years had
passed effacingly. The church, once so firm and four-square on the hill,
was now a mere tracery against the clouds; the hospice roofless, the
houses all gutted and bulging, with black smears of smoke on their inner
walls. At the head of the street a few old women and children were
hoeing vegetables before a row of tin-roofed shanties, and a Y.M.C.A.
hut flew the stars-and-stripes across the way.

Troy jumped down and began to ask questions. At first the only person
who recognized the name of Gantier was an old woman too frightened and
feeble-minded to answer intelligibly. Then a French territorial who was
hoeing with the women came forward. He belonged to the place and knew
the story.

"M. Gantier--the old gentleman? He was mayor, and the Germans took him.
He died in Germany. The young girl--Mlle. Gantier--was taken with him.
No, she's not dead.... I don't know.... She's shut up somewhere in
Germany ... queer in the head, they say.... The sons--ah, you knew
Monsieur Paul? He went first.... What, the others?... Yes: the three
others--Louis at Notre Dame de Lorette; Jean on a submarine: poor
little Félix, the youngest, of the fever at Salonika. _Voilà_.... The
old lady? Ah, she and her sister went away ... some charitable people
took them, I don't know where.... I've got the address somewhere...." He
fumbled, and brought out a strip of paper on which was written the name
of a town in the centre of France.

"There's where they were a year ago.... Yes, you may say: _there's a
family gone--wiped out_. How often I've seen them all sitting there,
laughing and drinking coffee under the arbour! They were not rich, but
they were happy and proud of each other. That's over."

He went back to his hoeing.

       *       *       *       *       *

After that, whenever Troy Belknap got back to Paris he hunted for the
surviving Gantiers. For a long time he could get no trace of them; then
he remembered his old governess, Mme. Lebuc, for whom Mrs. Belknap had
found employment in a refugee bureau.

He ran down Mme. Lebuc, who was still at her desk in the same big room,
facing a row of horse-hair benches packed with tired people waiting
their turn for a clothing-ticket or a restaurant card.

Mme. Lebuc had grown much older, and her filmy eyes peered anxiously
through large spectacles before she recognized Troy. Then, after tears
and raptures, he set forth his errand, and she began to peer again
anxiously, shuffling about the bits of paper on the desk, and confusing
her records hopelessly.

"Why, is that _you_?" cried a gay young voice; and there, on the other
side of the room, sat one of the young war-goddesses of the Belknap
tennis-court, trim, uniformed, important, with a row of bent backs in
shabby black before her desk.

"Ah, Miss Batchford will tell you--she's so quick and clever," Mme.
Lebuc sighed, resigning herself to chronic bewilderment.

Troy crossed to the other desk. An old woman sat before it in threadbare
mourning, a crape veil on her twitching head. She spoke in a low voice,
slowly, taking a long time to explain; each one of Miss Batchford's
quick questions put her back, and she had to begin all over again.

"Oh, these refugees!" cried Miss Batchford, stretching a bangled arm
above the crape veil to clasp Troy's hand. "Do sit down, Mr.
Belknap.--Dépêchez-vous, s'il vous plaît," she said, not too unkindly,
to the old woman; and added, to Troy: "There's no satisfying them."

At the sound of Troy's name the old woman had turned her twitching
head, putting back her veil. Her eyes met Troy's, and they looked at
each other doubtfully. Then--"Madame Gantier!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, yes," she said, the tears running down her face.

Troy was not sure if she recognized him, though his name had evidently
called up some vague association. He saw that most things had grown far
off to her, and that for the moment her whole mind was centred on the
painful and humiliating effort of putting her case to this strange young
woman who snapped out questions like a machine.

"Do you know her?" asked Miss Batchford, surprised.

"I used to, I believe," Troy answered.

"You can't think what she wants--just everything! They're all alike. She
wants to borrow five hundred francs to furnish a flat for herself and
her sister."

"Well, why not?"

"Why, we don't lend money, of course. It's against all our principles.
We give work, or relief in kind--that's what I'm telling her."

"I see. Could I give it to her?"

"What--all that money? Certainly _not_. You don't know them!"

Troy shook hands and went out into the street to wait for Mme. Gantier;
and when she came he told her who he was. She cried and shook a great
deal, and he called a cab and drove her home to the poor lodging where
she and her sister lived. The sister had become weak-minded, and the
room was dirty and untidy, because, as Mme. Gantier explained, her
lameness prevented her from keeping it clean, and they could not afford
a charwoman. The pictures of the four dead sons hung on the wall, a
wisp of crape above each, with all their ribbons and citations. But when
Troy spoke of old M. Gantier and the daughter Mme. Gantier's face grew
like a stone, and her sister began to whimper like an animal.

Troy remembered the territorial's phrase: "You may say: _there's a
family wiped out_." He went away, too shy to give the five hundred
francs in his pocket.

One of his first cares on getting back to France had been to order a
head-stone for Paul Gantier's grave at Mondement. A week or two after
his meeting with Mme. Gantier, his ambulance was ordered to Epernay, and
he managed to get out to Mondement and have the stone set up and the
grave photographed. He had brought some flowers to lay on it, and he
borrowed two tin wreaths from the neighbouring crosses, so that Paul
Gantier's mound should seem the most fondly tended of all. He sent the
photograph to Mme. Gantier, with a five hundred franc bill; but after a
long time his letter came back from the post-office. The two old women
had gone....




VIII


In February Mr. Belknap arrived in Paris on a mission. Tightly buttoned
into his Red Cross uniform, he looked to his son older and fatter, but
more important and impressive, than usual.

He was on his way to Italy, where he was to remain for three months, and
Troy learned with dismay that he needed a secretary, and had brought
none with him because he counted on his son to fill the post.

"You've had nearly a year of this, old man, and the front's as quiet as
a church. As for Paris, isn't it too frivolous for you? It's much
farther from the war nowadays than New York. I haven't had a dinner like
this since your mother joined the Voluntary Rationing League," Mr.
Belknap smiled at him across their little table at the Nouveau Luxe.

"I'm glad to hear it--about New York, I mean," Troy answered composedly.
"It's _our_ turn now. But Paris isn't a bit too frivolous for me. Which
shall it be, father--the Palais Royal--or the Capucines? They say the
new _revue_ there is great fun."

Mr. Belknap was genuinely shocked. He had caught the war fever late in
life, and late in the war, and his son's flippancy surprised and pained
him.

"The theatre? We don't go to the theatre...." He paused to light his
cigar, and added, embarrassed: "Really, Troy, now there's so little
doing here, don't you think you might be more useful in Italy?"

Troy was anxious, for he was not sure that Mr. Belknap's influence
might not be sufficient to detach him from his job on a temporary
mission; but long experience in dealing with parents made him assume a
greater air of coolness as his fears increased.

"Well, you see, father, so many other chaps have taken advantage of the
lull to go off on leave that if I asked to be detached now--well, it
wouldn't do me much good with my chief," he said cunningly, guessing
that if he appeared to yield his father might postpone action.

"Yes, I see," Mr. Belknap rejoined, impressed by the military character
of the argument. He was still trying to get used to the fact that he was
himself under orders, and nervous visions of a sort of mitigated
court-martial came to him in the middle of pleasant dinners, or jumped
him out of his morning sleep like an alarm-clock.

Troy saw that his point was gained; but he regretted having proposed
the Capucines to his father. He himself was not shocked by the seeming
indifference of Paris: he thought the gay theatres, the crowded shops,
the restaurants groaning with abundance, were all healthy signs of the
nation's irrepressible vitality. But he understood that America's young
zeal might well be chilled by the first contact with this careless
exuberance, so close to the lines where young men like himself were
dying day by day in order that the curtain might ring up punctually on
low-necked _revues_, and fat neutrals feast undisturbed on lobster and
champagne. Only now and then he asked himself what had become of the
Paris of the Marne, and what would happen if ever again----But that of
course was nonsense....

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Belknap left for Italy--and two days afterward Troy's ambulance was
roused from semi-inaction and hurried to Beauvais. The retreat from St.
Quentin had begun, and Paris was once again the Paris of the Marne.

The same--but how different!--were the tense days that followed. Troy
Belknap, instead of hanging miserably about marble hotels and waiting
with restless crowds for the communiqués to appear in the windows of the
newspaper offices, was in the thick of the retreat, swept back on its
tragic tide, his heart wrung, but his imagination hushed by the fact of
participating in the struggle, playing a small dumb indefatigable part,
relieving a little fraction of the immense anguish and the dreadful
disarray.

The mere fact of lifting a wounded man "so that it wouldn't hurt"; of
stiffening one's lips to a smile as the ambulance pulled up in the
market-place of a terror-stricken village; of calling out "Nous les
tenons!" to whimpering women and bewildered old people; of giving a lift
to a family of foot-sore refugees; of prying open a tin of condensed
milk for the baby, or taking down the address of a sister in Paris, with
the promise to bring her news of the fugitives; the heat and the burden
and the individual effort of each minute carried one along through the
endless and yet breathless hours--backward and forward, backward and
forward, between Paris and the fluctuating front, till in Troy's weary
brain the ambulance took on the semblance of a tireless grey shuttle
humming in the hand of Fate....

It was on one of these trips that, for the first time, he saw a
train-load of American soldiers on the way to the battle front. He had,
of course, seen plenty of them in Paris during the months since his
arrival; seen them vaguely roaming the streets, or sitting in front of
cafés, or wooed by polyglot sirens in the obscure promiscuity of
cinema-palaces.

At first he had seized every chance of talking to them; but either his
own shyness or theirs seemed to paralyze him. He found them, as a rule,
bewildered, depressed and unresponsive. They wanted to kill Germans all
right, they said; but this hanging around Paris wasn't what they'd
bargained for, and there was a good deal more doing back home at Podunk
or Tombstone or Skohegan.

It was not only the soldiers who took this depreciatory view of France.
Some of the officers whom Troy met at his friends' houses discouraged
him more than the enlisted men with whom he tried to make friends in the
cafés. They had more definite and more unfavourable opinions as to the
country they had come to defend. They wanted to know, in God's name,
where in the blasted place you could get fried hominy and a real
porter-house steak for breakfast, and when the ball-game season began,
and whether it rained every day all the year round; and Troy's timid
efforts to point out some of the compensating advantages of Paris failed
to excite any lasting interest.

But now he seemed to see a different race of men. The faces leaning from
the windows of the train glowed with youthful resolution. The soldiers
were out on their real business at last, and as Troy looked at them, so
alike and so innumerable, he had the sense of a force, inexorable and
exhaustless, poured forth from the reservoirs of the new world to
replenish the wasted veins of the old.

"Hooray!" he shouted frantically, waving his cap at the passing train;
but as it disappeared he hung his head and swore under his breath.
There they went, his friends and fellows, as he had so often dreamed of
seeing them, racing in their hundreds of thousands to the rescue of
France; and he was still too young to be among them, and could only
yearn after them with all his aching heart!

After a hard fortnight of day-and-night work he was ordered a few days
off, and sulkily resigned himself to inaction. For the first twenty-four
hours he slept the leaden sleep of weary youth, and for the next he
moped on his bed in the Infirmary; but the third day he crawled out to
take a look at Paris.

The long-distance bombardment was going on, and now and then, at
irregular intervals, there was a more or less remote crash, followed by
a long reverberation. But the life of the streets was not affected.
People went about their business as usual, and it was obvious that the
strained look on every face was not caused by the random fall of a few
shells, but by the perpetual vision of that swaying and receding line on
which all men's thoughts were fixed. It was sorrow, not fear, that Troy
read in all those anxious eyes--sorrow over so much wasted effort, such
high hopes thwarted, so many dear-bought miles of France once more under
the German heel.

That night when he came home he found a letter from his mother. At the
very end, in a crossed postscript, he read: "Who do you suppose sailed
last week? Sophy Wicks. Soon there'll be nobody left! Old Mrs. Wicks
died in January--did I tell you?--and Sophy has sent the children to
Long Island with their governess, and rushed over to do Red Cross
nursing. It seems she had taken a course at the Presbyterian without
any one's knowing it. I've promised to keep an eye on the children. Let
me know if you see her."

Sophy Wicks in France! There was hardly room in his troubled mind for
the news. What Sophy Wicks did or did not do had shrunk to utter
insignificance in the crash of falling worlds. He was rather sorry to
have to class her with the other hysterical girls fighting for a pretext
to get to France; but what did it all matter, anyhow? On the way home he
had overheard an officer in the street telling a friend that the Germans
were at Creil....

Then came the day when the advance was checked. The glorious
counter-attack of General Mangin gave France new faith in her armies,
and Paris irrepressibly burst at once into abounding life. It was as if
she were ashamed of having doubted, as if she wanted, by a livelier
renewal of activities, to proclaim her unshakable faith in her
defenders. In the perpetual sunshine of the most golden of springs she
basked and decked herself, and mirrored her recovered beauty in the
Seine.

And still the cloudless weeks succeeded each other, days of blue warmth
and nights of silver lustre; and still, behind the impenetrable wall of
the front, the Beast dumbly lowered and waited. Then one morning, toward
the end of May, Troy, waking late after an unusually hard day, read:
"The new German offensive has begun. The Chemin des Dames has been
retaken by the enemy. Our valiant troops are resisting heroically...."

Ah, now indeed they were on the road to Paris! In a flash of horror he
saw it all. The bitter history of the war was re-enacting itself, and
the battle of the Marne was to be fought again....

The misery of the succeeding days would have been intolerable if there
had been time to think of it. But day and night there was no respite for
Troy's service; and, being by this time a practised hand, he had to be
continually on the road.

On the second day he received orders to evacuate the wounded from an
American base hospital near the Marne. It was actually the old
battleground he was to traverse; only, before, he had traversed it in
the wake of the German retreat, and now it was the allied troops who,
slowly, methodically, and selling every inch dear, were falling back
across the sacred soil. Troy faced eastward with a heavy heart....




IX


The next morning at daylight they started for the front.

Troy's breast swelled with the sense of the approach to something bigger
than he had yet known. The air of Paris, that day, was heavy with doom.
There was no mistaking its taste on the lips. It was the air of the
Marne that he was breathing....

Here he was, once more involved in one of the great convulsions of
destiny, and still almost as helpless a spectator as when, four years
before, he had strayed the burning desert of Paris and cried out in his
boy's heart for a share in the drama. Almost as helpless, yes--in spite
of his four more years, his grown-up responsibilities, and the blessed
uniform thanks to which he, even he, a poor little ambulance-driver of
eighteen, ranked as a soldier of the great untried army of his country.
It was something--it was a great deal--to be even the humblest part, the
most infinitesimal cog, in that mighty machinery of the future; but it
was not enough, at this turning-point of history, for one who had so
lived it all in advance, who was so aware of it now that it had come,
who had carried so long on his lips the taste of its scarcely breathable
air.

As the ambulance left the gates of Paris, and hurried eastward in the
grey dawn, this sense of going toward something new and overwhelming
continued to grow in Troy. It was probably the greatest hour of the war
that was about to strike--and he was still too young to give himself to
the cause he had so long dreamed of serving.

From the moment they left the gates the road was encumbered with huge
grey motor-trucks, limousines, torpedoes, motor-cycles, long trains of
artillery, army kitchens, supply wagons, all the familiar elements of
the procession he had so often watched unrolling itself endlessly east
and west from the Atlantic to the Alps. Nothing new in the sight--but
something new in the faces! A look of having got beyond the accident of
living, and accepted what lay over the edge, in the dim land of the
final. He had seen that look in the days before the Marne....

Most of the faces on the way were French: as far as Epernay they met
their compatriots only in isolated groups. But whenever one of the
motor-trucks lumbering by bore a big U.S. on its rear panel Troy pushed
his light ambulance ahead and skimmed past, just for the joy of seeing
the fresh young heads rising pyramid-wise above the sides of the lorry,
hearing the snatches of familiar song--"Hail, hail, the gang's all
here!" and "We won't come back till it's over over there!"--and shouting
back, in reply to a stentorian "Hi, kid, beat it!", "Bet your life I
will, old man!"

Hubert Jacks, the young fellow who was with him, shouted back too, as
lustily; but between times he was more occupied with the details of
their own particular job--to which he was newer than Troy--and seemed
not to feel so intensely the weight of impending events.

As they neared the Montmirail monument: "Ever been over this ground
before?" Troy asked carelessly, and Jacks answered: "N--no."

"Ah--I have. I was here just after the battle of the Marne, in September
'fourteen."

"That so? You must have been quite a kid," said Jacks with indifference,
filling his pipe.

"Well--not _quite_," Troy rejoined sulkily; and they said no more.

At Epernay they stopped for lunch, and found the place swarming with
troops. Troy's soul was bursting within him: he wanted to talk and
remember and compare. But his companion was unimaginative, and perhaps a
little jealous of his greater experience. "He doesn't want to show that
he's new at the job," Troy decided.

They lunched together in a corner of the packed restaurant, and while
they were taking coffee some French officers came up and chatted with
Troy. To all of them he felt the desperate need of explaining that he
was driving an ambulance only because he was still too young to be
among the combatants.

"But I shan't be--soon!" he always added, in the tone of one who
affirms. "It's merely a matter of a few weeks now."

"Oh, you all look like babies--but you all fight like devils," said a
young French lieutenant seasoned by four years at the front; and another
officer added gravely: "Make haste to be old enough, _cher monsieur_. We
need you all--every one of you...."

"Oh, we're coming--we're all coming!" Troy cried.

That evening, after a hard and harrowing day's work between _postes de
secours_ and a base hospital, they found themselves in a darkened
village, where, after a summary meal under flying shells, some one
suggested ending up at the Y.M.C.A. hut.

The shelling had ceased, and there seemed nothing better to do than to
wander down the dark street to the underground shelter packed with
American soldiers. Troy was sleepy and tired, and would have preferred
to crawl into his bed at the inn; he felt, more keenly than ever, the
humiliation (the word was stupid, but he could find no other) of being
among all these young men, only a year or two his seniors, and none, he
was sure, more passionately eager than himself for the work that lay
ahead, and yet so hopelessly divided from him by that stupid difference
in age. But Hubert Jacks was seemingly unconscious of this, and only
desirous of ending his night cheerfully. It would have looked unfriendly
not to accompany him, so they pushed their way together through the
cellar door surmounted by the sociable red triangle.

It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from
wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing-boxes at a
long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little
oil lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their
white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. Others were
playing checkers, or looking at the illustrated papers, and everybody
was smoking and talking--not in large groups, but quietly, by twos or
threes. Young women in trig uniforms, with fresh innocent faces, moved
among the barrels and boxes, distributing stamps or books, chatting with
the soldiers, and being generally homelike and sisterly. The men gave
them back glances as honest, and almost as innocent, and an air of
simple daylight friendliness pervaded the Avernian cave.

It was the first time that Troy had ever seen a large group of his
compatriots so close to the fighting front, and in an hour of ease, and
he was struck by the gravity of the young faces, and the low tones of
their talk. Everything was in a minor key. No one was laughing or
singing or larking: the note was that which might have prevailed in a
club of quiet elderly men, or in a drawing-room where the guests did not
know each other well. Troy was all the more surprised because he
remembered the jolly calls of the young soldiers in the motor-trucks,
and the songs and horse-play of the gangs of trench-diggers and
hut-builders he had passed on the way. Was it that his compatriots did
not know how to laugh when they were at leisure, or was it rather that,
in the intervals of work, the awe of the unknown laid its hand on these
untried hearts?

Troy and Jacks perched on a packing-box, and talked a little with their
neighbours; but presently they were interrupted by the noise of a motor
stopping outside. There was a stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a
girl said eagerly: "Here she comes!"

Instantly the cellar woke up. The soldiers' faces grew young again, they
flattened themselves laughingly against the walls near the entrance, the
door above was cautiously opened, and a girl in a long blue cloak
appeared at the head of the stairs.

"Well, boys--you see I managed it!" she cried; and Troy recognized the
piercing accents and azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick.

"_She_ managed it!" the whole cellar roared as one man, drowning her
answer in a cheer. And, "Of course I did!" she continued, laughing and
nodding right and left as she made her triumphant way down the lane of
khaki, to what, at her appearance, had somehow promptly become the stage
at the farther end of a packed theatre. The elderly Y.M.C.A. official
who accompanied her puffed out his chest like a general and blinked
knowingly behind his gold eye-glasses.

Troy's first movement had been one of impatience. He hated all that Miss
Warlick personified, and hated it most of all on this sacred soil, and
at this fateful moment, with the iron wings of doom clanging so close
above their heads. But it would have been almost impossible to fight his
way out through the crowd that had closed in behind her--and he stayed.

The cheering subsided, she gained her improvised platform--a door laid
on some biscuit-boxes--and the recitation began.

She gave them all sorts of things, ranging from grave to gay, and
extracting from the sentimental numbers a peculiarly piercing effect
that hurt Troy like the twinge of a dental instrument. And her audience
loved it all, indiscriminately and voraciously, with souls hungry for
the home-flavour and long nurtured on what Troy called "cereal-fiction."
One had to admit that Miss Warlick knew her public, and could play on
every chord.

It might have been funny if it had not been so infinitely touching. They
were all so young, so serious, so far from home, and bound on a quest so
glorious! And there overhead, just above them, brooded and clanged the
black wings of their doom.... Troy's mockery was softened to tenderness,
and he felt, under the hard shell of his youthful omniscience, the stir
of all the things to which the others were unconsciously responding.

"And now, by special request, Miss Warlick is going to say a few words,"
the elderly eye-glassed officer importantly announced.

Ah, what a pity! If only she had ended on that last jolly chorus, so
full of artless laughter and tears! Troy remembered her dissertations on
the steamer, and winced at a fresh display of such fatuity in such a
scene.

She had let the cloak slip from her shoulders, and stepped to the edge
of her unsteady stage. Her eyes burned large in a face grown suddenly
grave.... For a moment she reminded him again of Sophy Wicks.

"Only a few words, really," she began apologetically; and the cellar
started a cheer of protest.

"No--not that kind. Something different...." She paused long enough to
let the silence prepare them: sharp little artist that she was! Then
she leaned forward. "This is what I want to say. I've come from the
French front--pretty near the edge. They're dying there, boys--dying by
thousands, _now_, this minute.... But that's not it--I know: you want me
to cut it out--and I'm going to.... But this is why I began that way;
because it was my first sight of--things of that sort. And I had to tell
you----"

She stopped, pale, her pretty mouth twitching.

"What I really wanted to say is this. Since I came to Europe, nearly a
year ago, I've got to know the country they're dying for--and I
understand why they mean to go on and on dying--if they have to--till
there isn't one of them left.

"Boys--I know France now--and she's worth it! Don't you make any
mistake!

"I have to laugh now when I remember what I thought of France when I
landed. My! How d'you suppose she'd got on so long without us? Done a
few things too--poor little toddler! Well--it was time we took her by
the hand, and showed her how to behave. And I wasn't the only one
either; I guess most of us thought we'd have to teach her her letters.
Maybe some of you boys right here felt that way too?"

A guilty laugh, and loud applause.

"Thought so," said Miss Warlick, smiling.

"Well," she continued, "there wasn't hardly anything _I_ wasn't ready to
teach them. On the steamer coming out with us there was a lot of those
Amb'lance boys. My! How I gassed to them. I said the French had got to
be taught how to love their mothers--I said they hadn't any
home-feeling--and didn't love children the way we do. I've been round
among them some since then, in the hospitals, and I've seen fellows
lying there shot 'most to death, and their little old mothers in white
caps arriving from 'way off at the other end of France. Well, those
fellows know how to see their mothers coming even if they're blind, and
how to hug 'em even if their arms are off.... And the children--the way
they go on about the children! Ever seen a French soldier yet that
didn't have a photograph of a baby stowed away somewhere in his dirty
uniform? I never have. I tell you, they're _white_! And they're fighting
as only people can who feel that way about mothers and babies. The way
we're going to fight; and maybe we'll prove it to 'em sooner than any of
us think....

"Anyhow, I wanted to get this off my chest to-night; not for _you_, only
for myself. I didn't want to have a shell get me before I'd said
'Veever la France!' before all of you.

"See here, boys--the Marcellaze!"

She snatched a flag from the wall, drawing herself up to heroic height;
and the whole cellar joined her in a roar.




X


The next morning Jacks dragged Troy out of bed by the feet. The room was
still dark, and through the square of the low window glittered a bunch
of stars.

"Hurry call to Montmirail--step lively!" Jacks ordered, his voice thick
with sleep.

All the old names; with every turn of the wheel they seemed to be
drawing nearer and nearer to the ravaged spot of earth where Paul
Gantier slept his faithful sleep. Strange if, to-day of all days, Troy
should again stand by his friend's grave.

They pushed along eastward under the last stars, the roll of the cannon
crashing through the quiet dawn. The birds flew up with frightened cries
from the trees along the roadside; rooks cawed their warning from clump
to clump, and gathered in the sky in dark triangles flying before the
danger.

The east began to redden through the dust-haze of the cloudless air. As
they advanced the road became more and more crowded, and the ambulance
was caught in the usual dense traffic of the front: artillery,
field-kitchens, motor-trucks, horse-wagons, hay-carts packed with
refugees, and popping motor-cycles zigzagging through the tangle of
vehicles. The movement seemed more feverish and uncertain than usual,
and now and then the road was jammed, and curses, shouts and the crack
of heavy whips sounded against the incessant cannonade that hung its
iron curtain above the hills to the north-east. The faces of soldiers
and officers were unshaved sallow drawn with fatigue and anxiety. Women
crouched sobbing on their piled-up baggage, and here and there, by the
roadside, a little country cart had broken down, and the occupants sat
on the bank watching the confusion like impassive lookers-on.

Suddenly, in the thickest of the struggle, a heavy lorry smashed into
Troy's ambulance, and he felt the unmistakable wrench of the
steering-gear. The car shook like a careening boat, and then righted
herself and stopped.

"Oh, hell!" shouted Jacks in a fury. The two lads jumped down, and in a
few minutes they saw that they were stranded beyond remedy. Tears of
anger rushed into Troy's eyes. On this day of days he was not even to
accomplish his own humble job!

Another ambulance of their own formation overtook them, and it was
agreed that Jacks, who was the sharper of the two, was to get a lift to
the nearest town, and try to bring back a spare part, or, failing that,
pick up some sort of a car in which they could continue their work.

Troy was left by the roadside. Hour after hour he sat there waiting and
cursing his fate. When would Jacks be back again? Not at all, most
likely; it was ten to one he would be caught on the way and turned on to
some more pressing job. He knew, and Troy knew, that their ambulance was
for the time being a hopeless wreck, and would probably have to stick
ignominiously in its ditch till some one could go and fetch a spare part
from Paris. And meanwhile, what might not be happening nearer by?

The rumble and thump of the cannonade grew more intense; a violent
engagement was evidently going on not far off. Troy pulled out his map
and tried to calculate how far he was from the front; but the front, at
that point, was a wavering and incalculable line. He had an idea that
the fighting was much nearer than he or Jacks had imagined. The place at
which they had broken down must be about fifteen miles from the Marne.
But could it be possible that the Germans had crossed the Marne?

Troy grew hungry, and thrust his hand in his pocket to pull out a
sandwich. With it came a letter of his mother's, carried off in haste
when he left Paris the previous morning. He re-read it with a mournful
smile. "Of course we all know the Allies must win; but the preparations
here seem so slow and blundering; and the Germans are still so
strong...." (Thump, thump, the artillery echoed: "_Strong!_") And just
at the end of the letter, again; "I do wonder if you'll run across
Sophy...."

He lit a cigarette, and shut his eyes and thought. The sight of Miss
Warlick had made Sophy Wicks's presence singularly vivid to him: he had
fallen asleep thinking of her the night before. How like her to have
taken a course at the Presbyterian Hospital without letting any one
know! He wondered that he had not suspected, under her mocking
indifference, an ardour as deep as his own, and he was ashamed of having
judged her as others had, when, for so long, the thought of her had been
his torment and his joy. Where was she now, he wondered? Probably in
some hospital in the south or the centre: the authorities did not let
beginners get near the front, though, of course, it was what all the
girls were mad for.... Well, Sophy would do her work wherever it was
assigned to her: he did not see her intriguing for a showy post.

Troy began to marvel again at the spell of France--his France! Here was
a girl who had certainly not come in quest of vulgar excitement, as so
many did: Sophy had always kept herself scornfully aloof from the pretty
ghouls who danced and picnicked on the ruins of the world. He knew that
her motives, so jealously concealed, must have been as pure and urgent
as his own. France, which she hardly knew, had merely guessed at through
the golden blur of a six weeks' midsummer trip, France had drawn her
with an irresistible pressure; and the moment she had felt herself free
she had come. "Whither thou goest will I go, thy people shall be my
people...." Yes, France was the Naomi-country that had but to beckon,
and her children rose and came....

Troy was exceedingly tired: he stretched himself on the dusty bank, and
the noise of the road-traffic began to blend with the cannonade in his
whirling brain. Suddenly he fancied the Germans were upon him. He
thought he heard the peppering volley of machine-guns, shouts, screams,
rifle-shots close at hand....

He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

What he had heard was the cracking of whips and the shouting of carters
urging tired farm-horses along. Down a by-road to his left a stream of
haggard country people was pouring from the direction of the Marne. This
time only a few were in the carts: the greater number were flying on
their feet, the women carrying their babies, the old people bent under
preposterous bundles, blankets, garden utensils, cages with rabbits, an
agricultural prize framed and glazed, a wax wedding-wreath under a
broken globe. Sick and infirm people were dragged and shoved along by
the older children: a goitred idiot sat in a wheel-barrow pushed by a
girl, and laughed and pulled its tongue....

In among the throng Troy began to see the torn blue uniforms of wounded
soldiers limping on bandaged legs.... Others too, not wounded, elderly
haggard territorials, with powder-black faces, bristling beards, and the
horror of the shell-roar in their eyes.... One of them stopped near
Troy, and in a thick voice begged for a drink ... just a drop of
anything, for Gods sake. Others followed, pleading for food and drink.
"Gas, gas ..." a young artilleryman gasped at him through distorted
lips.... The Germans were over the Marne, they told him, the Germans
were coming. It was hell back there, no one could stand it.

Troy ransacked the ambulance, found water, brandy, biscuits, condensed
milk, and set up an impromptu canteen. But the people who had clustered
about him were pushed forward by others crying: "Are you mad to stay
here? The Germans are coming!"--and in a feeble panic they pressed on.

One old man, trembling with fatigue, and dragging a shaking brittle old
woman, had spied the stretcher beds inside the ambulance, and without
asking leave scrambled in and pulled his wife after him. They fell like
logs on to the grey blankets, and a livid territorial with a bandaged
arm drenched in blood crawled in after them and sank on the floor. The
rest of the crowd had surged by.

As he was helping the wounded soldier to settle himself in the
ambulance, Troy heard a new sound down the road. It was a deep
continuous rumble, the rhythmic growl of a long train of army-trucks.
The way must have been cleared to let them by, for there was no break or
faltering in the ever-deepening roar of their approach.

A cloud of dust rolled ahead, growing in volume with the growing noise;
now the first trucks were in sight, huge square olive-brown motor-trucks
stacked high with scores and scores of rosy soldiers. Troy jumped to his
feet with a shout. It was an American regiment being rushed to the
front!

The refugees and the worn-out blue soldiers fell back before the
triumphant advance, and a weak shout went up. The rosy soldiers shouted
back, but their faces were grave and set. It was clear that they knew
where they were going, and to what work they had been so hurriedly
summoned.

"It's hell back there!" a wounded territorial called out, pointing
backward over his bandaged shoulder, and another cried: "Vive
l'Amérique!"

"Vive la France!" shouted the truckful abreast of Troy, and the same cry
burst from his own lungs. A few miles off the battle of the Marne was
being fought again, and here were his own brothers rushing forward to
help! He felt that his greatest hour had struck.

One of the trucks had halted for a minute just in front of him, marking
time, and the lads leaning over its side had seen him, and were calling
out friendly college calls.

"Come along and help!" cried one, as the truck got under way again.

Troy glanced at his broken-down motor; then his eye lit on a rifle lying
close by in the dust of the roadside. He supposed it belonged to the
wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance.

He caught up the rifle, scrambled up over the side with the soldier's
help, and was engulfed among his brothers. Furtively he had pulled the
ambulance badge from his collar ... but a moment later he understood the
uselessness of the precaution. All that mattered to any one just then
was that he was one more rifle for the front.




XI


On the way he tried to call up half-remembered snatches of military
lore.

If only he did not disgrace them by a blunder!

He had talked enough to soldiers, French and American, in the last year:
he recalled odd bits of professional wisdom, but he was too excited to
piece them together. He was not in the least afraid of being afraid, but
his heart sank at the dread of doing something stupid, inopportune,
idiotic. His envy of the youths beside him turned to veneration. They
had all been in the front line, and knew its vocabulary, its dangers and
its dodges.

All he could do was to watch and imitate....

Presently they were all tumbled out of the motors and drawn up by the
roadside. An officer bawled unintelligible orders, and the men executed
mysterious movements in obedience.

Troy crept close to the nearest soldier, and copied his gestures
awkwardly--but no one noticed. Night had fallen, and he was thankful for
the darkness. Perhaps by to-morrow morning he would have picked up a few
of their tricks. Meanwhile, apparently, all he had to do was to march,
march, march, at a sort of break-neck trot that the others took as
lightly as one skims the earth in a dream. If it had not been for his
pumping heart and his aching bursting feet, Troy at moments would have
thought it was a dream....

Rank by rank they pressed forward in the night toward a sky-line torn
with intermittent flame.

"We're going toward a battle," Troy sang to himself, "toward a battle,
toward a battle...." But the words meant no more to him than the
doggerel the soldier was chanting at his elbow.

       *       *       *       *       *

They were in a wood, slipping forward cautiously, beating their way
through the under-growth. The night had grown cloudy, but now and then
the clouds broke, and a knot of stars clung to a branch like swarming
bees.

At length a halt was called in a clearing, and then the group to which
Troy had attached himself was ordered forward. He did not understand the
order, but seeing the men moving he followed, like a mascot dog trotting
after its company, and they began to beat their way onward, still more
cautiously, in little crawling lines of three or four. It reminded Troy
of "playing Indian" in his infancy.

"Careful ... watch out for 'em ..." the soldier next to him whispered,
clutching his arm at a noise in the underbrush; and Troy's heart jerked
back violently, though his legs were still pressing forward.

They were here, then: they might be close by in the blackness, behind
the next tree-hole, in the next clump of bushes--the destroyers of
France, old M. Gantier's murderers, the enemy to whom Paul Gantier had
given his life! These thoughts slipped confusedly through Troy's mind,
scarcely brushing it with a chill wing. His main feeling was one of a
base physical fear, and of a newly-awakened moral energy which had the
fear by the throat and held it down with shaking hands. Which of the two
would conquer, how many yards farther would the resolute Troy drag on
the limp coward through this murderous wood? That was the one thing that
mattered....

At length they dropped down into a kind of rocky hollow overhung with
bushes, and lay there, finger on trigger, hardly breathing. "Sleep a bit
if you can--you look beat," whispered the friendly soldier.

_Sleep!_

Troy's mind was whirling like a machine in a factory blazing with
lights. His thoughts rushed back over the miles he had travelled since
he had caught up the rifle by the roadside.

"My God!" he suddenly thought, "what am I doing here, anyhow? I'm a
deserter."

Yes: that was the name he would go by if ever his story became known.
And how should it not become known? He had deserted--deserted not only
his job, and his ambulance, and Jacks, who might come back at any
moment--it was a dead certainty to him now that Jacks would come
back--but also (incredible perfidy!) the poor worn-out old couple and
the wounded territorial who had crawled into the ambulance. He, Troy
Belknap, United States Army Ambulance driver, and sworn servant of
France, had deserted three sick and helpless people who, if things
continued to go badly, would almost certainly fall into the hands of the
Germans.... It was too horrible to think of, and so, after a minute or
two, he ceased to think of it--at least with the surface of his mind.

"If it's a court-martial it's a court-martial," he reflected; and began
to stretch his ears again for the sound of men slipping up in the
darkness through the bushes....

But he was really horribly tired, and in the midst of the tension the
blaze of lights in his head went out, and he fell into a half-conscious
doze. When he started into full consciousness again the men were
stirring, and he became aware that the sergeant was calling for
volunteers.

Volunteers for what? He didn't know and was afraid to ask. But it became
clear to him that the one chance to wash his guilt away (was that funny
old-fashioned phrase a quotation, and where did it come from?) was to
offer himself for the job, whatever it might be.

The decision once taken, he became instantly calm, happy and alert. He
observed the gesture made by the other volunteers and imitated it. It
was too dark for the sergeant to distinguish one man from another, and
without comment he let Troy fall into the line of men who were creeping
up out of the hollow.

The awful cannonade had ceased, and as they crawled along single file
between the trees the before-dawn twitter of birds rained down on them
like dew, and the woods smelt like the woods at home.

They came to the end of the trees, and guessed that the dark wavering
wall ahead was the edge of a wheat-field. Some one whispered that the
Marne was just beyond the wheat-field, and that the red flares they saw
must be over Château-Thierry.

The momentary stillness laid a reassuring touch on Troy's nerves, and he
slipped along adroitly at the tail of the line, alert but cool. Far off
the red flares still flecked the darkness, but they did not frighten
him. He said to himself: "People are always afraid in their first
battle. I'm not the least afraid, so I suppose this is not a battle" ...
and at the same moment there was a small shrieking explosion followed
by a horrible rattle of projectiles that seemed to spring up out of the
wheat at their feet.

The men dropped on their bellies and crawled away from it, and Troy
crawled after, sweating with fear. He had not looked back, but he knew
that some of the men must be lying where they had dropped, and suddenly
it occurred to him that it was his business to go and see....

Was it, though? Or would that be disobeying orders again?

The Ambulance driver's instinct awoke in him, and he did not stop to
consider, but turned and crawled back, straight back to the place that
the horrible explosion had come from. The firing had stopped, but in the
thin darkness he saw a body lying in front of him in the flattened
wheat. He looked in the direction from which he had come, and saw that
the sergeant and the rest of the men were disappearing to the right;
then he ramped forward again, forward and forward, till he touched the
arm of the motionless man and whispered: "Hi, kid, it's me...."

He tried to rouse the wounded man, to pull him forward, to tow him like
a barge along the beaten path in the wheat. But the man groaned and
resisted. He was evidently in great pain, and Troy, whom a year's
experience in ambulance work had enlightened, understood that he must
either be carried away or left where he was.

To carry him it was necessary to stand up, and the night was growing
transparent, and the wheat was not more than waist high.

Troy raised his head an inch or two and looked about him. In the east,
beyond the wheat, a pallor was creeping upward, drowning the last
stars. Any one standing up would be distinctly visible against that
pallor. With a sense of horror and reluctance and dismay he lifted the
wounded man and stood up. As he did so he felt a small tap on his back,
between the shoulders, as if some one had touched him from behind. He
half turned to see who it was, and doubled up, slipping down with the
wounded soldier in his arms.




XII


Troy, burning with fever, lay on a hospital bed.

He was not very clear where the hospital was, nor how he had got there;
and he did not greatly care. All that was left of clearness in his brain
was filled with the bitter sense of his failure. He had abandoned his
job to plunge into battle, and before he had seen a German or fired a
shot he found himself ignominiously laid by the heels in a strange place
full of benevolent-looking hypocrites whose least touch hurt him a
million times more than the German bullet.

It was all a stupid agitating muddle, in the midst of which he tried in
vain to discover what had become of Jacks, what had happened to the
ambulance, and whether the old people and the wounded territorial had
been heard of. He insisted particularly on the latter point to the cruel
shaved faces that were always stooping over him, but they seemed unable
to give him a clear answer--or else their cruelty prompted them to
withhold what they knew. He groaned and tossed and got no comfort, till,
suddenly opening his eyes, he found Jacks sitting by his bed.

He poured out his story to Jacks in floods and torrents: there was no
time to listen to what his friend had to say. He went in and out of the
whole business with him, explaining, arguing, and answering his own
arguments. Jacks, passive and bewildered, sat by the bed and murmured:
"All right--all right" at intervals. Then he too disappeared, giving
way to other unknown faces.

The third night (some one said it was the third night) the fever dropped
a little. Troy felt more quiet, and Jacks, who had turned up again, sat
beside him, and told him all the things he had not been able to listen
to the first day--all the great things in which he had played an
unconscious part.

"Battle of the Marne? Sure you were in it--in it up to the hilt, you
lucky kid!"

And what a battle it had been! The Americans had taken Vaux and driven
the Germans back across the bridge at Château-Thierry, the French were
pressing hard on their left flank, the advance on Paris had been
checked--and the poor old couple and the territorial in the ambulance
had not fallen into enemy hands, but had been discovered by Jacks where
Troy had left them, and hurried off to places of safety the same night.

As Troy lay and listened, tears of weakness and joy ran down his face.
The Germans were back across the Marne, and he had really been in the
action that had sent them there! The road to Paris was barred--and Sophy
Wicks was somewhere in France.... He felt as light as a feather, and if
it had not been for his deathly weakness he would have jumped out of bed
and insisted on rejoining the ambulance. But as it was he could only lie
flat and feebly return Jacks's grin....

       *       *       *       *       *

There was just one thing he had not told Jacks: a little thing that
Jacks would not have understood. Out in the wheat, when he had felt that
tap on the shoulder, he had turned round quickly, thinking that a friend
had touched him. At the same instant he had stumbled and fallen, and
his eyes had grown dark; but through the darkness he still felt
confusedly that a friend was near, if only he could lift his lids and
look.

He did lift them at last; and there in the dawn he saw a French soldier,
haggard and battle-worn, looking down at him. The soldier wore the
uniform of the _chasseurs à pied_, and his face was the face of Paul
Gantier, bending low and whispering: "_Mon petit--mon pauvre petit
gars...._" Troy heard the words distinctly, he knew the voice as well as
he knew his mother's. His eyes shut again, but he felt Gantier's arms
under his body, felt himself lifted, lifted, till he seemed to float in
the arms of his friend.

He said nothing of that to Jacks or any one, and now that the fever had
dropped he was glad he had held his tongue. Some one told him that a
sergeant of the _chasseurs à pied_ had found him and brought him in to
the nearest _poste de secours_, where Jacks, providentially, had run
across him and carried him back to the base. They told him that his
rescue had been wonderful, but that nobody knew what the sergeant's name
was, or where he had gone to.... ("If _ever_ a man ought to have had the
Croix de Guerre--!" one of the nurses interjected emotionally.)

Troy listened and shut his lips. It was really none of his business to
tell these people where the sergeant had gone to; but he smiled a little
when the doctor said: "Chances are a man like that hasn't got much use
for decorations ..." and when the emotional nurse added: "Well, you must
just devote the rest of your life to trying to find him."

Ah, yes, he would do that, Troy swore--he would do it on the
battlefields of France.




THE END


_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

       *       *       *       *       *

By EDITH WHARTON.


    THE HOUSE OF MIRTH.
    DESCENT OF MAN, and Other Stories.
    THE FRUIT OF THE TREE.
    THE HERMIT AND THE WILD WOMAN, and Other Stories.
    TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS.
    THE REEF.
    THE CUSTOM OF THE COUNTRY.
    XINGU, and Other Stories.
    SUMMER. A Novel.

    SANCTUARY.
    ETHAN FROME.

       *       *       *       *       *

By WINSTON CHURCHILL.


    THE CELEBRITY.
    RICHARD CARVEL.
    THE CRISIS.
    THE CROSSING.
    CONISTON.
    MR. CREWE'S CAREER.
    A MODERN CHRONICLE.
    THE INSIDE OF THE CUP.
    A FAR COUNTRY.
    THE DWELLING PLACE OF LIGHT.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE WORKS OF THOMAS HARDY


    TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES.
    FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD.
    THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE.
    A PAIR OF BLUE EYES.
    TWO ON A TOWER.
    THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE.
    THE WOODLANDERS.
    JUDE THE OBSCURE.
    THE TRUMPET-MAJOR.
    THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA.
    A LAODICEAN.
    DESPERATE REMEDIES.
    WESSEX TALES.
    LIFE'S LITTLE IRONIES.
    A GROUP OF NOBLE DAMES.
    UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE.
    THE WELL-BELOVED.
    A CHANGED MAN, and other Tales.
    WESSEX POEMS, and other Verses.
    POEMS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.



SANCTUARY

By Edith Wharton




PART I


It is not often that youth allows itself to feel undividedly happy: the
sensation is too much the result of selection and elimination to be within
reach of the awakening clutch on life. But Kate Orme, for once, had yielded
herself to happiness; letting it permeate every faculty as a spring rain
soaks into a germinating meadow. There was nothing to account for this
sudden sense of beatitude; but was it not this precisely which made it
so irresistible, so overwhelming? There had been, within the last two
months--since her engagement to Denis Peyton--no distinct addition to
the sum of her happiness, and no possibility, she would have affirmed,
of adding perceptibly to a total already incalculable. Inwardly and
outwardly the conditions of her life were unchanged; but whereas, before,
the air had been full of flitting wings, now they seemed to pause over
her and she could trust herself to their shelter.

Many influences had combined to build up the centre of brooding peace in
which she found herself. Her nature answered to the finest vibrations,
and at first her joy in loving had been too great not to bring with it a
certain confusion, a readjusting of the whole scenery of life. She found
herself in a new country, wherein he who had led her there was least able
to be her guide. There were moments when she felt that the first stranger
in the street could have interpreted her happiness for her more easily
than Denis. Then, as her eye adapted itself, as the lines flowed into each
other, opening deep vistas upon new horizons, she began to enter into
possession of her kingdom, to entertain the actual sense of its belonging
to her. But she had never before felt that she also belonged to it; and
this was the feeling which now came to complete her happiness, to give it
the hallowing sense of permanence.

She rose from the writing-table where, list in hand, she had been going
over the wedding-invitations, and walked toward the drawing-room window.
Everything about her seemed to contribute to that rare harmony of feeling
which levied a tax on every sense. The large coolness of the room, its fine
traditional air of spacious living, its outlook over field and woodland
toward the lake lying under the silver bloom of September; the very scent
of the late violets in a glass on the writing-table; the rosy-mauve masses
of hydrangea in tubs along the terrace; the fall, now and then, of a leaf
through the still air--all, somehow, were mingled in the suffusion of
well-being that yet made them seem but so much dross upon its current.

The girl’s smile prolonged itself at the sight of a figure approaching from
the lower slopes above the lake. The path was a short cut from the Peyton
place, and she had known that Denis would appear in it at about that hour.
Her smile, however, was prolonged not so much by his approach as by her
sense of the impossibility of communicating her mood to him. The feeling
did not disturb her. She could not imagine sharing her deepest moods with
any one, and the world in which she lived with Denis was too bright and
spacious to admit of any sense of constraint. Her smile was in truth a
tribute to that clear-eyed directness of his which was so often a refuge
from her own complexities.

Denis Peyton was used to being met with a smile. He might have been
pardoned for thinking smiles the habitual wear of the human countenance;
and his estimate of life and of himself was necessarily tinged by the
cordial terms on which they had always met each other. He had in fact found
life, from the start, an uncommonly agreeable business, culminating fitly
enough in his engagement to the only girl he had ever wished to marry,
and the inheritance, from his unhappy step-brother, of a fortune which
agreeably widened his horizon. Such a combination of circumstances might
well justify a young man in thinking himself of some account in the
universe; and it seemed the final touch of fitness that the mourning which
Denis still wore for poor Arthur should lend a new distinction to his
somewhat florid good looks.

Kate Orme was not without an amused perception of her future husband’s
point of view; but she could enter into it with the tolerance which
allows for the inconscient element in all our judgments. There was, for
instance, no one more sentimentally humane than Denis’s mother, the
second Mrs. Peyton, a scented silvery person whose lavender silks and
neutral-tinted manner expressed a mind with its blinds drawn down toward
all the unpleasantness of life; yet it was clear that Mrs. Peyton saw a
“dispensation” in the fact that her step-son had never married, and that
his death had enabled Denis, at the right moment, to step gracefully into
affluence. Was it not, after all, a sign of healthy-mindedness to take the
gifts of the gods in this religious spirit, discovering fresh evidence of
“design” in what had once seemed the sad fact of Arthur’s inaccessibility
to correction? Mrs. Peyton, beautifully conscious of having done her “best”
 for Arthur, would have thought it unchristian to repine at the providential
failure of her efforts. Denis’s deductions were, of course, a little less
direct than his mother’s. He had, besides, been fond of Arthur, and his
efforts to keep the poor fellow straight had been less didactic and more
spontaneous. Their result read itself, if not in any change in Arthur’s
character, at least in the revised wording of his will; and Denis’s moral
sense was pleasantly fortified by the discovery that it very substantially
paid to be a good fellow.

The sense of general providentialness on which Mrs. Peyton reposed had in
fact been confirmed by events which reduced Denis’s mourning to a mere
tribute of respect--since it would have been a mockery to deplore the
disappearance of any one who had left behind him such an unsavory wake as
poor Arthur. Kate did not quite know what had happened: her father was as
firmly convinced as Mrs. Peyton that young girls should not be admitted to
any open discussion of life. She could only gather, from the silences and
evasions amid which she moved, that a woman had turned up--a woman who was
of course “dreadful,” and whose dreadfulness appeared to include a sort
of shadowy claim upon Arthur. But the claim, whatever it was, had been
promptly discredited. The whole question had vanished and the woman with
it. The blinds were drawn again on the ugly side of things, and life was
resumed on the usual assumption that no such side existed. Kate knew only
that a darkness had crossed her sky and left it as unclouded as before.

Was it, perhaps, she now asked herself, the very lifting of the
cloud--remote, unthreatening as it had been--which gave such new serenity
to her heaven? It was horrible to think that one’s deepest security was
a mere sense of escape--that happiness was no more than a reprieve. The
perversity of such ideas was emphasized by Peyton’s approach. He had the
gift of restoring things to their normal relations, of carrying one over
the chasms of life through the closed tunnel of an incurious cheerfulness.
All that was restless and questioning in the girl subsided in his presence,
and she was content to take her love as a gift of grace, which began just
where the office of reason ended. She was more than ever, to-day, in this
mood of charmed surrender. More than ever he seemed the keynote of the
accord between herself and life, the centre of a delightful complicity in
every surrounding circumstance. One could not look at him without seeing
that there was always a fair wind in his sails.

It was carrying him toward her, as usual, at a quick confident pace,
which nevertheless lagged a little, she noticed, as he emerged from the
beech-grove and struck across the lawn. He walked as though he were tired.
She had meant to wait for him on the terrace, held in check by her usual
inclination to linger on the threshold of her pleasures; but now something
drew her toward him, and she went quickly down the steps and across the
lawn.

“Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened.”

She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she
glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the
fact that her approach had made no change in it.

“I am rather tired.--Is your father in?”

“Papa?” She looked up in surprise. “He went to town yesterday. Don’t you
remember?”

“Of course--I’d forgotten. You’re alone, then?” She dropped his arm and
stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed look of extreme
physical weariness.

“Denis--are you ill? _Has_ anything happened?”

He forced a smile. “Yes--but you needn’t look so frightened.”

She drew a deep breath of reassurance. _He_ was safe, after all! And
all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.

“Your mother--?” she then said, with a fresh start of fear.

“It’s not my mother.” They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the
house. “Let us go indoors. There’s such a beastly glare out here.”

He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where,
after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost
indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces
away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps
of wedding-cards.

“They are to be sent out to-morrow?”

“Yes.”

He turned back and stood before her.

“It’s about the woman,” he began abruptly--“the woman who pretended to be
Arthur’s wife.”

Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.

“She _was_ his wife, then?”

Peyton made an impatient movement of negation. “If she was, why didn’t she
prove it? She hadn’t a shred of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal.”

“Well, then--?”

“Well, she’s dead.” He paused, and the next words came with difficulty.
“She and the child.”

“The child? There was a child?”

“Yes.”

Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young
girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this
first sharp edge of fact.

“And both are dead?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know? My father said she had gone away--gone back to the
West--”

“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”

“Found her?”

He motioned toward the window. “Out there--in the lake.”

“Both?”

“Both.”

She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude
the vision. “She had drowned herself?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, poor thing--poor thing!”

They paused awhile, the minutes delving an abyss between them till he threw
a few irrelevant words across the silence.

“One of the gardeners found them.”

“Poor thing!”

“It was sufficiently horrible.”

“Horrible--oh!” She had swung round again to her pole. “Poor Denis!
_You_ were not there--_you_ didn’t have to--?”

“I had to see her.” She felt the instant relief in his voice. He could talk
now, could distend his nerves in the warm air of her sympathy. “I had to
identify her.” He rose nervously and began to pace the room. “It’s knocked
the wind out of me. I--my God! I couldn’t foresee it, could I?” He halted
before her with outstretched hands of argument. “I did all I could--it’s
not _my_ fault, is it?”

“Your fault? Denis!”

“She wouldn’t take the money--” He broke off, checked by her awakened
glance.

“The money? What money?” Her face changed, hardening as his relaxed. “Had
you offered her _money_ to give up the case?”

He stared a moment, and then dismissed the implication with a laugh.

“No--no; after the case was decided against her. She seemed hard up, and I
sent Hinton to her with a cheque.”

“And she refused it?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh, I don’t know--the usual thing. That she’d only wanted to prove she was
his wife--on the child’s account. That she’d never wanted his money. Hinton
said she was very quiet--not in the least excited--but she sent back the
cheque.”

Kate sat motionless, her head bent, her hands clasped about her knees. She
no longer looked at Peyton.

“Could there have been a mistake?” she asked slowly.

“A mistake?”

She raised her head now, and fixed her eyes on his, with a strange
insistence of observation. “Could they have been married?”

“The courts didn’t think so.”

“Could the courts have been mistaken?”

He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. “Good God, Kate!
We gave her every chance to prove her case--why didn’t she do it? You don’t
know what you’re talking about--such things are kept from girls. Why,
whenever a man of Arthur’s kind dies, such--such women turn up. There are
lawyers who live on such jobs--ask your father about it. Of course, this
woman expected to be bought off--”

“But if she wouldn’t take your money?”

“She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant
to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and
she was desperate; we don’t know how many times she may have been through
the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money
out of the heirs of any man who--who has been about with them.”

Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow
ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she
dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified
glance into it.

“But the child--the child was Arthur’s?”

Peyton shrugged his shoulders. “There again--how can we tell? Why, I don’t
suppose the woman herself--I wish to heaven your father were here to
explain!”

She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a
gesture almost maternal.

“Don’t let us talk of it,” she said. “You did all you could. Think what a
comfort you were to poor Arthur.”

He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or
resistance.

“I tried--I tried hard to keep him straight!”

“We all know that--every one knows it. And we know how grateful he
was--what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been
dreadful to think of his dying out there alone.”

She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep
lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed herself of lay in
her hold inert.

“It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that
dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among
strangers.”

He sat silent, his head dropping forward, his eyes fixed. “Among
strangers,” he repeated absently.

She looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “That poor woman--did you
ever see her while you were out there?”

He drew his hand away and gathered his brows together as if in an effort of
remembrance.

“I saw her--oh, yes, I saw her.” He pushed the tumbled hair from his
forehead and stood up. “Let us go out,” he said. “My head is in a fog. I
want to get away from it all.”

A wave of compunction drew her to her feet.

“It was my fault! I ought not to have asked so many questions.” She turned
and rang the bell. “I’ll order the ponies--we shall have time for a drive
before sunset.”


II

With the sunset in their faces they swept through the keen-scented autumn
air at the swiftest pace of Kate’s ponies. She had given the reins to
Peyton, and he had turned the horses’ heads away from the lake, rising by
woody upland lanes to the high pastures which still held the sunlight. The
horses were fresh enough to claim his undivided attention, and he drove in
silence, his smooth fair profile turned to his companion, who sat silent
also.

Kate Orme was engaged in one of those rapid mental excursions which were
forever sweeping her from the straight path of the actual into uncharted
regions of conjecture. Her survey of life had always been marked by the
tendency to seek out ultimate relations, to extend her researches to the
limit of her imaginative experience. But hitherto she had been like some
young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she
takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and
through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life. For the first moment
all was indistinguishable blackness; then she began to detect vague shapes
and confused gestures in the depths. There were people below there, men
like Denis, girls like herself--for under the unlikeness she felt the
strange affinity--all struggling in that awful coil of moral darkness, with
agonized hands reaching up for rescue. Her heart shrank from the horror of
it, and then, in a passion of pity, drew back to the edge of the abyss.
Suddenly her eyes turned toward Denis. His face was grave, but less
disturbed. And men knew about these things! They carried this abyss in
their bosoms, and went about smiling, and sat at the feet of innocence.
Could it be that Denis--Denis even--Ah, no! She remembered what he had been
to poor Arthur; she understood, now, the vague allusions to what he had
tried to do for his brother. He had seen Arthur down there, in that coiling
blackness, and had leaned over and tried to drag him out. But Arthur was
too deep down, and his arms were interlocked with other arms--they had
dragged each other deeper, poor souls, like drowning people who fight
together in the waves! Kate’s visualizing habit gave a hateful precision
and persistency to the image she had evoked--she could not rid herself of
the vision of anguished shapes striving together in the darkness. The
horror of it took her by the throat--she drew a choking breath, and felt
the tears on her face.

Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention
had strayed from them.

“This has done me good,” he began; but as he looked his voice changed.
“Kate! What is it? Why are you crying? Oh, for God’s sake, _don’t_!”
 he ended, his hand closing on her wrist.

She steadied herself and raised her eyes to his.

“I--I couldn’t help it,” she stammered, struggling in the sudden release of
her pent compassion. “It seems so awful that we should stand so close to
this horror--that it might have been you who--”

“I who--what on earth do you mean?” he broke in stridently.

“Oh, don’t you see? I found myself exulting that you and I were so far from
it--above it--safe in ourselves and each other--and then the other feeling
came--the sense of selfishness, of going by on the other side; and I tried
to realize that it might have been you and I who--who were down there in
the night and the flood--”

Peyton let the whip fall on the ponies’ flanks. “Upon my soul,” he said
with a laugh, “you must have a nice opinion of both of us.”

The words fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would
she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such
hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands
of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The
thought brought a wholesome reaction of thankfulness.

“Ah, well,” she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, “don’t you see
that I can bear to think such things only because they’re impossibilities?
It’s easy to look over into the depths if one has a rampart to lean on.
What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of that woman lying
there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so
exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel, doesn’t it, to let
what he was not add ever so little to the value of what you are? To let him
contribute ever so little to my happiness by the difference there is
between you?”

She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his
reach, through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring
susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a short
cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other side; but
now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught in the thick of
her hypothesis.

“It’s the difference that makes you care for me, then?” he broke out, with
a kind of violence which seemed to renew his clutch on her wrist.

“The difference?”

He lashed the ponies again, so sharply that a murmur escaped her, and he
drew them up, quivering, with an inconsequent “Steady, boys,” at which
their back-laid ears protested.

“It’s because I’m moral and respectable, and all that, that you’re fond of
me,” he went on; “you’re--you’re simply in love with my virtues. You
couldn’t imagine caring if I were down there in the ditch, as you say, with
Arthur?”

The question fell on a silence which seemed to deepen suddenly within
herself. Every thought hung bated on the sense that something was coming:
her whole consciousness became a void to receive it.

“Denis!” she cried.

He turned on her almost savagely. “I don’t want your pity, you know,” he
burst out. “You can keep that for Arthur. I had an idea women loved men for
themselves--through everything, I mean. But I wouldn’t steal your love--I
don’t want it on false pretenses, you understand. Go and look into other
men’s lives, that’s all I ask of you. I slipped into it--it was just a case
of holding my tongue when I ought to have spoken--but I--I--for God’s sake,
don’t sit there staring! I suppose you’ve seen all along that I knew he was
married to the woman.”


III

The housekeeper’s reminding her that Mr. Orme would be at home the next day
for dinner, and did she think he would like the venison with claret sauce
or jelly, roused Kate to the first consciousness of her surroundings.
Her father would return on the morrow: he would give to the dressing of
the venison such minute consideration as, in his opinion, every detail
affecting his comfort or convenience quite obviously merited. And if
it were not the venison it would be something else; if it were not the
housekeeper it would be Mr. Orme, charged with the results of a conference
with his agent, a committee-meeting at his club, or any of the other
incidents which, by happening to himself, became events. Kate found herself
caught in the inexorable continuity of life, found herself gazing over a
scene of ruin lit up by the punctual recurrence of habit as nature’s calm
stare lights the morrow of a whirlwind.

Life was going on, then, and dragging her at its wheels. She could
neither check its rush nor wrench loose from it and drop out--oh, how
blessedly--into darkness and cessation. She must go bounding on, racked,
broken, but alive in every fibre. The most she could hope was a few hours’
respite, not from her own terrors, but from the pressure of outward claims:
the midday halt, during which the victim is unbound while his torturers
rest from their efforts. Till her father’s return she would have the house
to herself, and, the question of the venison despatched, could give herself
to long lonely pacings of the empty rooms, and shuddering subsidences upon
her pillow.

Her first impulse, as the mist cleared from her brain, was the habitual one
of reaching out for ultimate relations. She wanted to know the worst; and
for her, as she saw in a flash, the worst of it was the core of fatality
in what had happened. She shrank from her own way of putting it--nor was
it even figuratively true that she had ever felt, under faith in Denis,
any such doubt as the perception implied. But that was merely because her
imagination had never put him to the test. She was fond of exposing herself
to hypothetical ordeals, but somehow she had never carried Denis with her
on these adventures. What she saw now was that, in a world of strangeness,
he remained the object least strange to her. She was not in the tragic case
of the girl who suddenly sees her lover unmasked. No mask had dropped from
Denis’s face: the pink shades had simply been lifted from the lamps, and
she saw him for the first time in an unmitigated glare.

Such exposure does not alter the features, but it lays an ugly emphasis
on the most charming lines, pushing the smile to a grin, the curve of
good-nature to the droop of slackness. And it was precisely into the
flagging lines of extreme weakness that Denis’s graceful contour flowed.
In the terrible talk which had followed his avowal, and wherein every word
flashed a light on his moral processes, she had been less startled by what
he had done than by the way in which his conscience had already become a
passive surface for the channelling of consequences. He was like a child
who had put a match to the curtains, and stands agape at the blaze.
It was horribly naughty to put the match--but beyond that the child’s
responsibility did not extend. In this business of Arthur’s, where all had
been wrong from the beginning--where self-defence might well find a plea
for its casuistries in the absence of a definite right to be measured
by--it had been easy, after the first slip, to drop a little lower with
each struggle. The woman--oh, the woman was--well, of the kind who prey on
such men. Arthur, out there, at his lowest ebb, had drifted into living
with her as a man drifts into drink or opium. He knew what she was--he
knew where she had come from. But he had fallen ill, and she had nursed
him--nursed him devotedly, of course. That was her chance, and she knew it.
Before he was out of the fever she had the noose around him--he came to and
found himself married. Such cases were common enough--if the man recovered
he bought off the woman and got a divorce. It was all a part of the
business--the marriage, the bribe, the divorce. Some of those women made a
big income out of it--they were married and divorced once a year. If Arthur
had only got well--but, instead, he had a relapse and died. And there was
the woman, made his widow by mischance as it were, with her child on her
arm--whose child?--and a scoundrelly black-mailing lawyer to work up her
case for her. Her claim was clear enough--the right of dower, a third of
his estate. But if he had never meant to marry her? If he had been trapped
as patently as a rustic fleeced in a gambling-hell? Arthur, in his last
hours, had confessed to the marriage, but had also acknowledged its folly.
And after his death, when Denis came to look about him and make inquiries,
he found that the witnesses, if there had been any, were dispersed and
undiscoverable. The whole question hinged on Arthur’s statement to his
brother. Suppress that statement, and the claim vanished, and with it the
scandal, the humiliation, the life-long burden of the woman and child
dragging the name of Peyton through heaven knew what depths. He had thought
of that first, Denis swore, rather than of the money. The money, of course,
had made a difference,--he was too honest not to own it--but not till
afterward, he declared--would have declared on his honour, but that the
word tripped him up, and sent a flush to his forehead.

Thus, in broken phrases, he flung his defence at her: a defence improvised,
pieced together as he went along, to mask the crude instinctiveness of his
act. For with increasing clearness Kate saw, as she listened, that there
had been no real struggle in his mind; that, but for the grim logic of
chance, he might never have felt the need of any justification. If the
woman, after the manner of such baffled huntresses, had wandered off in
search of fresh prey, he might, quite sincerely, have congratulated himself
on having saved a decent name and an honest fortune from her talons. It was
the price she had paid to establish her claim that for the first time
brought him to a startled sense of its justice. His conscience responded
only to the concrete pressure of facts.

It was with the anguish of this discovery that Kate Orme locked herself in
at the end of their talk. How the talk had ended, how at length she had got
him from the room and the house, she recalled but confusedly. The tragedy
of the woman’s death, and of his own share in it, were as nothing in the
disaster of his bright irreclaimableness. Once, when she had cried out,
“You would have married me and said nothing,” and he groaned back, “But
I _have_ told you,” she felt like a trainer with a lash above some
bewildered animal.

But she persisted savagely. “You told me because you had to; because your
nerves gave way; because you knew it couldn’t hurt you to tell.” The
perplexed appeal of his gaze had almost checked her. “You told me because
it was a relief; but nothing will really relieve you--nothing will really
help you--till you have told some one who--who _will_ hurt you.”

“Who will hurt me--?”

“Till you have told the truth as--as openly as you lied.”

He started up, ghastly with fear. “I don’t understand you.”

“You must confess, then--publicly--openly--you must go to the judge. I
don’t know how it’s done.”

“To the judge? When they’re both dead? When everything is at an end? What
good could that do?” he groaned.

“Everything is not at an end for you--everything is just beginning. You
must clear yourself of this guilt; and there is only one way--to confess
it. And you must give back the money.”

This seemed to strike him as conclusive proof of her irrelevance. “I wish I
had never heard of the money! But to whom would you have me give it back? I
tell you she was a waif out of the gutter. I don’t believe any one knew her
real name--I don’t believe she had one.”

“She must have had a mother and father.”

“Am I to devote my life to hunting for them through the slums of
California? And how shall I know when I have found them? It’s impossible to
make you understand. I did wrong--I did horribly wrong--but that is not the
way to repair it.”

“What is, then?”

He paused, a little askance at the question. “To do better--to do my best,”
 he said, with a sudden flourish of firmness. “To take warning by this
dreadful--”

“Oh, be silent,” she cried out, and hid her face. He looked at her
hopelessly.

At last he said: “I don’t know what good it can do to go on talking. I have
only one more thing to say. Of course you know that you are free.”

He spoke simply, with a sudden return to his old voice and accent, at which
she weakened as under a caress. She lifted her head and gazed at him. “Am
I?” she said musingly.

“Kate!” burst from him; but she raised a silencing hand.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that I am imprisoned--imprisoned with you in
this dreadful thing. First I must help you to get out--then it will be time
enough to think of myself.”

His face fell and he stammered: “I don’t understand you.”

“I can’t say what I shall do--or how I shall feel--till I know what you are
going to do and feel.”

“You must see how I feel--that I’m half dead with it.”

“Yes--but that is only half.”

He turned this over for a perceptible space of time before asking slowly:
“You mean that you’ll give me up, if I don’t do this crazy thing you
propose?”

She paused in turn. “No,” she said; “I don’t want to bribe you. You must
feel the need of it yourself.”

“The need of proclaiming this thing publicly?”

“Yes.”

He sat staring before him. “Of course you realize what it would mean?” he
began at length.

“To you?” she returned.

“I put that aside. To others--to you. I should go to prison.”

“I suppose so,” she said simply.

“You seem to take it very easily--I’m afraid my mother wouldn’t.”

“Your mother?” This produced the effect he had expected.

“You hadn’t thought of her, I suppose? It would probably kill her.”

“It would have killed her to think that you could do what you have done!”

“It would have made her very unhappy; but there’s a difference.”

Yes: there was a difference; a difference which no rhetoric could disguise.
The secret sin would have made Mrs. Peyton wretched, but it would not
have killed her. And she would have taken precisely Denis’s view of the
elasticity of atonement: she would have accepted private regrets as
the genteel equivalent of open expiation. Kate could even imagine her
extracting a “lesson” from the providential fact that her son had not
been found out.

“You see it’s not so simple,” he broke out, with a tinge of doleful
triumph.

“No: it’s not simple,” she assented.

“One must think of others,” he continued, gathering faith in his argument
as he saw her reduced to acquiescence.

She made no answer, and after a moment he rose to go. So far, in
retrospect, she could follow the course of their talk; but when, in the
act of parting, argument lapsed into entreaty, and renunciation into the
passionate appeal to give him at least one more hearing, her memory lost
itself in a tumult of pain, and she recalled only that, when the door
closed on him, he took with him her promise to see him once again.


IV

She had promised to see him again; but the promise did not imply that she
had rejected his offer of freedom. In the first rush of misery she had not
fully repossessed herself, had felt herself entangled in his fate by a
hundred meshes of association and habit; but after a sleepless night spent
with the thought of him--that dreadful bridal of their souls--she woke to a
morrow in which he had no part. She had not sought her freedom, nor had he
given it; but a chasm had opened at their feet, and they found themselves
on different sides.

Now she was able to scan the disaster from the melancholy vantage of her
independence. She could even draw a solace from the fact that she had
ceased to love Denis. It was inconceivable that an emotion so interwoven
with every fibre of consciousness should cease as suddenly as the flow of
sap in an uprooted plant; but she had never allowed herself to be tricked
by the current phraseology of sentiment, and there were no stock axioms to
protect her from the truth.

It was probably because she had ceased to love him that she could look
forward with a kind of ghastly composure to seeing him again. She had
stipulated, of course, that the wedding should be put off, but she had
named no other condition beyond asking for two days to herself--two days
during which he was not even to write. She wished to shut herself in with
her misery, to accustom herself to it as she had accustomed herself to
happiness. But actual seclusion was impossible: the subtle reactions of
life almost at once began to break down her defences. She could no more
have her wretchedness to herself than any other emotion: all the lives
about her were so many unconscious factors in her sensations. She tried
to concentrate herself on the thought as to how she could best help poor
Denis; for love, in ebbing, had laid bare an unsuspected depth of pity.
But she found it more and more difficult to consider his situation in the
abstract light of right and wrong. Open expiation still seemed to her the
only possible way of healing; but she tried vainly to think of Mrs. Peyton
as taking such a view. Yet Mrs. Peyton ought at least to know what had
happened: was it not, in the last resort, she who should pronounce on
her son’s course? For a moment Kate was fascinated by this evasion of
responsibility; she had nearly decided to tell Denis that he must begin by
confessing everything to his mother. But almost at once she began to shrink
from the consequences. There was nothing she so dreaded for him as that any
one should take a light view of his act: should turn its irremediableness
into an excuse. And this, she foresaw, was what Mrs. Peyton would do. The
first burst of misery over, she would envelop the whole situation in a mist
of expediency. Brought to the bar of Kate’s judgment, she at once revealed
herself incapable of higher action.

Kate’s conception of her was still under arraignment when the actual Mrs.
Peyton fluttered in. It was the afternoon of the second day, as the girl
phrased it in the dismal re-creation of her universe. She had been thinking
so hard of Mrs. Peyton that the lady’s silvery insubstantial presence
seemed hardly more than a projection of the thought; but as Kate collected
herself, and regained contact with the outer world, her preoccupation
yielded to surprise. It was unusual for Mrs. Peyton to pay visits. For
years she had remained enthroned in a semi-invalidism which prohibited
effort while it did not preclude diversion; and the girl at once divined a
special purpose in her coming.

Mrs. Peyton’s traditions would not have permitted any direct method of
attack; and Kate had to sit through the usual prelude of ejaculation and
anecdote. Presently, however, the elder lady’s voice gathered significance,
and laying her hand on Kate’s she murmured: “I have come to talk to you of
this sad affair.”

Kate began to tremble. Was it possible that Denis had after all spoken? A
rising hope checked her utterance, and she saw in a flash that it still lay
with him to regain his hold on her. But Mrs. Peyton went on delicately:
“It has been a great shock to my poor boy. To be brought in contact with
Arthur’s past was in itself inexpressibly painful; but this last dreadful
business--that woman’s wicked act--”

“Wicked?” Kate exclaimed.

Mrs. Peyton’s gentle stare reproved her. “Surely religion teaches us that
suicide is a sin? And to murder her child! I ought not to speak to you of
such things, my dear. No one has ever mentioned anything so dreadful in my
presence: my dear husband used to screen me so carefully from the painful
side of life. Where there is so much that is beautiful to dwell upon, we
should try to ignore the existence of such horrors. But nowadays everything
is in the papers; and Denis told me he thought it better that you should
hear the news first from him.”

Kate nodded without speaking.

“He felt how _dreadful_ it was to have to tell you. But I tell him he
takes a morbid view of the case. Of course one is shocked at the woman’s
crime--but, if one looks a little deeper, how can one help seeing that it
may have been designed as the means of rescuing that poor child from a life
of vice and misery? That is the view I want Denis to take: I want him to
see how all the difficulties of life disappear when one has learned to look
for a divine purpose in human sufferings.”

Mrs. Peyton rested a moment on this period, as an experienced climber
pauses to be overtaken by a less agile companion; but presently she became
aware that Kate was still far below her, and perhaps needed a stronger
incentive to the ascent.

“My dear child,” she said adroitly, “I said just now that I was sorry you
had been obliged to hear of this sad affair; but after all it is only you
who can avert its consequences.”

Kate drew an eager breath. “Its consequences?” she faltered.

Mrs. Peyton’s voice dropped solemnly. “Denis has told me everything,” she
said.

“Everything?”

“That you insist on putting off the marriage. Oh, my dear, I do implore you
to reconsider that!”

Kate sank back with the sense of having passed again into a region of
leaden shadow. “Is that all he told you?”

Mrs. Peyton gazed at her with arch raillery. “All? Isn’t it everything--to
him?”

“Did he give you my reason, I mean?”

“He said you felt that, after this shocking tragedy, there ought, in
decency, to be a delay; and I quite understand the feeling. It does seem
too unfortunate that the woman should have chosen this particular time! But
you will find as you grow older that life is full of such sad contrasts.”

Kate felt herself slowly petrifying under the warm drip of Mrs. Peyton’s
platitudes.

“It seems to me,” the elder lady continued, “that there is only one point
from which we ought to consider the question--and that is, its effect on
Denis. But for that we ought to refuse to know anything about it. But it
has made my boy so unhappy. The law-suit was a cruel ordeal to him--the
dreadful notoriety, the revelation of poor Arthur’s infirmities. Denis is
as sensitive as a woman; it is his unusual refinement of feeling that makes
him so worthy of being loved by you. But such sensitiveness may be carried
to excess. He ought not to let this unhappy incident prey on him: it shows
a lack of trust in the divine ordering of things. That is what troubles
me: his faith in life has been shaken. And--you must forgive me, dear
child--you _will_ forgive me, I know--but I can’t help blaming you a
little--”

Mrs. Peyton’s accent converted the accusation into a caress, which
prolonged itself in a tremulous pressure of Kate’s hand.

The girl gazed at her blankly. “You blame _me_--?”

“Don’t be offended, my child. I only fear that your excessive sympathy with
Denis, your own delicacy of feeling, may have led you to encourage his
morbid ideas. He tells me you were very much shocked--as you naturally
would be--as any girl must be--I would not have you otherwise, dear Kate!
It is _beautiful_ that you should both feel so; most beautiful; but
you know religion teaches us not to yield too much to our grief. Let the
dead bury their dead; the living owe themselves to each other. And what had
this wretched woman to do with either of you? It is a misfortune for Denis
to have been connected in any way with a man of Arthur Peyton’s character;
but after all, poor Arthur did all he could to atone for the disgrace he
brought on us, by making Denis his heir--and I am sure I have no wish to
question the decrees of Providence.” Mrs. Peyton paused again, and then
softly absorbed both of Kate’s hands. “For my part,” she continued, “I see
in it another instance of the beautiful ordering of events. Just after dear
Denis’s inheritance has removed the last obstacle to your marriage, this
sad incident comes to show how desperately he needs you, how cruel it would
be to ask him to defer his happiness.”

She broke off, shaken out of her habitual placidity by the abrupt
withdrawal of the girl’s hands. Kate sat inertly staring, but no answer
rose to her lips.

At length Mrs. Peyton resumed, gathering her draperies about her with a
tentative hint of leave-taking: “I may go home and tell him that you will
not put off the wedding?”

Kate was still silent, and her visitor looked at her with the mild surprise
of an advocate unaccustomed to plead in vain.

“If your silence means refusal, my dear, I think you ought to realize the
responsibility you assume.” Mrs. Peyton’s voice had acquired an edge of
righteous asperity. “If Denis has a fault it is that he is too gentle, too
yielding, too readily influenced by those he cares for. Your influence is
paramount with him now--but if you turn from him just when he needs your
help, who can say what the result will be?”

The argument, though impressively delivered, was hardly of a nature to
carry conviction to its hearer; but it was perhaps for that very reason
that she suddenly and unexpectedly replied to it by sinking back into her
seat with a burst of tears. To Mrs. Peyton, however, tears were the signal
of surrender, and, at Kate’s side in an instant she hastened to temper her
triumph with magnanimity.

“Don’t think I don’t feel with you; but we must both forget ourselves for
our boy’s sake. I told him I should come back with your promise.”

The arm she had slipped about Kate’s shoulder fell back with the girl’s
start. Kate had seen in a flash what capital would be made of her emotion.

“No, no, you misunderstand me. I can make no promise,” she declared.

The older lady sat a moment irresolute; then she restored her arm to the
shoulder from which it had been so abruptly displaced.

“My dear child,” she said, in a tone of tender confidence, “if I have
misunderstood you, ought you not to enlighten me? You asked me just now
if Denis had given me your reason for this strange postponement. He gave
me one reason, but it seems hardly sufficient to explain your conduct.
If there is any other,--and I know you well enough to feel sure there
is,--will you not trust me with it? If my boy has been unhappy enough to
displease you, will you not give his mother the chance to plead his cause?
Remember, no one should be condemned unheard. As Denis’s mother, I have the
right to ask for your reason.”

“My reason? My reason?” Kate stammered, panting with the exhaustion of the
struggle. Oh, if only Mrs. Peyton would release her! “If you have the right
to know it, why doesn’t he tell you?” she cried.

Mrs. Peyton stood up, quivering. “I will go home and ask him,” she said. “I
will tell him he had your permission to speak.”

She moved toward the door, with the nervous haste of a person unaccustomed
to decisive action. But Kate sprang before her.

“No, no; don’t ask him! I implore you not to ask him,” she cried.

Mrs. Peyton turned on her with sudden authority of voice and gesture. “Do
I understand you?” she said. “You admit that you have a reason for putting
off your marriage, and yet you forbid me--me, Denis’s mother--to ask him
what it is? My poor child, I needn’t ask, for I know already. If he has
offended you, and you refuse him the chance to defend himself, I needn’t
look farther for your reason: it is simply that you have ceased to love
him.”

Kate fell back from the door which she had instinctively barricaded.

“Perhaps that is it,” she murmured, letting Mrs. Peyton pass.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Orme’s returning carriage-wheels crossed Mrs. Peyton’s indignant
flight; and an hour later Kate, in the bland candle-light of the
dinner-hour, sat listening with practised fortitude to her father’s
comments on the venison.

She had wondered, as she awaited him in the drawing-room, if he would
notice any change in her appearance. It seemed to her that the flagellation
of her thoughts must have left visible traces. But Mr. Orme was not a man
of subtle perceptions, save where his personal comfort was affected: though
his egoism was clothed in the finest feelers, he did not suspect a similar
surface in others. His daughter, as part of himself, came within the normal
range of his solicitude; but she was an outlying region, a subject
province; and Mr. Orme’s was a highly centralized polity.

News of the painful incident--he often used Mrs. Peyton’s vocabulary--had
reached him at his club, and to some extent disturbed the assimilation of a
carefully ordered breakfast; but since then two days had passed, and it did
not take Mr. Orme forty-eight hours to resign himself to the misfortunes of
others. It was all very nasty, of course, and he wished to heaven it hadn’t
happened to any one about to be connected with him; but he viewed it with
the transient annoyance of a gentleman who has been splashed by the mud of
a fatal runaway.

Mr. Orme affected, under such circumstances, a bluff and hearty stoicism
as remote as possible from Mrs. Peyton’s deprecating evasion of facts. It
was a bad business; he was sorry Kate should have been mixed up with it;
but she would be married soon now, and then she would see that life wasn’t
exactly a Sunday-school story. Everybody was exposed to such disagreeable
accidents: he remembered a case in their own family--oh, a distant cousin
whom Kate wouldn’t have heard of--a poor fellow who had got entangled with
just such a woman, and having (most properly) been sent packing by his
father, had justified the latter’s course by promptly forging his name--a
very nasty affair altogether; but luckily the scandal had been hushed up,
the woman bought off, and the prodigal, after a season of probation, safely
married to a nice girl with a good income, who was told by the family that
the doctors recommended his settling in California.

_Luckily the scandal was hushed up_: the phrase blazed out against
the dark background of Kate’s misery. That was doubtless what most people
felt--the words represented the consensus of respectable opinion. The best
way of repairing a fault was to hide it: to tear up the floor and bury the
victim at night. Above all, no coroner and no autopsy!

She began to feel a strange interest in her distant cousin. “And his
wife--did she know what he had done?”

Mr. Orme stared. His moral pointed, he had returned to the contemplation of
his own affairs.

“His wife? Oh, of course not. The secret has been most admirably kept; but
her property was put in trust, so she’s quite safe with him.”

Her property! Kate wondered if her faith in her husband had also been
put in trust, if her sensibilities had been protected from his possible
inroads.

“Do you think it quite fair to have deceived her in that way?”

Mr. Orme gave her a puzzled glance: he had no taste for the by-paths of
ethical conjecture.

“His people wanted to give the poor fellow another chance; they did the
best they could for him.”

“And--he has done nothing dishonourable since?”

“Not that I know of: the last I heard was that they had a little boy,
and that he was quite happy. At that distance he’s not likely to bother
_us_, at all events.”

Long after Mr. Orme had left the topic, Kate remained lost in its
contemplation. She had begun to perceive that the fair surface of life was
honeycombed by a vast system of moral sewage. Every respectable household
had its special arrangements for the private disposal of family scandals;
it was only among the reckless and improvident that such hygienic
precautions were neglected. Who was she to pass judgment on the merits
of such a system? The social health must be preserved: the means devised
were the result of long experience and the collective instinct of
self-preservation. She had meant to tell her father that evening that her
marriage had been put off; but she now abstained from doing so, not from
any doubt of Mr. Orme’s acquiescence--he could always be made to feel the
force of conventional scruples--but because the whole question sank into
insignificance beside the larger issue which his words had raised.

In her own room, that night, she passed through that travail of the soul
of which the deeper life is born. Her first sense was of a great moral
loneliness--an isolation more complete, more impenetrable, than that in
which the discovery of Denis’s act had plunged her. For she had vaguely
leaned, then, on a collective sense of justice that should respond to
her own ideas of right and wrong: she still believed in the logical
correspondence of theory and practice. Now she saw that, among those
nearest her, there was no one who recognized the moral need of expiation.
She saw that to take her father or Mrs. Peyton into her confidence would
be but to widen the circle of sterile misery in which she and Denis moved.
At first the aspect of life thus revealed to her seemed simply mean
and base--a world where honour was a pact of silence between adroit
accomplices. The network of circumstance had tightened round her, and every
effort to escape drew its meshes closer. But as her struggles subsided she
felt the spiritual release which comes with acceptance: not connivance in
dishonour, but recognition of evil. Out of that dark vision light was to
come, the shaft of cloud turning to the pillar of fire. For here, at last,
life lay before her as it was: not brave, garlanded and victorious, but
naked, grovelling and diseased, dragging its maimed limbs through the mud,
yet lifting piteous hands to the stars. Love itself, once throned aloft
on an altar of dreams, how it stole to her now, storm-beaten and scarred,
pleading for the shelter of her breast! Love, indeed, not in the old sense
in which she had conceived it, but a graver, austerer presence--the charity
of the mystic three. She thought she had ceased to love Denis--but what had
she loved in him but her happiness and his? Their affection had been the
_garden enclosed_ of the Canticles, where they were to walk forever in
a delicate isolation of bliss. But now love appeared to her as something
more than this--something wider, deeper, more enduring than the selfish
passion of a man and a woman. She saw it in all its far-reaching issues,
till the first meeting of two pairs of young eyes kindled a light which
might be a high-lifted beacon across dark waters of humanity.

All this did not come to her clearly, consecutively, but in a series of
blurred and shifting images. Marriage had meant to her, as it means to
girls brought up in ignorance of life, simply the exquisite prolongation of
wooing. If she had looked beyond, to the vision of wider ties, it was as
a traveller gazes over a land veiled in golden haze, and so far distant
that the imagination delays to explore it. But now through the blur of
sensations one image strangely persisted--the image of Denis’s child. Had
she ever before thought of their having a child? She could not remember.
She was like one who wakens from a long fever: she recalled nothing of
her former self or of her former feelings. She knew only that the vision
persisted--the vision of the child whose mother she was not to be. It was
impossible that she should marry Denis--her inmost soul rejected him ...
but it was just because she was not to be the child’s mother that its
image followed her so pleadingly. For she saw with perfect clearness the
inevitable course of events. Denis would marry some one else--he was one of
the men who are fated to marry, and she needed not his mother’s reminder
that her abandonment of him at an emotional crisis would fling him upon the
first sympathy within reach. He would marry a girl who knew nothing of his
secret--for Kate was intensely aware that he would never again willingly
confess himself--he would marry a girl who trusted him and leaned on him,
as she, Kate Orme--the earlier Kate Orme--had done but two days since! And
with this deception between them their child would be born: born to an
inheritance of secret weakness, a vice of the moral fibre, as it might be
born with some hidden physical taint which would destroy it before the
cause should be detected.... Well, and what of it? Was she to hold herself
responsible? Were not thousands of children born with some such unsuspected
taint?... Ah, but if here was one that she could save? What if she, who had
had so exquisite a vision of wifehood, should reconstruct from its ruins
this vision of protecting maternity--if her love for her lover should be,
not lost, but transformed, enlarged, into this passion of charity for his
race? If she might expiate and redeem his fault by becoming a refuge from
its consequences? Before this strange extension of her love all the old
limitations seemed to fall. Something had cleft the surface of self, and
there welled up the mysterious primal influences, the sacrificial instinct
of her sex, a passion of spiritual motherhood that made her long to fling
herself between the unborn child and its fate....

She never knew, then or after, how she reached this mystic climax of
effacement; she was only conscious, through her anguish, of that lift of
the heart which made one of the saints declare that joy was the inmost core
of sorrow. For it was indeed a kind of joy she felt, if old names must
serve for such new meanings; a surge of liberating faith in life, the old
_credo quia absurdum_ which is the secret cry of all supreme
endeavour.




PART II


I

“Does it look nice, mother?”

Dick Peyton met her with the question on the threshold, drawing her gaily
into the little square room, and adding, with a laugh with a blush in it:
“You know she’s an uncommonly noticing person, and little things tell with
her.”

He swung round on his heel to follow his mother’s smiling inspection of the
apartment.

“She seems to have _all_ the qualities,” Mrs. Denis Peyton remarked,
as her circuit finally brought her to the prettily appointed tea-table.

“_All_,” he declared, taking the sting from her emphasis by his prompt
adoption of it. Dick had always had a wholesome way of thus appropriating
to his own use such small shafts of maternal irony as were now and then
aimed at him.

Kate Peyton laughed and loosened her furs. “It looks charmingly,” she
pronounced, ending her survey by an approach to the window, which gave,
far below, the oblique perspective of a long side-street leading to Fifth
Avenue.

The high-perched room was Dick Peyton’s private office, a retreat
partitioned off from the larger enclosure in which, under a north light
and on a range of deal tables, three or four young draughtsmen were busily
engaged in elaborating his architectural projects. The outer door of the
office bore the sign: _Peyton and Gill, Architects_; but Gill was
an utilitarian person, as unobtrusive as his name, who contented himself
with a desk in the workroom, and left Dick to lord it alone in the small
apartment to which clients were introduced, and where the social part of
the business was carried on.

It was to serve, on this occasion, as the scene of a tea designed, as Kate
Peyton was vividly aware, to introduce a certain young lady to the scene of
her son’s labours. Mrs. Peyton had been hearing a great deal lately about
Clemence Verney. Dick was naturally expansive, and his close intimacy with
his mother--an intimacy fostered by his father’s early death--if it had
suffered some natural impairment in his school and college days, had of
late been revived by four years of comradeship in Paris, where Mrs. Peyton,
in a tiny apartment of the Rue de Varennes, had kept house for him during
his course of studies at the Beaux Arts. There were indeed not lacking
critics of her own sex who accused Kate Peyton of having figured too
largely in her son’s life; of having failed to efface herself at a period
when it is agreed that young men are best left free to try conclusions with
the world. Mrs. Peyton, had she cared to defend herself, might have said
that Dick, if communicative, was not impressionable, and that the closeness
of texture which enabled him to throw off her sarcasms preserved him also
from the infiltration of her prejudices. He was certainly no knight of the
apron-string, but a seemingly resolute and self-sufficient young man, whose
romantic friendship with his mother had merely served to throw a veil of
suavity over the hard angles of youth.

But Mrs. Peyton’s real excuse was after all one which she would never have
given. It was because her intimacy with her son was the one need of her
life that she had, with infinite tact and discretion, but with equal
persistency, clung to every step of his growth, dissembling herself,
adapting herself, rejuvenating herself in the passionate effort to be
always within reach, but never in the way.

Denis Peyton had died after seven years of marriage, when his boy was
barely six. During those seven years he had managed to squander the best
part of the fortune he had inherited from his step-brother; so that, at his
death, his widow and son were left with a scant competence. Mrs. Peyton,
during her husband’s life, had apparently made no effort to restrain his
expenditure. She had even been accused by those judicious persons who are
always ready with an estimate of their neighbours’ motives, of having
encouraged poor Denis’s improvidence for the gratification of her own
ambition. She had in fact, in the early days of their marriage, tried to
launch him in politics, and had perhaps drawn somewhat heavily on his funds
in the first heat of the contest; but the experiment ending in failure, as
Denis Peyton’s experiments were apt to end, she had made no farther demands
on his exchequer. Her personal tastes were in fact unusually simple, but
her outspoken indifference to money was not, in the opinion of her critics,
designed to act as a check upon her husband; and it resulted in leaving
her, at his death, in straits from which it was impossible not to deduce a
moral.

Her small means, and the care of the boy’s education, served the widow as
a pretext for secluding herself in a socially remote suburb, where it was
inferred that she was expiating, on queer food and in ready-made boots, her
rash defiance of fortune. Whether or not Mrs. Peyton’s penance took this
form, she hoarded her substance to such good purpose that she was not only
able to give Dick the best of schooling, but to propose, on his leaving
Harvard, that he should prolong his studies by another four years at the
Beaux Arts. It had been the joy of her life that her boy had early shown
a marked bent for a special line of work. She could not have borne to see
him reduced to a mere money-getter, yet she was not sorry that their small
means forbade the cultivation of an ornamental leisure. In his college days
Dick had troubled her by a superabundance of tastes, a restless flitting
from one form of artistic expression to another. Whatever art he enjoyed
he wished to practise, and he passed from music to painting, from painting
to architecture, with an ease which seemed to his mother to indicate lack
of purpose rather than excess of talent. She had observed that these
changes were usually due, not to self-criticism, but to some external
discouragement. Any depreciation of his work was enough to convince him
of the uselessness of pursuing that special form of art, and the reaction
produced the immediate conviction that he was really destined to shine in
some other line of work. He had thus swung from one calling to another
till, at the end of his college career, his mother took the decisive step
of transplanting him to the Beaux Arts, in the hope that a definite course
of study, combined with the stimulus of competition, might fix his wavering
aptitudes. The result justified her expectation, and their four years in
the Rue de Varennes yielded the happiest confirmation of her belief in
him. Dick’s ability was recognized not only by his mother, but by his
professors. He was engrossed in his work, and his first successes developed
his capacity for application. His mother’s only fear was that praise was
still too necessary to him. She was uncertain how long his ambition would
sustain him in the face of failure. He gave lavishly where he was sure
of a return; but it remained to be seen if he were capable of production
without recognition. She had brought him up in a wholesome scorn of
material rewards, and nature seemed, in this direction, to have seconded
her training. He was genuinely indifferent to money, and his enjoyment
of beauty was of that happy sort which does not generate the wish for
possession. As long as the inner eye had food for contemplation, he cared
very little for the deficiencies in his surroundings; or, it might rather
be said, he felt, in the sum-total of beauty about him, an ownership of
appreciation that left him free from the fret of personal desire. Mrs.
Peyton had cultivated to excess this disregard of material conditions; but
she now began to ask herself whether, in so doing, she had not laid too
great a strain on a temperament naturally exalted. In guarding against
other tendencies she had perhaps fostered in him too exclusively those
qualities which circumstances had brought to an unusual development in
herself. His enthusiasms and his disdains were alike too unqualified
for that happy mean of character which is the best defence against the
surprises of fortune. If she had taught him to set an exaggerated value on
ideal rewards, was not that but a shifting of the danger-point on which her
fears had always hung? She trembled sometimes to think how little love and
a lifelong vigilance had availed in the deflecting of inherited tendencies.

Her fears were in a measure confirmed by the first two years of their life
in New York, and the opening of his career as a professional architect.
Close on the easy triumphs of his studentships there came the chilling
reaction of public indifference. Dick, on his return from Paris, had formed
a partnership with an architect who had had several years of practical
training in a New York office; but the quiet and industrious Gill, though
he attracted to the new firm a few small jobs which overflowed from the
business of his former employer, was not able to infect the public with
his own faith in Peyton’s talents, and it was trying to a genius who felt
himself capable of creating palaces to have to restrict his efforts to
the building of suburban cottages or the planning of cheap alterations in
private houses.

Mrs. Peyton expended all the ingenuities of tenderness in keeping up
her son’s courage; and she was seconded in the task by a friend whose
acquaintance Dick had made at the Beaux Arts, and who, two years before
the Peytons, had returned to New York to start on his own career as an
architect. Paul Darrow was a young man full of crude seriousness, who,
after a youth of struggling work and study in his native northwestern
state, had won a scholarship which sent him abroad for a course at the
Beaux Arts. His two years there coincided with the first part of Dick’s
residence, and Darrow’s gifts had at once attracted the younger student.
Dick was unstinted in his admiration of rival talent, and Mrs. Peyton,
who was romantically given to the cultivation of such generosities, had
seconded his enthusiasm by the kindest offers of hospitality to the young
student. Darrow thus became the grateful frequenter of their little
_salon_; and after their return to New York the intimacy between
the young men was renewed, though Mrs. Peyton found it more difficult
to coax Dick’s friend to her New York drawing-room than to the informal
surroundings of the Rue de Varennes. There, no doubt, secluded and absorbed
in her son’s work, she had seemed to Darrow almost a fellow-student; but
seen among her own associates she became once more the woman of fashion,
divided from him by the whole breadth of her ease and his awkwardness.
Mrs. Peyton, whose tact had divined the cause of his estrangement, would
not for an instant let it affect the friendship of the two young men. She
encouraged Dick to frequent Darrow, in whom she divined a persistency of
effort, an artistic self-confidence, in curious contrast to his social
hesitancies. The example of his obstinate capacity for work was just the
influence her son needed, and if Darrow would not come to them she insisted
that Dick must seek him out, must never let him think that any social
discrepancy could affect a friendship based on deeper things. Dick, who had
all the loyalties, and who took an honest pride in his friend’s growing
success, needed no urging to maintain the intimacy; and his copious reports
of midnight colloquies in Darrow’s lodgings showed Mrs. Peyton that she had
a strong ally in her invisible friend.

It had been, therefore, somewhat of a shock to learn in the course of time
that Darrow’s influence was being shared, if not counteracted, by that of a
young lady in whose honour Dick was now giving his first professional tea.
Mrs. Peyton had heard a great deal about Miss Clemence Verney, first from
the usual purveyors of such information, and more recently from her son,
who, probably divining that rumour had been before him, adopted his usual
method of disarming his mother by taking her into his confidence. But,
ample as her information was, it remained perplexing and contradictory, and
even her own few meetings with the girl had not helped her to a definite
opinion. Miss Verney, in conduct and ideas, was patently of the “new
school”: a young woman of feverish activities and broad-cast judgments,
whose very versatility made her hard to define. Mrs. Peyton was shrewd
enough to allow for the accidents of environment; what she wished to get
at was the residuum of character beneath Miss Verney’s shifting surface.

“It looks charmingly,” Mrs. Peyton repeated, giving a loosening touch to
the chrysanthemums in a tall vase on her son’s desk.

Dick laughed, and glanced at his watch.

“They won’t be here for another quarter of an hour. I think I’ll tell Gill
to clean out the work-room before they come.”

“Are we to see the drawings for the competition?” his mother asked.

He shook his head smilingly. “Can’t--I’ve asked one or two of the Beaux
Arts fellows, you know; and besides, old Darrow’s actually coming.”

“Impossible!” Mrs. Peyton exclaimed.

“He swore he would last night.” Dick laughed again, with a tinge of
self-satisfaction. “I’ve an idea he wants to see Miss Verney.”

“Ah,” his mother murmured. There was a pause before she added: “Has Darrow
really gone in for this competition?”

“Rather! I should say so! He’s simply working himself to the bone.”

Mrs. Peyton sat revolving her muff on a meditative hand; at length she
said: “I’m not sure I think it quite nice of him.”

Her son halted before her with an incredulous stare. “_Mother_!” he
exclaimed.

The rebuke sent a blush to her forehead. “Well--considering your
friendship--and everything.”

“Everything? What do you mean by everything? The fact that he had more
ability than I have and is therefore more likely to succeed? The fact that
he needs the money and the success a deuced sight more than any of us? Is
that the reason you think he oughtn’t to have entered? Mother! I never
heard you say an ungenerous thing before.”

The blush deepened to crimson, and she rose with a nervous laugh. “It
_was_ ungenerous,” she conceded. “I suppose I’m jealous for you. I
hate these competitions!”

Her son smiled reassuringly. “You needn’t. I’m not afraid: I think I shall
pull it off this time. In fact, Paul’s the only man I’m afraid of--I’m
always afraid of Paul--but the mere fact that he’s in the thing is a
tremendous stimulus.”

His mother continued to study him with an anxious tenderness. “Have you
worked out the whole scheme? Do you _see_ it yet?”

“Oh, broadly, yes. There’s a gap here and there--a hazy bit, rather--it’s
the hardest problem I’ve ever had to tackle; but then it’s my biggest
opportunity, and I’ve simply _got_ to pull it off!”

Mrs. Peyton sat silent, considering his flushed face and illumined eye,
which were rather those of the victor nearing the goal than of the runner
just beginning the race. She remembered something that Darrow had once said
of him: “Dick always sees the end too soon.”

“You haven’t too much time left,” she murmured.

“Just a week. But I shan’t go anywhere after this. I shall renounce the
world.” He glanced smilingly at the festal tea-table and the embowered
desk. “When I next appear, it will either be with my heel on Paul’s
neck--poor old Paul--or else--or else--being dragged lifeless from the
arena!”

His mother nervously took up the laugh with which he ended. “Oh, not
lifeless,” she said.

His face clouded. “Well, maimed for life, then,” he muttered.

Mrs. Peyton made no answer. She knew how much hung on the possibility of
his winning the competition which for weeks past had engrossed him. It was
a design for the new museum of sculpture, for which the city had recently
voted half a million. Dick’s taste ran naturally to the grandiose, and the
erection of public buildings had always been the object of his ambition.
Here was an unmatched opportunity, and he knew that, in a competition of
the kind, the newest man had as much chance of success as the firm of most
established reputation, since every competitor entered on his own merits,
the designs being submitted to a jury of architects who voted on them
without knowing the names of the contestants. Dick, characteristically,
was not afraid of the older firms; indeed, as he had told his mother, Paul
Darrow was the only rival he feared. Mrs. Peyton knew that, to a certain
point, self-confidence was a good sign; but somehow her son’s did not
strike her as being of the right substance--it seemed to have no dimension
but extent. Her fears were complicated by a suspicion that, under his
professional eagerness for success, lay the knowledge that Miss Verney’s
favour hung on the victory. It was that, perhaps, which gave a feverish
touch to his ambition; and Mrs. Peyton, surveying the future from the
height of her material apprehensions, divined that the situation depended
mainly on the girl’s view of it. She would have given a great deal to know
Clemence Verney’s conception of success.


II

Miss Verney, when she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal
and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her
vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information
required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and
efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the
charming haze of youth; but it occurred to her critic that she might emerge
from this morning mist as a dry and metallic old woman.

If Miss Verney suspected a personal application in Dick’s hospitality, it
did not call forth in her the usual tokens of self-consciousness. Her
manner may have been a shade more vivid than usual, but she preserved all
her bright composure of glance and speech, so that one guessed, under the
rapid dispersal of words, an undisturbed steadiness of perception. She
was lavishly but not indiscriminately interested in the evidences of her
host’s industry, and as the other guests assembled, straying with vague
ejaculations through the labyrinth of scale drawings and blue prints, Mrs.
Peyton noted that Miss Verney alone knew what these symbols stood for.

To his visitors’ requests to be shown his plans for the competition,
Peyton had opposed a laughing refusal, enforced by the presence of two
fellow-architects, young men with lingering traces of the Beaux Arts in
their costume and vocabulary, who stood about in Gavarni attitudes and
dazzled the ladies by allusions to fenestration and entasis. The party had
already drifted back to the tea-table when a hesitating knock announced
Darrow’s approach. He entered with his usual air of having blundered in
by mistake, embarrassed by his hat and great-coat, and thrown into deeper
confusion by the necessity of being introduced to the ladies grouped about
the urn. To the men he threw a gruff nod of fellowship, and Dick having
relieved him of his encumbrances, he retreated behind the shelter of Mrs.
Peyton’s welcome. The latter judiciously gave him time to recover, and when
she turned to him he was engaged in a surreptitious inspection of Miss
Verney, whose dusky slenderness, relieved against the bare walls of the
office, made her look like a young St. John of Donatello’s. The girl
returned his look with one of her clear glances, and the group having
presently broken up again, Mrs. Peyton saw that she had drifted to Darrow’s
side. The visitors at length wandered back to the work-room to see a
portfolio of Dick’s water-colours; but Mrs. Peyton remained seated behind
the urn, listening to the interchange of talk through the open door while
she tried to coordinate her impressions.

She saw that Miss Verney was sincerely interested in Dick’s work: it
was the nature of her interest that remained in doubt. As if to solve
this doubt, the girl presently reappeared alone on the threshold, and
discovering Mrs. Peyton, advanced toward her with a smile.

“Are you tired of hearing us praise Mr. Peyton’s things?” she asked,
dropping into a low chair beside her hostess. “Unintelligent admiration
must be a bore to people who know, and Mr. Darrow tells me you are almost
as learned as your son.”

Mrs. Peyton returned the smile, but evaded the question. “I should be sorry
to think your admiration unintelligent,” she said. “I like to feel that my
boy’s work is appreciated by people who understand it.”

“Oh, I have the usual smattering,” said Miss Verney carelessly. “I
_think_ I know why I admire his work; but then I am sure I see more in
it when some one like Mr. Darrow tells me how remarkable it is.”

“Does Mr. Darrow say that?” the mother exclaimed, losing sight of her
object in the rush of maternal pleasure.

“He has said nothing else: it seems to be the only subject which loosens
his tongue. I believe he is more anxious to have your son win the
competition than to win it himself.”

“He is a very good friend,” Mrs. Peyton assented. She was struck by the way
in which the girl led the topic back to the special application of it which
interested her. She had none of the artifices of prudery.

“He feels sure that Mr. Peyton _will_ win,” Miss Verney continued.
“It was very interesting to hear his reasons. He is an extraordinarily
interesting man. It must be a tremendous incentive to have such a friend.”

Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “The friendship is delightful; but I don’t know that
my son needs the incentive. He is almost too ambitious.”

Miss Verney looked up brightly. “Can one be?” she said. “Ambition is so
splendid! It must be so glorious to be a man and go crashing through
obstacles, straight up to the thing one is after. I’m afraid I don’t care
for people who are superior to success. I like marriage by capture!” She
rose with her wandering laugh, and stood flushed and sparkling above Mrs.
Peyton, who continued to gaze at her gravely.

“What do you call success?” the latter asked. “It means so many different
things.”

“Oh, yes, I know--the inward approval, and all that. Well, I’m afraid I
like the other kind: the drums and wreaths and acclamations. If I were Mr.
Peyton, for instance, I’d much rather win the competition than--than be as
disinterested as Mr. Darrow.”

Mrs. Peyton smiled. “I hope you won’t tell him so,” she said half
seriously. “He is over-stimulated already; and he is so easily influenced
by any one who--whose opinion he values.”

She stopped abruptly, hearing herself, with a strange inward shock, re-echo
the words which another man’s mother had once spoken to her. Miss Verney
did not seem to take the allusion to herself, for she continued to fix on
Mrs. Peyton a gaze of impartial sympathy.

“But we can’t help being interested!” she declared.

“It’s very kind of you; but I wish you would all help him to feel that his
competition is after all of very little account compared with other
things--his health and his peace of mind, for instance. He is looking
horribly used up.”

The girl glanced over her shoulder at Dick, who was just reentering the
room at Darrow’s side.

“Oh, do you think so?” she said. “I should have thought it was his friend
who was used up.”

Mrs. Peyton followed the glance with surprise. She had been too preoccupied
to notice Darrow, whose crudely modelled face was always of a dull pallour,
to which his slow-moving grey eye lent no relief except in rare moments of
expansion. Now the face had the fallen lines of a death-mask, in which only
the smile he turned on Dick remained alive; and the sight smote her with
compunction. Poor Darrow! He did look horribly fagged out: as if he needed
care and petting and good food. No one knew exactly how he lived. His
rooms, according to Dick’s report, were fireless and ill kept, but he stuck
to them because his landlady, whom he had fished out of some financial
plight, had difficulty in obtaining other lodgers. He belonged to no clubs,
and wandered out alone for his meals, mysteriously refusing the hospitality
which his friends pressed on him. It was plain that he was very poor, and
Dick conjectured that he sent what he earned to an aunt in his native
village; but he was so silent about such matters that, outside of his
profession, he seemed to have no personal life.

Miss Verney’s companion having presently advised her of the lapse of time,
there ensued a general leave-taking, at the close of which Dick accompanied
the ladies to their carriage. Darrow was meanwhile blundering into his
greatcoat, a process which always threw him into a state of perspiring
embarrassment; but Mrs. Peyton, surprising him in the act, suggested that
he should defer it and give her a few moments’ talk.

“Let me make you some fresh tea,” she said, as Darrow blushingly shed the
garment, “and when Dick comes back we’ll all walk home together. I’ve not
had a chance to say two words to you this winter.”

Darrow sank into a chair at her side and nervously contemplated his boots.
“I’ve been tremendously hard at work,” he said.

“I know: _too_ hard at work, I’m afraid. Dick tells me you have been
wearing yourself out over your competition plans.”

“Oh, well, I shall have time to rest now,” he returned. “I put the last
stroke to them this morning.”

Mrs. Peyton gave him a quick look. “You’re ahead of Dick, then.”

“In point of time only,” he said smiling.

“That is in itself an advantage,” she answered with a tinge of asperity. In
spite of an honest effort for impartiality she could not, at the moment,
help regarding Darrow as an obstacle in her son’s path.

“I wish the competition were over!” she exclaimed, conscious that her voice
had betrayed her. “I hate to see you both looking so fagged.”

Darrow smiled again, perhaps at her studied inclusion of himself.

“Oh, _Dick_’s all right,” he said. “He’ll pull himself together in no
time.”

He spoke with an emphasis which might have struck her, if her sympathies
had not again been deflected by the allusion to her son.

“Not if he doesn’t win,” she exclaimed.

Darrow took the tea she had poured for him, knocking the spoon to the floor
in his eagerness to perform the feat gracefully. In bending to recover the
spoon he struck the tea-table with his shoulder, and set the cups dancing.
Having regained a measure of composure, he took a swallow of the hot tea
and set it down with a gasp, precariously near the edge of the tea-table.
Mrs. Peyton rescued the cup, and Darrow, apparently forgetting its
existence, rose and began to pace the room. It was always hard for him to
sit still when he talked.

“You mean he’s so tremendously set on it?” he broke out.

Mrs. Peyton hesitated. “You know him almost as well as I do,” she said.
“He’s capable of anything where there is a possibility of success; but I’m
always afraid of the reaction.”

“Oh, well, Dick’s a man,” said Darrow bluntly. “Besides, he’s going to
succeed.”

“I wish he didn’t feel so sure of it. You mustn’t think I’m afraid for him.
He’s a man, and I want him to take his chances with other men; but I wish
he didn’t care so much about what people think.”

“People?”

“Miss Verney, then: I suppose you know.”

Darrow paused in front of her. “Yes: he’s talked a good deal about her. You
think she wants him to succeed?”

“At any price!”

He drew his brows together. “What do you call any price?”

“Well--herself, in this case, I believe.”

Darrow bent a puzzled stare on her. “You mean she attached that amount of
importance to this competition?”

“She seems to regard it as symbolical: that’s what I gather. And I’m afraid
she’s given him the same impression.”

Darrow’s sunken face was suffused by his rare smile. “Oh, well, he’ll pull
it off then!” he said.

Mrs. Peyton rose with a distracted sigh. “I half hope he won’t, for such a
motive,” she exclaimed.

“The motive won’t show in his work,” said Darrow. He added, after a pause
probably devoted to the search for the right word: “He seems to think a
great deal of her.”

Mrs. Peyton fixed him thoughtfully. “I wish I knew what _you_ think of
her.”

“Why, I never saw her before.”

“No; but you talked with her to-day. You’ve formed an opinion: I think you
came here on purpose.”

He chuckled joyously at her discernment: she had always seemed to him
gifted with supernatural insight. “Well, I did want to see her,” he owned.

“And what do you think?”

He took a few vague steps and then halted before Mrs. Peyton. “I think,” he
said, smiling, “that she likes to be helped first, and to have everything
on her plate at once.”


III

At dinner, with a rush of contrition, Mrs. Peyton remembered that she had
after all not spoken to Darrow about his health. He had distracted her
by beginning to talk of Dick; and besides, much as Darrow’s opinions
interested her, his personality had never fixed her attention. He always
seemed to her simply a vehicle for the transmission of ideas.

It was Dick who recalled her to a sense of her omission by asking if she
hadn’t thought that old Paul looked rather more ragged than usual.

“He did look tired,” Mrs. Peyton conceded. “I meant to tell him to take
care of himself.”

Dick laughed at the futility of the measure. “Old Paul is never tired: he
can work twenty-five hours out of the twenty-four. The trouble with him is
that he’s ill. Something wrong with the machinery, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Has he seen a doctor?”

“He wouldn’t listen to me when I suggested it the other day; but he’s so
deuced mysterious that I don’t know what he may have done since.” Dick
rose, putting down his coffee-cup and half-smoked cigarette. “I’ve half a
mind to pop in on him to-night and see how he’s getting on.”

“But he lives at the other end of the earth; and you’re tired yourself.”

“I’m not tired; only a little strung-up,” he returned, smiling. “And
besides, I’m going to meet Gill at the office by and by and put in a
night’s work. It won’t hurt me to take a look at Paul first.”

Mrs. Peyton was silent. She knew it was useless to contend with her son
about his work, and she tried to fortify herself with the remembrance of
her own words to Darrow: Dick was a man and must take his chance with other
men.

But Dick, glancing at his watch, uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Oh,
by Jove, I shan’t have time after all. Gill is waiting for me now; we must
have dawdled over dinner.” He went to give his mother a caressing tap on
the cheek. “Now don’t worry,” he adjured her; and as she smiled back at him
he added with a sudden happy blush: “She doesn’t, you know: she’s so sure
of me.”

Mrs. Peyton’s smile faded, and laying a detaining hand on his, she said
with sudden directness: “Sure of you, or of your success?”

He hesitated. “Oh, she regards them as synonymous. She thinks I’m bound to
get on.”

“But if you don’t?”

He shrugged laughingly, but with a slight contraction of his confident
brows. “Why, I shall have to make way for some one else, I suppose. That’s
the law of life.”

Mrs. Peyton sat upright, gazing at him with a kind of solemnity. “Is it the
law of love?” she asked.

He looked down on her with a smile that trembled a little. “My dear
romantic mother, I don’t want her pity, you know!”

       *       *       *       *       *

Dick, coming home the next morning shortly before daylight, left the house
again after a hurried breakfast, and Mrs. Peyton heard nothing of him till
nightfall. He had promised to be back for dinner, but a few moments before
eight, as she was coming down to the drawing-room, the parlour-maid handed
her a hastily pencilled note.

“Don’t wait for me,” it ran. “Darrow is ill and I can’t leave him. I’ll
send a line when the doctor has seen him.”

Mrs. Peyton, who was a woman of rapid reactions, read the words with a
pang. She was ashamed of the jealous thoughts she had harboured of Darrow,
and of the selfishness which had made her lose sight of his troubles in the
consideration of Dick’s welfare. Even Clemence Verney, whom she secretly
accused of a want of heart, had been struck by Darrow’s ill looks, while
she had had eyes only for her son. Poor Darrow! How cold and self-engrossed
he must have thought her! In the first rush of penitence her impulse was
to drive at once to his lodgings; but the infection of his own shyness
restrained her. Dick’s note gave no details; the illness was evidently
grave, but might not Darrow regard her coming as an intrusion? To repair
her negligence of yesterday by a sudden invasion of his privacy might be
only a greater failure in tact; and after a moment of deliberation she
resolved on sending to ask Dick if he wished her to go to him.

The reply, which came late, was what she had expected. “No, we have all the
help we need. The doctor has sent a good nurse, and is coming again later.
It’s pneumonia, but of course he doesn’t say much yet. Let me have some
beef-juice as soon as the cook can make it.”

The beef-juice ordered and dispatched, she was left to a vigil in
melancholy contrast to that of the previous evening. Then she had been
enclosed in the narrow limits of her maternal interests; now the barriers
of self were broken down, and her personal preoccupations swept away on the
current of a wider sympathy. As she sat there in the radius of lamp-light
which, for so many evenings, had held Dick and herself in a charmed circle
of tenderness, she saw that her love for her boy had come to be merely a
kind of extended egotism. Love had narrowed instead of widening her, had
rebuilt between herself and life the very walls which, years and years
before, she had laid low with bleeding fingers. It was horrible, how she
had come to sacrifice everything to the one passion of ambition for her
boy....

At daylight she sent another messenger, one of her own servants, who
returned without having seen Dick. Mr. Peyton had sent word that there
was no change. He would write later; he wanted nothing. The day wore on
drearily. Once Kate found herself computing the precious hours lost to
Dick’s unfinished task. She blushed at her ineradicable selfishness,
and tried to turn her mind to poor Darrow. But she could not master her
impulses; and now she caught herself indulging the thought that his illness
would at least exclude him from the competition. But no--she remembered
that he had said his work was finished. Come what might, he stood in the
path of her boy’s success. She hated herself for the thought, but it would
not down.

Evening drew on, but there was no note from Dick. At length, in the shamed
reaction from her fears, she rang for a carriage and went upstairs to
dress. She could stand aloof no longer: she must go to Darrow, if only to
escape from her wicked thoughts of him. As she came down again she heard
Dick’s key in the door. She hastened her steps, and as she reached the hall
he stood before her without speaking.

She looked at him and the question died on her lips. He nodded, and walked
slowly past her.

“There was no hope from the first,” he said.

The next day Dick was taken up with the preparations for the funeral. The
distant aunt, who appeared to be Darrow’s only relation, had been duly
notified of his death; but no answer having been received from her, it was
left to his friend to fulfil the customary duties. He was again absent for
the best part of the day; and when he returned at dusk Mrs. Peyton, looking
up from the tea-table behind which she awaited him, was startled by the
deep-lined misery of his face.

Her own thoughts were too painful for ready expression, and they sat for a
while in a mute community of wretchedness.

“Is everything arranged?” she asked at length.

“Yes. Everything.”

“And you have not heard from the aunt?”

He shook his head.

“Can you find no trace of any other relations?”

“None. I went over all his papers. There were very few, and I found no
address but the aunt’s.” He sat thrown back in his chair, disregarding the
cup of tea she had mechanically poured for him. “I found this, though,” he
added, after a pause, drawing a letter from his pocket and holding it out
to her.

She took it doubtfully. “Ought I to read it?”

“Yes.”

She saw then that the envelope, in Darrow’s hand, was addressed to her son.
Within were a few pencilled words, dated on the first day of his illness,
the morrow of the day on which she had last seen him.

“Dear Dick,” she read, “I want you to use my plans for the museum if you
can get any good out of them. Even if I pull out of this I want you to. I
shall have other chances, and I have an idea this one means a lot to you.”

Mrs. Peyton sat speechless, gazing at the date of the letter, which she had
instantly connected with her last talk with Darrow. She saw that he had
understood her, and the thought scorched her to the soul.

“Wasn’t it glorious of him?” Dick said.

She dropped the letter, and hid her face in her hands.


IV

The funeral took place the next morning, and on the return from the
cemetery Dick told his mother that he must go and look over things at
Darrow’s office. He had heard the day before from his friend’s aunt, a
helpless person to whom telegraphy was difficult and travel inconceivable,
and who, in eight pages of unpunctuated eloquence, made over to Dick what
she called the melancholy privilege of winding up her nephew’s affairs.

Mrs. Peyton looked anxiously at her son. “Is there no one who can do this
for you? He must have had a clerk or some one who knows about his work.”

Dick shook his head. “Not lately. He hasn’t had much to do this winter, and
these last months he had chucked everything to work alone over his plans.”

The word brought a faint colour to Mrs. Peyton’s cheek. It was the first
allusion that either of them had made to Darrow’s bequest.

“Oh, of course you must do all you can,” she murmured, turning alone into
the house.

The emotions of the morning had stirred her deeply, and she sat at home
during the day, letting her mind dwell, in a kind of retrospective piety,
on the thought of poor Darrow’s devotion. She had given him too little
time while he lived, had acquiesced too easily in his growing habits of
seclusion; and she felt it as a proof of insensibility that she had not
been more closely drawn to the one person who had loved Dick as she loved
him. The evidence of that love, as shown in Darrow’s letter, filled her
with a vain compunction. The very extravagance of his offer lent it a
deeper pathos. It was wonderful that, even in the urgency of affection, a
man of his almost morbid rectitude should have overlooked the restrictions
of professional honour, should have implied the possibility of his friend’s
overlooking them. It seemed to make his sacrifice the more complete that it
had, unconsciously, taken the form of a subtle temptation.

The last word arrested Mrs. Peyton’s thoughts. A temptation? To whom? Not,
surely, to one capable, as her son was capable, of rising to the height
of his friend’s devotion. The offer, to Dick, would mean simply, as it
meant to her, the last touching expression of an inarticulate fidelity:
the utterance of a love which at last had found its formula. Mrs. Peyton
dismissed as morbid any other view of the case. She was annoyed with
herself for supposing that Dick could be ever so remotely affected by the
possibility at which poor Darrow’s renunciation hinted. The nature of
the offer removed it from practical issues to the idealizing region of
sentiment.

Mrs. Peyton had been sitting alone with these thoughts for the greater part
of the afternoon, and dusk was falling when Dick entered the drawing-room.
In the dim light, with his pallour heightened by the sombre effect of
his mourning, he came upon her almost startlingly, with a revival of
some long-effaced impression which, for a moment, gave her the sense of
struggling among shadows. She did not, at first, know what had produced the
effect; then she saw that it was his likeness to his father.

“Well--is it over?” she asked, as he threw himself into a chair without
speaking.

“Yes: I’ve looked through everything.” He leaned back, crossing his hands
behind his head, and gazing past her with a look of utter lassitude.

She paused a moment, and then said tentatively: “to-morrow you will be able
to go back to your work.”

“Oh--my work,” he exclaimed, as if to brush aside an ill-timed pleasantry.

“Are you too tired?”

“No.” He rose and began to wander up and down the room. “I’m not
tired.--Give me some tea, will you?” He paused before her while she poured
the cup, and then, without taking it, turned away to light a cigarette.

“Surely there is still time?” she suggested, with her eyes on him.

“Time? To finish my plans? Oh, yes--there’s time. But they’re not worth
it.”

“Not worth it?” She started up, and then dropped back into her seat,
ashamed of having betrayed her anxiety. “They are worth as much as they
were last week,” she said with an attempt at cheerfulness.

“Not to me,” he returned. “I hadn’t seen Darrow’s then.”

There was a long silence. Mrs. Peyton sat with her eyes fixed on her
clasped hands, and her son paced the room restlessly.

“Are they so wonderful?” she asked at length.

“Yes.”

She paused again, and then said, lifting a tremulous glance to his face:
“That makes his offer all the more beautiful.”

Dick was lighting another cigarette, and his face was turned from her.
“Yes--I suppose so,” he said in a low tone.

“They were quite finished, he told me,” she continued, unconsciously
dropping her voice to the pitch of his.

“Yes.”

“Then they will be entered, I suppose?”

“Of course--why not?” he answered almost sharply.

“Shall you have time to attend to all that and to finish yours too?”

“Oh, I suppose so. I’ve told you it isn’t a question of tune. I see now
that mine are not worth bothering with.”

She rose and approached him, laying her hands on his shoulders. “You are
tired and unstrung; how can you judge? Why not let me look at both designs
to-morrow?”

Under her gaze he flushed abruptly and drew back with a half-impatient
gesture.

“Oh, I’m afraid that wouldn’t help me; you’d be sure to think mine best,”
 he said with a laugh.

“But if I could give you good reasons?” she pressed him.

He took her hand, as if ashamed of his impatience. “Dear mother, if you had
any reasons their mere existence would prove that they were bad.”

His mother did not return his smile. “You won’t let me see the two designs
then?” she said with a faint tinge of insistence.

“Oh, of course--if you want to--if you only won’t talk about it now! Can’t
you see that I’m pretty nearly dead-beat?” he burst out uncontrollably; and
as she stood silent, he added with a weary fall in his voice, “I think I’ll
go upstairs and see if I can’t get a nap before dinner.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Though they had separated upon the assurance that she should see the two
designs if she wished it, Mrs. Peyton knew they would not be shown to her.
Dick, indeed, would not again deny her request; but had he not reckoned on
the improbability of her renewing it? All night she lay confronted by that
question. The situation shaped itself before her with that hallucinating
distinctness which belongs to the midnight vision. She knew now why Dick
had suddenly reminded her of his father: had she not once before seen the
same thought moving behind the same eyes? She was sure it had occurred to
Dick to use Darrow’s drawings. As she lay awake in the darkness she could
hear him, long after midnight, pacing the floor overhead: she held her
breath, listening to the recurring beat of his foot, which seemed that of
an imprisoned spirit revolving wearily in the cage of the same thought. She
felt in every fibre that a crisis in her son’s life had been reached, that
the act now before him would have a determining effect on his whole future.
The circumstances of her past had raised to clairvoyance her natural
insight into human motive, had made of her a moral barometer responding to
the faintest fluctuations of atmosphere, and years of anxious meditation
had familiarized her with the form which her son’s temptations were likely
to take. The peculiar misery of her situation was that she could not,
except indirectly, put this intuition, this foresight, at his service.
It was a part of her discernment to be aware that life is the only real
counsellor, that wisdom unfiltered through personal experience does not
become a part of the moral tissues. Love such as hers had a great office,
the office of preparation and direction; but it must know how to hold its
hand and keep its counsel, how to attend upon its object as an invisible
influence rather than as an active interference.

All this Kate Peyton had told herself again and again, during those hours
of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick’s horoscope; but
not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a
test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she
might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic
appeal to his will-power: that his temptations should slip by him in a dull
disguise. She had secured him against all ordinary forms of baseness; the
vulnerable point lay higher, in that region of idealizing egotism which is
the seat of life in such natures.

Years of solitary foresight gave her mind a singular alertness in dealing
with such possibilities. She saw at once that the peril of the situation
lay in the minimum of risk it involved. Darrow had employed no assistant in
working out his plans for the competition, and his secluded life made it
almost certain that he had not shown them to any one, and that she and Dick
alone knew them to have been completed. Moreover, it was a part of Dick’s
duty to examine the contents of his friend’s office, and in doing this
nothing would be easier than to possess himself of the drawings and make
use of any part of them that might serve his purpose. He had Darrow’s
authority for doing so; and though the act involved a slight breach of
professional probity, might not his friend’s wishes be invoked as a secret
justification? Mrs. Peyton found herself almost hating poor Darrow for
having been the unconscious instrument of her son’s temptation. But what
right had she, after all, to suspect Dick of considering, even for a
moment, the act of which she was so ready to accuse him? His unwillingness
to let her see the drawings might have been the accidental result of
lassitude and discouragement. He was tired and troubled, and she had chosen
the wrong moment to make the request. His want of readiness might even be
due to the wish to conceal from her how far his friend had surpassed him.
She knew his sensitiveness on this point, and reproached herself for not
having foreseen it. But her own arguments failed to convince her. Deep
beneath her love for her boy and her faith in him there lurked a nameless
doubt. She could hardly now, in looking back, define the impulse upon which
she had married Denis Peyton: she knew only that the deeps of her nature
had been loosened, and that she had been borne forward on their current
to the very fate from which her heart recoiled. But if in one sense her
marriage remained a problem, there was another in which her motherhood
seemed to solve it. She had never lost the sense of having snatched her
child from some dim peril which still lurked and hovered; and he became
more closely hers with every effort of her vigilant love. For the act
of rescue had not been accomplished once and for all in the moment
of immolation: it had not been by a sudden stroke of heroism, but by
ever-renewed and indefatigable effort, that she had built up for him the
miraculous shelter of her love. And now that it stood there, a hallowed
refuge against failure, she could not even set a light in the pane, but
must let him grope his way to it unaided.


V

Mrs. Peyton’s midnight musings summed themselves up in the conclusion that
the next few hours would end her uncertainty. She felt the day to be
decisive. If Dick offered to show her the drawings, her fears would be
proved groundless; if he avoided the subject, they were justified.

She dressed early in order not to miss him at breakfast; but as she entered
the dining-room the parlour-maid told her that Mr. Peyton had overslept
himself, and had rung to have his breakfast sent upstairs. Was it a pretext
to avoid her? She was vexed at her own readiness to see a portent in the
simplest incident; but while she blushed at her doubts she let them govern
her. She left the dining-room door open, determined not to miss him if
he came downstairs while she was at breakfast; then she went back to the
drawing-room and sat down at her writing-table, trying to busy herself with
some accounts while she listened for his step. Here too she had left the
door open; but presently even this slight departure from her daily usage
seemed a deviation from the passive attitude she had adopted, and she rose
and shut the door. She knew that she could still hear his step on the
stairs--he had his father’s quick swinging gait--but as she sat listening,
and vainly trying to write, the closed door seemed to symbolize a refusal
to share in his trial, a hardening of herself against his need of her. What
if he should come down intending to speak, and should be turned from his
purpose? Slighter obstacles have deflected the course of events in those
indeterminate moments when the soul floats between two tides. She sprang
up quickly, and as her hand touched the latch she heard his step on the
stairs.

When he entered the drawing-room she had regained the writing-table and
could lift a composed face to his. He came in hurriedly, yet with a kind of
reluctance beneath his haste: again it was his father’s step. She smiled,
but looked away from him as he approached her; she seemed to be re-living
her own past as one re-lives things in the distortion of fever.

“Are you off already?” she asked, glancing at the hat in his hand.

“Yes; I’m late as it is. I overslept myself.” He paused and looked vaguely
about the room. “Don’t expect me till late--don’t wait dinner for me.”

She stirred impulsively. “Dick, you’re overworking--you’ll make yourself
ill.”

“Nonsense. I’m as fit as ever this morning. Don’t be imagining things.”

He dropped his habitual kiss on her forehead, and turned to go. On the
threshold he paused, and she felt that something in him sought her and then
drew back. “Good-bye,” he called to her as the door closed on him.

She sat down and tried to survey the situation divested of her midnight
fears. He had not referred to her wish to see the drawings: but what did
the omission signify? Might he not have forgotten her request? Was she
not forcing the most trivial details to fit in with her apprehensions?
Unfortunately for her own reassurance, she knew that her familiarity with
Dick’s processes was based on such minute observation, and that, to such
intimacy as theirs, no indications were trivial. She was as certain as if
he had spoken, that when he had left the house that morning he was weighing
the possibility of using Darrow’s drawings, of supplementing his own
incomplete design from the fulness of his friend’s invention. And with a
bitter pang she divined that he was sorry he had shown her Darrow’s letter.

It was impossible to remain face to face with such conjectures, and though
she had given up all her engagements during the few days since Darrow’s
death, she now took refuge in the thought of a concert which was to take
place at a friend’s house that morning. The music-room, when she entered,
was thronged with acquaintances, and she found transient relief in that
dispersal of attention which makes society an anesthetic for some forms
of wretchedness. Contact with the pressure of busy indifferent life often
gives remoteness to questions which have clung as close as the flesh to the
bone; and if Mrs. Peyton did not find such complete release, she at least
interposed between herself and her anxiety the obligation to dissemble it.
But the relief was only momentary, and when the first bars of the overture
turned from her the smiles of recognition among which she had tried to lose
herself, she felt a deeper sense of isolation. The music, which at another
time would have swept her away on some rich current of emotion, now seemed
to island her in her own thoughts, to create an artificial solitude in
which she found herself more immitigably face to face with her fears. The
silence, the _recueillement_, about her gave resonance to the inner
voices, lucidity to the inner vision, till she seemed enclosed in a
luminous empty horizon against which every possibility took the sharp edge
of accomplished fact. With relentless precision the course of events was
unrolled before her: she saw Dick yielding to his opportunity, snatching
victory from dishonour, winning love, happiness and success in the act by
which he lost himself. It was all so simple, so easy, so inevitable, that
she felt the futility of struggling or hoping against it. He would win the
competition, would marry Miss Verney, would press on to achievement through
the opening which the first success had made for him.

As Mrs. Peyton reached this point in her forecast, she found her outward
gaze arrested by the face of the young lady who so dominated her inner
vision. Miss Verney, a few rows distant, sat intent upon the music, in that
attitude of poised motion which was her nearest approach to repose. Her
slender brown profile with its breezy hair, her quick eye, and the lips
which seemed to listen as well as speak, all betokened to Mrs. Peyton a
nature through which the obvious energies blew free, a bare open stretch
of consciousness without shelter for tenderer growths. She shivered to
think of Dick’s frail scruples exposed to those rustling airs. And then,
suddenly, a new thought struck her. What if she might turn this force to
her own use, make it serve, unconsciously to Dick, as the means of his
deliverance? Hitherto she had assumed that her son’s worst danger lay in
the chance of his confiding his difficulty to Clemence Verney; and she
had, in her own past, a precedent which made her think such a confidence
not unlikely. If he did carry his scruples to the girl, she argued, the
latter’s imperviousness, her frank inability to understand them, would have
the effect of dispelling them like mist; and he was acute enough to know
this and profit by it. So she had hitherto reasoned; but now the girl’s
presence seemed to clarify her perceptions, and she told herself that
something in Dick’s nature, something which she herself had put there,
would resist this short cut to safety, would make him take the more
tortuous way to his goal rather than gain it through the privacies of the
heart he loved. For she had lifted him thus far above his father, that it
would be a disenchantment to him to find that Clemence Verney did not share
his scruples. On this much, his mother now exultingly felt, she could count
in her passive struggle for supremacy. No, he would never, never tell
Clemence Verney--and his one hope, his sure salvation, therefore lay in
some one else’s telling her.

The excitement of this discovery had nearly, in mid-concert, swept Mrs.
Peyton from her seat to the girl’s side. Fearing to miss the latter in
the throng at the entrance, she slipped out during the last number and,
lingering in the farther drawing-room, let the dispersing audience drift
her in Miss Verney’s direction. The girl shone sympathetically on her
approach, and in a moment they had detached themselves from the crowd and
taken refuge in the perfumed emptiness of the conservatory.

The girl, whose sensations were always easily set in motion, had at first a
good deal to say of the music, for which she claimed, on her hearer’s part,
an active show of approval or dissent; but this dismissed, she turned a
melting face on Mrs. Peyton and said with one of her rapid modulations of
tone: “I was so sorry about poor Mr. Darrow.”

Mrs. Peyton uttered an assenting sigh. “It was a great grief to us--a great
loss to my son.”

“Yes--I know. I can imagine what you must have felt. And then it was so
unlucky that it should have happened just now.”

Mrs. Peyton shot a reconnoitring glance at her profile. “His dying, you
mean, on the eve of success?”

Miss Verney turned a frank smile upon her. “One ought to feel that, of
course--but I’m afraid I am very selfish where my friends are concerned,
and I was thinking of Mr. Peyton’s having to give up his work at such a
critical moment.” She spoke without a note of deprecation: there was a
pagan freshness in her opportunism.

Mrs. Peyton was silent, and the girl continued after a pause: “I suppose
now it will be almost impossible for him to finish his drawings in time.
It’s a pity he hadn’t worked out the whole scheme a little sooner. Then the
details would have come of themselves.”

Mrs. Peyton felt a contempt strangely mingled with exultation. If only the
girl would talk in that way to Dick!

“He has hardly had time to think of himself lately,” she said, trying to
keep the coldness out of her voice.

“No, of course not,” Miss Verney assented; “but isn’t that all the more
reason for his friends to think of him? It was very dear of him to give up
everything to nurse Mr. Darrow--but, after all, if a man is going to get on
in his career there are times when he must think first of himself.”

Mrs. Peyton paused, trying to choose her words with deliberation. It was
quite clear now that Dick had not spoken, and she felt the responsibility
that devolved upon her.

“Getting on in a career--is that always the first thing to be considered?”
 she asked, letting her eyes rest musingly on the girl’s.

The glance did not disconcert Miss Verney, who returned it with one of
equal comprehensiveness. “Yes,” she said quickly, and with a slight blush.
“With a temperament like Mr. Peyton’s I believe it is. Some people can pick
themselves up after any number of bad falls: I am not sure that he could. I
think discouragement would weaken instead of strengthening him.”

Both women had forgotten external conditions in the quick reach for each
other’s meanings. Mrs. Peyton flushed, her maternal pride in revolt; but
the answer was checked on her lips by the sense of the girl’s unexpected
insight. Here was some one who knew Dick as well as she did--should she say
a partisan or an accomplice? A dim jealousy stirred beneath Mrs. Peyton’s
other emotions: she was undergoing the agony which the mother feels at the
first intrusion on her privilege of judging her child; and her voice had a
flutter of resentment.

“You must have a poor opinion of his character,” she said.

Miss Verney did not remove her eyes, but her blush deepened beautifully. “I
have, at any rate,” she Said, “a high one of his talent. I don’t suppose
many men have an equal amount of moral and intellectual energy.”

“And you would cultivate the one at the expense of the other?”

“In certain cases--and up to a certain point.” She shook out the long fur
of her muff, one of those silvery flexible furs which clothe a woman with a
delicate sumptuousness. Everything about her, at the moment, seemed rich
and cold--everything, as Mrs. Peyton quickly noted, but the blush lingering
under her dark skin; and so complete was the girl’s self-command that the
blush seemed to be there only because it had been forgotten.

“I dare say you think me strange,” she continued. “Most people do, because
I speak the truth. It’s the easiest way of concealing one’s feelings. I
can, for instance, talk quite openly about Mr. Peyton under shelter of your
inference that I shouldn’t do so if I were what is called ‘interested’ in
him. And as I _am_ interested in him, my method has its advantages!”
 She ended with one of the fluttering laughs which seemed to flit from point
to point of her expressive person.

Mrs. Peyton leaned toward her. “I believe you are interested,” she said
quietly; “and since I suppose you allow others the privilege you claim for
yourself, I am going to confess that I followed you here in the hope of
finding out the nature of your interest.”

Miss Verney shot a glance at her, and drew away in a soft subsidence of
undulating furs.

“Is this an embassy?” she asked smiling.

“No: not in any sense.”

The girl leaned back with an air of relief. “I’m glad; I should have
disliked--” She looked again at Mrs. Peyton. “You want to know what I mean
to do?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can only answer that I mean to wait and see what he does.”

“You mean that everything is contingent on his success?”

“_I_ am--if I’m everything,” she admitted gaily.

The mother’s heart was beating in her throat, and her words seemed to force
themselves out through the throbs.

“I--I don’t quite see why you attach such importance to this special
success.”

“Because he does,” the girl returned instantly. “Because to him it is the
final answer to his self-questioning--the questioning whether he is ever to
amount to anything or not. He says if he has anything in him it ought to
come out now. All the conditions are favourable--it is the chance he has
always prayed for. You see,” she continued, almost confidentially, but
without the least loss of composure--“you see he has told me a great deal
about himself and his various experiments--his phrases of indecision and
disgust. There are lots of tentative talents in the world, and the sooner
they are crushed out by circumstances the better. But it seems as though
he really had it in him to do something distinguished--as though the
uncertainty lay in his character and not in his talent. That is what
interests, what attracts me. One can’t teach a man to have genius, but if
he has it one may show him how to use it. That is what I should be good
for, you see--to keep him up to his opportunities.”

Mrs. Peyton had listened with an intensity of attention that left her reply
unprepared. There was something startling and yet half attractive in the
girl’s avowal of principles which are oftener lived by than professed.

“And you think,” she began at length, “that in this case he has fallen
below his opportunity?”

“No one can tell, of course; but his discouragement, his _abattement_,
is a bad sign. I don’t think he has any hope of succeeding.”

The mother again wavered a moment. “Since you are so frank,” she then said,
“will you let me be equally so, and ask how lately you have seen him?”

The girl smiled at the circumlocution. “Yesterday afternoon,” she said
simply.

“And you thought him--”

“Horribly down on his luck. He said himself that his brain was empty.”

Again Mrs. Peyton felt the throb in her throat, and a slow blush rose to
her cheek. “Was that all he said?”

“About himself--was there anything else?” said the girl quickly.

“He didn’t tell you of--of an opportunity to make up for the time he has
lost?”

“An opportunity? I don’t understand.”

“He didn’t speak to you, then, of Mr. Darrow’s letter?”

“He said nothing of any letter.”

“There _was_ one, which was found after poor Darrow’s death. In it he
gave Dick leave to use his design for the competition. Dick says the design
is wonderful--it would give him just what he needs.”

Miss Verney sat listening raptly, with a rush of colour that suffused her
like light.

“But when was this? Where was the letter found? He never said a word of
it!” she exclaimed.

“The letter was found on the day of Darrow’s death.”

“But I don’t understand! Why has he never told me? Why should he seem so
hopeless?” She turned an ignorant appealing face on Mrs. Peyton. It was
prodigious, but it was true--she felt nothing, saw nothing, but the crude
fact of the opportunity.

Mrs. Peyton’s voice trembled with the completeness of her triumph. “I
suppose his reason for not speaking is that he has scruples.”

“Scruples?”

“He feels that to use the design would be dishonest.”

Miss Verney’s eyes fixed themselves on her in a commiserating stare.
“Dishonest? When the poor man wished it himself? When it was his last
request? When the letter is there to prove it? Why, the design belongs to
your son! No one else had any right to it.”

“But Dick’s right does not extend to passing it off as his own--at least
that is his feeling, I believe. If he won the competition he would be
winning it on false pretenses.”

“Why should you call them false pretenses? His design might have been
better than Darrow’s if he had had time to carry it out. It seems to me
that Mr. Darrow must have felt this--must have felt that he owed his friend
some compensation for the time he took from him. I can imagine nothing more
natural than his wishing to make this return for your son’s sacrifice.”

She positively glowed with the force of her conviction, and Mrs. Peyton,
for a strange instant, felt her own resistance wavering. She herself had
never considered the question in that light--the light of Darrow’s viewing
his gift as a justifiable compensation. But the glimpse she caught of it
drove her shuddering behind her retrenchments.

“That argument,” she said coldly, “would naturally be more convincing to
Darrow than to my son.”

Miss Verney glanced up, struck by the change in Mrs. Peyton’s voice.

“Ah, then you agree with him? You think it _would_ be dishonest?”

Mrs. Peyton saw that she had slipped into self-betrayal. “My son and I have
not spoken of the matter,” she said evasively. She caught the flash of
relief in Miss Verney’s face.

“You haven’t spoken? Then how do you know how he feels about it?”

“I only judge from--well, perhaps from his not speaking.”

The girl drew a deep breath. “I see,” she murmured. “That is the very
reason that prevents his speaking.”

“The reason?”

“Your knowing what he thinks--and his knowing that you know.”

Mrs. Peyton was startled at her subtlety. “I assure you,” she said, rising,
“that I have done nothing to influence him.”

The girl gazed at her musingly. “No,” she said with a faint smile, “nothing
except to read his thoughts.”


VI

Mrs. Peyton reached home in the state of exhaustion which follows on a
physical struggle. It seemed to her as though her talk with Clemence Verney
had been an actual combat, a measuring of wrist and eye. For a moment she
was frightened at what she had done--she felt as though she had betrayed
her son to the enemy. But before long she regained her moral balance,
and saw that she had merely shifted the conflict to the ground on which
it could best be fought out--since the prize fought for was the natural
battlefield. The reaction brought with it a sense of helplessness, a
realization that she had let the issue pass out of her hold; but since, in
the last analysis, it had never lain there, since it was above all needful
that the determining touch should be given by any hand but hers, she
presently found courage to subside into inaction. She had done all she
could--even more, perhaps, than prudence warranted--and now she could but
await passively the working of the forces she had set in motion.

For two days after her talk with Miss Verney she saw little of Dick. He
went early to his office and came back late. He seemed less tired, more
self-possessed, than during the first days after Darrow’s death; but there
was a new inscrutableness in his manner, a note of reserve, of resistance
almost, as though he had barricaded himself against her conjectures. She
had been struck by Miss Verney’s reply to the anxious asseveration that
she had done nothing to influence Dick--“Nothing,” the girl had answered,
“except to read his thoughts.” Mrs. Peyton shrank from this detection of
a tacit interference with her son’s liberty of action. She longed--how
passionately he would never know--to stand apart from him in this struggle
between his two destinies, and it was almost a relief that he on his side
should hold aloof, should, for the first time in their relation, seem to
feel her tenderness as an intrusion.

Only four days remained before the date fixed for the sending in of the
designs, and still Dick had not referred to his work. Of Darrow, also, he
had made no mention. His mother longed to know if he had spoken to Clemence
Verney--or rather if the girl had forced his confidence. Mrs. Peyton was
almost certain that Miss Verney would not remain silent--there were times
when Dick’s renewed application to his work seemed an earnest of her having
spoken, and spoken convincingly. At the thought Kate’s heart grew chill.
What if her experiment should succeed in a sense she had not intended? If
the girl should reconcile Dick to his weakness, should pluck the sting from
his temptation? In this round of uncertainties the mother revolved for two
interminable days; but the second evening brought an answer to her
question.

Dick, returning earlier than usual from the office, had found, on the
hall-table, a note which, since morning, had been under his mother’s
observation. The envelope, fashionable in tint and texture, was addressed
in a rapid staccato hand which seemed the very imprint of Miss Verney’s
utterance. Mrs. Peyton did not know the girl’s writing; but such notes had
of late lain often enough on the hall-table to make their attribution easy.
This communication Dick, as his mother poured his tea, looked over with a
face of shifting lights; then he folded it into his note-case, and said,
with a glance at his watch: “If you haven’t asked any one for this evening
I think I’ll dine out.”

“Do, dear; the change will be good for you,” his mother assented.

He made no answer, but sat leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head,
his eyes fixed on the fire. Every line of his body expressed a profound
physical lassitude, but the face remained alert and guarded. Mrs. Peyton,
in silence, was busying herself with the details of the tea-making, when
suddenly, inexplicably, a question forced itself to her lips.

“And your work--?” she said, strangely hearing herself speak.

“My work--?” He sat up, on the defensive almost, but without a tremor of
the guarded face.

“You’re getting on well? You’ve made up for lost time?”

“Oh, yes: things are going better.” He rose, with another glance at his
watch. “Time to dress,” he said, nodding to her as he turned to the door.

It was an hour later, during her own solitary dinner, that a ring at the
door was followed by the parlour-maid’s announcement that Mr. Gill was
there from the office. In the hall, in fact, Kate found her son’s partner,
who explained apologetically that he had understood Peyton was dining at
home, and had come to consult him about a difficulty which had arisen since
he had left the office. On hearing that Dick was out, and that his mother
did not know where he had gone, Mr. Gill’s perplexity became so manifest
that Mrs. Peyton, after a moment, said hesitatingly: “He may be at a
friend’s house; I could give you the address.”

The architect caught up his hat. “Thank you; I’ll have a try for him.”

Mrs. Peyton hesitated again. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “it would be better
to telephone.”

She led the way into the little study behind the drawing-room, where
a telephone stood on the writing-table. The folding doors between the
two rooms were open: should she close them as she passed back into the
drawing-room? On the threshold she wavered an instant; then she walked on
and took her usual seat by the fire.

Gill, meanwhile, at the telephone, had “rung up” the Verney house, and
inquired if his partner were dining there. The reply was evidently
affirmative; and a moment later Kate knew that he was in communication with
her son. She sat motionless, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair,
her head erect, in an attitude of avowed attention. If she listened she
would listen openly: there should be no suspicion of eavesdropping. Gill,
engrossed in his message, was probably hardly conscious of her presence;
but if he turned his head he should at least have no difficulty in seeing
her, and in being aware that she could hear what he said. Gill, however, as
she was quick to remember, was doubtless ignorant of any need for secrecy
in his communication to Dick. He had often heard the affairs of the office
discussed openly before Mrs. Peyton, had been led to regard her as familiar
with all the details of her son’s work. He talked on unconcernedly, and she
listened.

Ten minutes later, when he rose to go, she knew all that she had wanted to
find out. Long familiarity with the technicalities of her son’s profession
made it easy for her to translate the stenographic jargon of the office.
She could lengthen out all Gill’s abbreviations, interpret all his
allusions, and reconstruct Dick’s answers from the questions addressed to
him. And when the door closed on the architect she was left face to face
with the fact that her son, unknown to any one but herself, was using
Darrow’s drawings to complete his work.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Peyton, left alone, found it easier to continue her vigil by the
drawing-room fire than to carry up to the darkness and silence of her own
room the truth she had been at such pains to acquire. She had no thought of
sitting up for Dick. Doubtless, his dinner over, he would rejoin Gill at
the office, and prolong through, the night the task in which she now knew
him to be engaged. But it was less lonely by the fire than in the wide-eyed
darkness which awaited her upstairs. A mortal loneliness enveloped her. She
felt as though she had fallen by the way, spent and broken in a struggle of
which even its object had been unconscious. She had tried to deflect the
natural course of events, she had sacrificed her personal happiness to a
fantastic ideal of duty, and it was her punishment to be left alone with
her failure, outside the normal current of human strivings and regrets.

She had no wish to see her son just then: she would have preferred to let
the inner tumult subside, to repossess herself in this new adjustment to
life, before meeting his eyes again. But as she sat there, far adrift on
her misery, she was aroused by the turning of his key in the latch. She
started up, her heart sounding a retreat, but her faculties too dispersed
to obey it; and while she stood wavering, the door opened and he was in the
room.

In the room, and with face illumined: a Dick she had not seen since the
strain of the contest had cast its shade on him. Now he shone as in a
sunrise of victory, holding out exultant hands from which she hung back
instinctively.

“Mother! I knew you’d be waiting for me!” He had her on his breast now, and
his kisses were in her hair. “I’ve always said you knew everything that was
happening to me, and now you’ve guessed that I wanted you to-night.”

She was struggling faintly against the dear endearments. “What _has_
happened?” she murmured, drawing back for a dazzled look at him.

He had drawn her to the sofa, had dropped beside her, regaining his hold of
her in the boyish need that his happiness should be touched and handled.

“My engagement has happened!” he cried out to her. “You stupid dear, do you
need to be told?”


VII

She had indeed needed to be told: the surprise was complete and
overwhelming. She sat silent under it, her hands trembling in his, till the
blood mounted to his face and she felt his confident grasp relax.

“You didn’t guess it, then?” he exclaimed, starting up and moving away from
her.

“No; I didn’t guess it,” she confessed in a dead-level voice.

He stood above her, half challenging, half defensive. “And you haven’t a
word to say to me? Mother!” he adjured her.

She rose too, putting her arms about him with a kiss. “Dick! Dear Dick!”
 she murmured.

“She imagines you don’t like her; she says she’s always felt it. And yet
she owns you’ve been delightful, that you’ve tried to make friends with
her. And I thought you knew how much it would mean to me, just now, to have
this uncertainty over, and that you’d actually been trying to help me, to
put in a good word for me. I thought it was you who had made her decide.”

“I?”

“By your talk with her the other day. She told me of your talk with her.”

His mother’s hands slipped from his shoulders and she sank back into her
seat. She felt the cruelty of her silence, but only an inarticulate murmur
found a way to her lips. Before speaking she must clear a space in the
suffocating rush of her sensations. For the moment she could only repeat
inwardly that Clemence Verney had yielded before the final test, and that
she herself was somehow responsible for this fresh entanglement of fate.
For she saw in a flash how the coils of circumstance had tightened; and as
her mind cleared it was filled with the perception that this, precisely,
was what the girl intended, that this was why she had conferred the crown
before the victory. By pledging herself to Dick she had secured his pledge
in return: had put him on his honour in a cynical inversion of the term.
Kate saw the succession of events spread out before her like a map, and the
astuteness of the girl’s policy frightened her. Miss Verney had conducted
the campaign like a strategist. She had frankly owned that her interest in
Dick’s future depended on his capacity for success, and in order to key him
up to his first achievement she had given him a foretaste of its results.

So much was almost immediately clear to Mrs. Peyton; but in a moment her
inferences had carried her a point farther. For it was now plain to her
that Miss Verney had not risked so much without first trying to gain her
point at less cost: that if she had had to give herself as a prize, it was
because no other bribe had been sufficient. This then, as the mother saw
with a throb of hope, meant that Dick, who since Darrow’s death had held
to his purpose unwaveringly, had been deflected from it by the first hint
of Clemence Verney’s connivance. Kate had not miscalculated: things had
happened as she had foreseen. In the light of the girl’s approval his act
had taken an odious look. He had recoiled from it, and it was to revive his
flagging courage that she had had to promise herself, to take him in the
meshes of her surrender.

Kate, looking up, saw above her the young perplexity of her boy’s face, the
suspended happiness waiting to brim over. With a fresh touch of misery she
said to herself that this was his hour, his one irrecoverable moment, and
that she was darkening it by her silence. Her memory went back to the same
hour in her own life: she could feel its heat in her pulses still. What
right had she to stand in Dick’s light? Who was she to decide between his
code and hers? She put out her hand and drew him down to her.

“She’ll be the making of me, you know, mother,” he said, as they leaned
together. “She’ll put new life in me--she’ll help me get my second wind.
Her talk is like a fresh breeze blowing away the fog in my head. I never
knew any one who saw so straight to the heart of things, who had such a
grip on values. She goes straight up to life and catches hold of it, and
you simply can’t make her let go.”

He got up and walked the length of the room; then he came back and stood
smiling above his mother.

“You know you and I are rather complicated people,” he said. “We’re always
walking around things to get new views of them--we’re always rearranging
the furniture. And somehow she simplifies life so tremendously.” He dropped
down beside her with a deprecating laugh. “Not that I mean, dear, that it
hasn’t been good for me to argue things out with myself, as you’ve taught
me to--only the man who stops to talk is apt to get shoved aside nowadays,
and I don’t believe Milton’s archangels would have had much success in
active business.”

He had begun in a strain of easy confidence, but as he went on she detected
an effort to hold the note, she felt that his words were being poured out
in a vain attempt to fill the silence which was deepening between them. She
longed, in her turn, to pour something into that menacing void, to bridge
it with a reconciling word or look; but her soul hung back, and she had to
take refuge in a vague murmur of tenderness.

“My boy! My boy!” she repeated; and he sat beside her without speaking,
their hand-clasp alone spanning the distance which had widened between
their thoughts.

       *       *       *       *       *

The engagement, as Kate subsequently learned, was not to be made known till
later. Miss Verney had even stipulated that for the present there should
be no recognition of it in her own family or in Dick’s. She did not wish
to interfere with his final work for the competition, and had made him
promise, as he laughingly owned, that he would not see her again till the
drawings were sent in. His mother noticed that he made no other allusion to
his work; but when he bade her good-night he added that he might not see
her the next morning, as he had to go to the office early. She took this as
a hint that he wished to be left alone, and kept her room the next day till
the closing door told her that he was out of the house.

She herself had waked early, and it seemed to her that the day was already
old when she came downstairs. Never had the house appeared so empty. Even
in Dick’s longest absences something of his presence had always hung about
the rooms: a fine dust of memories and associations, which wanted only the
evocation of her thought to float into a palpable semblance of him. But now
he seemed to have taken himself quite away, to have broken every fibre by
which their lives had hung together. Where the sense of him had been there
was only a deeper emptiness: she felt as if a strange man had gone out of
her house.

She wandered from room to room, aimlessly, trying to adjust herself to
their solitude. She had known such loneliness before, in the years when
most women’s hearts are fullest; but that was long ago, and the solitude
had after all been less complete, because of the sense that it might
still be filled. Her son had come: her life had brimmed over; but now the
tide ebbed again, and she was left gazing over a bare stretch of wasted
years. Wasted! There was the mortal pang, the stroke from which there was
no healing. Her faith and hope had been marsh-lights luring her to the
wilderness, her love a vain edifice reared on shifting ground.

In her round of the rooms she came at last to Dick’s study upstairs. It was
full of his boyhood: she could trace the history of his past in its quaint
relics and survivals, in the school-books lingering on his crowded shelves,
the school-photographs and college-trophies hung among his later treasures.
All his successes and failures, his exaltations and inconsistencies, were
recorded in the warm huddled heterogeneous room. Everywhere she saw the
touch of her own hand, the vestiges of her own steps. It was she alone
who held the clue to the labyrinth, who could thread a way through the
confusions and contradictions of his past; and her soul rejected the
thought that his future could ever escape from her. She dropped down into
his shabby college armchair and hid her face in the papers on his desk.


VIII

The day dwelt in her memory as a long stretch of aimless hours: blind
alleys of time that led up to a dead wall of inaction.

Toward afternoon she remembered that she had promised to dine out and go to
the opera. At first she felt that the contact of life would be unendurable;
then she shrank from shutting herself up with her misery. In the end she
let herself drift passively on the current of events, going through the
mechanical routine of the day without much consciousness of what was
happening.

At twilight, as she sat in the drawing-room, the evening paper was brought
in, and in glancing over it her eye fell on a paragraph which seemed
printed in more vivid type than the rest. It was headed, _The New Museum
of Sculpture_, and underneath she read: “The artists and architects
selected to pass on the competitive designs for the new Museum will begin
their sittings on Monday, and to-morrow is the last day on which designs may
be sent in to the committee. Great interest is felt in the competition, as
the conspicuous site chosen for the new building, and the exceptionally
large sum voted by the city for its erection, offer an unusual field for
the display of architectural ability.”

She leaned back, closing her eyes. It was as though a clock had struck,
loud and inexorably, marking off some irrecoverable hour. She was seized
by a sudden longing to seek Dick out, to fall on her knees and plead with
him: it was one of those physical obsessions against which the body has to
stiffen its muscles as well as the mind its thoughts. Once she even sprang
up to ring for a cab; but she sank back again, breathing as if after a
struggle, and gripping the arms of her chair to keep herself down.

“I can only wait for him--only wait for him--” she heard herself say; and
the words loosened the sobs in her throat.

At length she went upstairs to dress for dinner. A ghostlike self looked
back at her from her toilet-glass: she watched it performing the mechanical
gestures of the toilet, dressing her, as it appeared, without help from
her actual self. Each little act stood out sharply against the blurred
background of her brain: when she spoke to her maid her voice sounded
extraordinarily loud. Never had the house been so silent; or, stay--yes,
once she had felt the same silence, once when Dick, in his school-days, had
been ill of a fever, and she had sat up with him on the decisive night.
The silence had been as deep and as terrible then; and as she dressed she
had before her the vision of his room, of the cot in which he lay, of his
restless head working a hole in the pillow, his face so pinched and alien
under the familiar freckles. It might be his death-watch she was keeping:
the doctors had warned her to be ready. And in the silence her soul had
fought for her boy, her love had hung over him like wings, her abundant
useless hateful life had struggled to force itself into his empty veins.
And she had succeeded, she had saved him, she had poured her life into him;
and in place of the strange child she had watched all night, at daylight
she held her own boy to her breast.

That night had once seemed to her the most dreadful of her life; but she
knew now that it was one of the agonies which enrich, that the passion thus
spent grows fourfold from its ashes. She could not have borne to keep this
new vigil alone. She must escape from its sterile misery, must take refuge
in other lives till she regained courage to face her own. At the opera,
in the illumination of the first _entr’acte_, as she gazed about the
house, wondering through the numb ache of her wretchedness how others could
talk and smile and be indifferent, it seemed to her that all the jarring
animation about her was suddenly focussed in the face of Clemence Verney.
Miss Verney sat opposite, in the front of a crowded box, a box in which,
continually, the black-coated background shifted and renewed itself.
Mrs. Peyton felt a throb of anger at the girl’s bright air of unconcern.
She forgot that she too was talking, smiling, holding out her hand to
newcomers, in a studied mimicry of life, while her real self played out
its tragedy behind the scenes. Then it occurred to her that, to Clemence
Verney, there was no tragedy in the situation. According to the girl’s
calculations, Dick was virtually certain of success; and unsuccess was to
her the only conceivable disaster.

All through the opera the sense of that opposing force, that negation of
her own beliefs, burned itself into Mrs. Peyton’s consciousness. The space
between herself and the girl seemed to vanish, the throng about them to
disperse, till they were face to face and alone, enclosed in their mortal
enmity. At length the feeling of humiliation and defeat grew unbearable to
Mrs. Peyton. The girl seemed to flout her in the insolence of victory, to
sit there as the visible symbol of her failure. It was better after all to
be at home alone with her thoughts.

As she drove away from the opera she thought of that other vigil which,
only a few streets away, Dick was perhaps still keeping. She wondered if
his work were over, if the final stroke had been drawn. And as she pictured
him there, signing his pact with evil in the loneliness of the conniving
night, an uncontrollable impulse possessed her. She must drive by his
windows and see if they were still alight. She would not go up to him,--she
dared not,--but at least she would pass near to him, would invisibly share
his watch and hover on the edge of his thoughts. She lowered the window and
called out the address to the coachman.

The tall office-building loomed silent and dark as she approached it; but
presently, high up, she caught a light in the familiar windows. Her heart
gave a leap, and the light swam on her through tears. The carriage drew up,
and for a moment she sat motionless. Then the coachman bent down toward
her, and she saw that he was asking if he should drive on. She tried to
shape a yes, but her lips refused it, and she shook her head. He continued
to lean down perplexedly, and at length, under the interrogation of his
attitude, it became impossible to sit still, and she opened the door and
stepped out. It was equally impossible to stand on the sidewalk, and her
next steps carried her to the door of the building. She groped for the
bell and rang it, feeling still dimly accountable to the coachman for some
consecutiveness of action, and after a moment the night watchman opened the
door, drawing back amazed at the shining apparition which confronted him.
Recognizing Mrs. Peyton, whom he had seen about the building by day, he
tried to adapt himself to the situation by a vague stammer of apology.

“I came to see if my son is still here,” she faltered.

“Yes, ma’am, he’s here. He’s been here most nights lately till after
twelve.”

“And is Mr. Gill with him?”

“No: Mr. Gill he went away just after I come on this evening.”

She glanced up into the cavernous darkness of the stairs.

“Is he alone up there, do you think?”

“Yes, ma’am, I know he’s alone, because I seen his men leaving soon after
Mr. Gill.”

Kate lifted her head quickly. “Then I will go up to him,” she said.

The watchman apparently did not think it proper to offer any comment on
this unusual proceeding, and a moment later she was fluttering and rustling
up through the darkness, like a night-bird hovering among rafters. There
were ten flights to climb: at every one her breath failed her, and she had
to stand still and press her hands against her heart. Then the weight on
her breast lifted, and she went on again, upward and upward, the great
dark building dropping away from her, in tier after tier of mute doors and
mysterious corridors. At last she reached Dick’s floor, and saw the light
shining down the passage from his door. She leaned against the wall, her
breath coming short, the silence throbbing in her ears. Even now it was not
too late to turn back. She bent over the stairs, letting her eyes plunge
into the nether blackness, with the single glimmer of the watchman’s lights
in its depths; then she turned and stole toward her son’s door.

There again she paused and listened, trying to catch, through the hum of
her pulses, any noise that might come to her from within. But the silence
was unbroken--it seemed as though the office must be empty. She pressed her
ear to the door, straining for a sound. She knew he never sat long at his
work, and it seemed unaccountable that she should not hear him moving about
the drawing-board. For a moment she fancied he might be sleeping; but sleep
did not come to him readily after prolonged mental effort--she recalled the
restless straying of his feet above her head for hours after he returned
from his night work in the office.

She began to fear that he might be ill. A nervous trembling seized her, and
she laid her hand on the latch, whispering “Dick!”

Her whisper sounded loudly through the silence, but there was no answer,
and after a pause she called again. With each call the hush seemed to
deepen: it closed in on her, mysterious and impenetrable. Her heart was
beating in short frightened leaps: a moment more and she would have cried
out. She drew a quick breath and turned the door-handle.

The outer room, Dick’s private office, with its red carpet and easy-chairs,
stood in pleasant lamp-lit emptiness. The last time she had entered it,
Darrow and Clemence Verney had been there, and she had sat behind the
urn observing them. She paused a moment, struck now by a fault sound
from beyond; then she slipped noiselessly across the carpet, pushed open
the swinging door, and stood on the threshold of the work-room. Here
the gas-lights hung a green-shaded circle of brightness over the great
draughting-table in the middle of the floor. Table and floor were strewn
with a confusion of papers--torn blue-prints and tracings, crumpled sheets
of tracing-paper wrenched from the draughting-boards in a sudden fury of
destruction; and in the centre of the havoc, his arms stretched across the
table and his face hidden in them, sat Dick Peyton.

He did not seem to hear his mother’s approach, and she stood looking at
him, her breast tightening with a new fear.

“Dick!” she said, “Dick!--” and he sprang up, staring with dazed eyes. But
gradually, as his gaze cleared, a light spread in it, a mounting brightness
of recognition.

“You’ve come--you’ve come--” he said, stretching his hands to her; and all
at once she had him in her breast as in a shelter.

“You wanted me?” she whispered as she held him.

He looked up at her, tired, breathless, with the white radiance of the
runner near the goal.

“I _had_ you, dear!” he said, smiling strangely on her; and her heart
gave a great leap of understanding.

Her arms had slipped from his neck, and she stood leaning on him,
deep-suffused in the shyness of her discovery. For it might still be that
he did not wish her to know what she had done for him.

But he put his arm about her, boyishly, and drew her toward one of the hard
seats between the tables; and there, on the bare floor, he knelt before
her, and hid his face in her lap. She sat motionless, feeling the dear
warmth of his head against her knees, letting her hands stray in faint
caresses through his hair.

Neither spoke for awhile; then he raised his head and looked at her. “I
suppose you know what has been happening to me,” he said.

She shrank from seeming to press into his life a hair’s-breadth farther
than he was prepared to have her go. Her eyes turned from him toward the
scattered drawings on the table.

“You have given up the competition?” she said.

“Yes--and a lot more.” He stood up, the wave of emotion ebbing, yet leaving
him nearer, in his recovered calmness, than in the shock of their first
moment.

“I didn’t know, at first, how much you guessed,” he went on quietly. “I was
sorry I’d shown you Darrow’s letter; but it didn’t worry me much because I
didn’t suppose you’d think it possible that I should--take advantage of it.
It’s only lately that I’ve understood that you knew everything.” He looked
at her with a smile. “I don’t know yet how I found it out, for you’re
wonderful about keeping things to yourself, and you never made a sign.
I simply felt it in a kind of nearness--as if I couldn’t get away from
you.--Oh, there were times when I should have preferred not having
you about--when I tried to turn my back on you, to see things from
other people’s standpoint. But you were always there--you wouldn’t be
discouraged. And I got tired of trying to explain things to you, of trying
to bring you round to my way of thinking. You wouldn’t go away and you
wouldn’t come any nearer--you just stood there and watched everything that
I was doing.”

He broke off, taking one of his restless turns down the long room. Then he
drew up a chair beside her, and dropped into it with a great sigh.

“At first, you know, I hated it most awfully. I wanted to be let alone and
to work out my own theory of things. If you’d said a word--if you’d tried
to influence me--the spell would have been broken. But just because the
actual _you_ kept apart and didn’t meddle or pry, the other, the you
in my heart, seemed to get a tighter hold on me. I don’t know how to tell
you,--it’s all mixed up in my head--but old things you’d said and done kept
coming back to me, crowding between me and what I was trying for, looking
at me without speaking, like old friends I’d gone back on, till I simply
couldn’t stand it any longer. I fought it off till to-night, but when I
came back to finish the work there you were again--and suddenly, I don’t
know how, you weren’t an obstacle any longer, but a refuge--and I crawled
into your arms as I used to when things went against me at school.”

His hands stole back into hers, and he leaned his head against her shoulder
like a boy.

“I’m an abysmally weak fool, you know,” he ended; “I’m not worth the fight
you’ve put up for me. But I want you to know that it’s your doing--that if
you had let go an instant I should have gone under--and that if I’d gone
under I should never have come up again alive.”
The Complete Works of Edith Wharton - Part 9
