Title: The Greater Inclination
Author: Wharton, Edith
Language: English
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THE GREATER INCLINATION


By Edith Wharton


TABLE OF CONTENTS


THE GREATER INCLINATION


I _The Muse’s Tragedy_.

II _A Journey_.

III _The Pelican_.

IV _Souls Belated_.

V _A Coward_.

VI _The Twilight of the God_.

VII _A Cup of Cold Water_.

VIII _The Portrait_.



THE GREATER INCLINATION



THE MUSE’S TRAGEDY


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

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

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

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

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

“Mary Anerton?”

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

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

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

“The winter they first met?”

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

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

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

“And Rendle?”

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

“The Anertons never separated, did they?”

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

“And she?”

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

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

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

“Oh!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Lewis Danyers, I believe?”

He bowed.

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

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

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


II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They sat silent, both looking at the lake.

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


III

_Lago d’Iseo, August 14th_.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



A JOURNEY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you very tired?” she asked.

“No, not very.”

“We’ll be there soon now.”

“Yes, very soon.”

“This time to-morrow--”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ain’t he awake yet?” he enquired.

“No,” she faltered.

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

She nodded silently and crept into her seat.

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

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

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

“All right. Soon as we start again.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lady accepted the rebuff indulgently.

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

“I--I let him sleep.”

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

“Y--yes.”

“Don’t you wake him to take it?”

“Yes.”

“When does he take the next dose?”

“Not for--two hours--”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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



THE PELICAN


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“On Greek art?” I suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed and held out her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To pay for her son’s education?”

“I believe so.”

“Well--see you later.”

He got up and walked into the house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I assented.

“Will you come in and see her?”

“Now? I shall be very glad to, if--”

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

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

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

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

“I’m so glad,” she said, “so glad!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My grandchildren!” she exclaimed with a blush.

“Well, if you choose to put it so.”

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

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

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

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

“Lancelot--” she began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never did that, Lancelot!”

“Did what?”

“Made you a laughing-stock--”

He stepped close to her and caught her wrist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lancelot!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

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

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

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

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

“What falsehoods about you?”

“That I ever told anybody such dreadful things?”

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

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

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

“Oh, mother, mother!” he groaned.

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

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

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

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

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

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



SOULS BELATED


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She faced him. “To be what?”

“Well--quiet. I mean--”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was free before.”

“Not to marry me,” he suggested.

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

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

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

She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.

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

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

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

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

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

“Do outlaws need a _modus vivendi?”_

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

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

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


II

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

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

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

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

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

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

He broke off with a touch of embarrassment.

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

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

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

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

She flamed up.

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

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

“They may think what they please.”

He looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s for you to decide.”

“We’ll stay,” she repeated.

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lydia stooped to pick a violet in the border.

“He hasn’t told me.”

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

“Dear Miss Pinsent, you flatter me!”

Lydia rose and gathered up her book and sunshade.

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


III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lydia turned pale.

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

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

Lydia drew back from the smiling fierceness of her brows.

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

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

“I say--is that true?” she demanded.

Lydia rose from her seat.

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Linton raised her head sharply.

“By finding out--there’s a darling!”

“Finding what out?”

“What Trevenna told him.”

“Trevenna--?” Lydia echoed in bewilderment.

Mrs. Linton clapped her hand to her mouth.

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

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

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

Lydia, who had remained standing, looked away uncomfortably.

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

“Why impossible?”

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

Mrs. Cope stared incredulously.

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

Lydia flushed.

“I’m not a spy!” she exclaimed.

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

She caught Lydia’s fingers in a stormy pressure.

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

Lydia tried to free herself.

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

Mrs. Cope’s clutch tightened.

“You won’t, then? You won’t?”

“Certainly not. Let me go, please.”

Mrs. Cope released her with a laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


IV

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

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

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

He started up at Lydia’s entrance.

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

She sat down in a chair near the door.

“Up the mountain,” she said wearily.

“Alone?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“Anything wrong? You look done up.”

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

“Lydia, what is wrong?” he repeated.

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

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

Gannett stared.

“That woman? What woman?”

“Mrs. Linton--Mrs. Cope.”

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

“The deuce! She told you--?”

“She told me everything.”

Gannett looked at her anxiously.

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

“Exposed!” Lydia laughed.

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

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

“Lydia!”

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

“What difficulty?”

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

“Well?”

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

Gannett stood up with an angry forehead.

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

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

“To oblige that woman?”

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

“To protect yourself? Against whom?”

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

“She threatened that?”

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

“The beast!”

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

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

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

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

“Why do you ask?” she said.

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

“Why?”

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

“You think she has her divorce?”

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

Lydia was silent.

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

“Lady Susan Condit has not been told.”

“How do you know?”

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

He stopped, half smiling.

“Well?”

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

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

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

Lydia lifted her head.

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

“What do you mean?”

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

“What?”

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

He sat down with a groan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You--you’ve felt so?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gannett did not speak.

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

She stepped close, laying her hand on his arm.

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

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

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

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

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

His face cleared.

“Then we’ll go to-morrow.”

“Go--where?”

“To Paris; to be married.”

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

“Have us here?”

“I mean Lady Susan--and the others.”

“Have us here? Of course they would.”

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

He made an impatient gesture.

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

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

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

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

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

She looked at him sadly.

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

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

“You’re impossible,” he groaned.

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

“What will help it then?”

She raised her head.

“My leaving you.”

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

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

“Oh!” she cried.

He was at her side in an instant.

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

“That’s why I must leave you.”

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

“It’s because I care--”

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

Her eyes defied him.

“Why not?”

He dropped her hands and rose from her side.

“Can you?” he said sadly.

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


V

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



A COWARD


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



II

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

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

Vibart had listened attentively.

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

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

His answer reassured her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


III

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

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

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

“What’s that?” he said. “Listen!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At length he turned to Vibart and said abruptly:

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

Vibart looked at him in surprise.

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

Mr. Carstyle straightened his narrow shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Carstyle’s head sank again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“‘No, he wasn’t alone.’

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

“‘I was with him.’

“‘_You were with him?_’

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

Mr. Carstyle rose slowly, with a certain stiffness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



THE TWILIGHT OF THE GOD


I

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

_Isabel_. Back already?

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

_Isabel_. On her way to New York.

_Warland_. To New York?

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

_Warland_. But what in the world--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Isabel_. You’re going?

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

_Isabel_. They always have. Like the Popes.

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

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

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

_Isabel_. I didn’t know.

_Warland_. Oberville--Oberville--!

_Isabel_. Why, what difference does it make?

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

_Isabel_. Very well--yes.

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

_Isabel_. That was before the deluge.

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

_Isabel_. You _are_ disinterested!

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

_Isabel_. That I paid you a handsome compliment?

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

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

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

_Isabel_. Is he grown such a great man?

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

_Isabel_. And got you your secretaryship!

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Warland_. Whew!

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

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

_Isabel_. Well?

_Warland_. It’s odd he never married.

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

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

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

_Warland_. Damn the butcher!

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

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

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

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

_Isabel_, Don’t make me regret my confidence.

_Warland_. I beg your pardon.

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

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

_Isabel_. You impugn my judgment.

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

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

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

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

_Warland_. Stay?

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

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

_Isabel_. Boating?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Warland_. Later? It’s past three already.

_Isabel_. I’ve no engagement this afternoon.

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

_Isabel_. I have no intention of eloping.

_Warland_. For tea, I mean?

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


II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Footman_. Yes, m’m.

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

_Footman_. Yes, m’m. (_He goes out_.)

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

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

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

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

_Oberville_. Mrs. Warland!

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

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

_Isabel_. Bravo! _Crescendo!_

_Oberville_. But you have changed, all the same.

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

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

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

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

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

_Oberville_. What else do you remember?

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

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

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

_Oberville_. The duty?

_Isabel_. Of remembering how you like your tea.

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

_Isabel_. As a duty! But as a pleasure?

_Oberville_. Do you really want to know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Isabel_. Let us talk of your surprise.

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

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

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

_Isabel_. It would be odious if you were eloquent.

_Oberville_. What do you mean?

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

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

_Isabel_. In what?

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

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

_Oberville_. On my letting you go?

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

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

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

_Oberville_. Did you? Triple fool that I was!

_Isabel_. But you showed me--

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

_Isabel_. A scene?

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

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

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

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

_Oberville_. What did you say?

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

_Oberville_. Ah--

_Isabel_. Let me give you another cup.

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

_Isabel_. You haven’t tasted it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Oberville_. To remember me?

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

_Oberville_. I have changed so much, then?

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

_Oberville_. I’ve shrunk then?

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

_Oberville_. And now?

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

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

_Isabel_. Of course not. How absurd!

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

_Isabel (deliberately)_. Not inexcusable.

_Oberville_. Not--?

_Isabel_. I had remembered.

_Oberville_. Isabel!

_Isabel_. But now--

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

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

_Oberville_. Now?

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

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

_Isabel_. Perhaps it has had harder wear.

_Oberville_. Or been less cared for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Isabel_. A _dilettante_! The very word I wanted!

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

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

_Oberville_. Beggars never say that to each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_Oberville bows and goes out_.

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

_Warland advances demonstratively_.

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



A CUP OF COLD WATER


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Failed in what?”

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

At length he advanced a few steps.

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

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

“What have you tried?”

She looked at him with a certain dignity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She dried her eyes and glanced at the revolver.

“That’s the only way out,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

“My husband,” she whispered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well?” said Woburn gently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

“You didn’t take it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” he answered, “but did Mr. Devine want to send you home?”

“He wanted me to wait at his aunt’s a little while first and then write
to Joe again.”

“I don’t--I want you to start tomorrow morning; this morning, I mean.
I’ll take you to the station and buy your ticket, and your husband can
send me back the money.”

“Oh, I can’t--I can’t--you mustn’t--” she stammered, reddening and
paling. “Besides, they’ll never let me leave here without paying.”

“How much do you owe?”

“Fourteen dollars.”

“Very well; I’ll pay that for you; you can leave me your revolver as a
pledge. But you must start by the first train; have you any idea at what
time it leaves the Grand Central?”

“I think there’s one at eight.”

He glanced at his watch.

“In less than two hours, then; it’s after six now.”

She stood before him with fascinated eyes.

“You must have a very strong will,” she said. “When you talk like that
you make me feel as if I had to do everything you say.”

“Well, you must,” said Woburn lightly. “Man was made to be obeyed.”

“Oh, you’re not like other men,” she returned; “I never heard a voice
like yours; it’s so strong and kind. You must be a very good man; you
remind me of Joe; I’m sure you’ve got just such a nature; and Joe is the
best man I’ve ever seen.”

Woburn made no reply, and she rambled on, with little pauses and fresh
bursts of confidence.

“Joe’s a real hero, you know; he did the most splendid thing you ever
heard of. I think I began to tell you about it, but I didn’t finish.
I’ll tell you now. It happened just after we were married; I was mad
with him at the time, I’m afraid, but now I see how splendid he was.
He’d been telegraph operator at Hinksville for four years and was hoping
that he’d get promoted to a bigger place; but he was afraid to ask for
a raise. Well, I was very sick with a bad attack of pneumonia and one
night the doctor said he wasn’t sure whether he could pull me through.
When they sent word to Joe at the telegraph office he couldn’t stand
being away from me another minute. There was a poor consumptive boy
always hanging round the station; Joe had taught him how to operate,
just to help him along; so he left him in the office and tore home for
half an hour, knowing he could get back before the eastern express came
along.

“He hadn’t been gone five minutes when a freight-train ran off the rails
about a mile up the track. It was a very still night, and the boy heard
the smash and shouting, and knew something had happened. He couldn’t
tell what it was, but the minute he heard it he sent a message over
the wires like a flash, and caught the eastern express just as it was
pulling out of the station above Hinksville. If he’d hesitated a second,
or made any mistake, the express would have come on, and the loss of
life would have been fearful. The next day the Hinksville papers
were full of Operator Glenn’s presence of mind; they all said he’d be
promoted. That was early in November and Joe didn’t hear anything from
the company till the first of January. Meanwhile the boy had gone home
to his father’s farm out in the country, and before Christmas he was
dead. Well, on New Year’s day Joe got a notice from the company saying
that his pay was to be raised, and that he was to be promoted to a
big junction near Detroit, in recognition of his presence of mind in
stopping the eastern express. It was just what we’d both been pining for
and I was nearly wild with joy; but I noticed Joe didn’t say much. He
just telegraphed for leave, and the next day he went right up to Detroit
and told the directors there what had really happened. When he came back
he told us they’d suspended him; I cried every night for a week, and
even his mother said he was a fool. After that we just lived on at
Hinksville, and six months later the company took him back; but I don’t
suppose they’ll ever promote him now.”

Her voice again trembled with facile emotion.

“Wasn’t it beautiful of him? Ain’t he a real hero?” she said. “And I’m
sure you’d behave just like him; you’d be just as gentle about little
things, and you’d never move an inch about big ones. You’d never do a
mean action, but you’d be sorry for people who did; I can see it in your
face; that’s why I trusted you right off.”

Woburn’s eyes were fixed on the window; he hardly seemed to hear her. At
length he walked across the room and pulled up the shade. The electric
lights were dissolving in the gray alembic of the dawn. A milk-cart
rattled down the street and, like a witch returning late from the
Sabbath, a stray cat whisked into an area. So rose the appointed day.

Woburn turned back, drawing from his pocket the roll of bills which he
had thrust there with so different a purpose. He counted them out, and
handed her fifteen dollars.

“That will pay for your board, including your breakfast this morning,”
 he said. “We’ll breakfast together presently if you like; and meanwhile
suppose we sit down and watch the sunrise. I haven’t seen it for years.”

He pushed two chairs toward the window, and they sat down side by side.
The light came gradually, with the icy reluctance of winter; at last
a red disk pushed itself above the opposite house-tops and a long cold
gleam slanted across their window. They did not talk much; there was a
silencing awe in the spectacle.

Presently Woburn rose and looked again at his watch.

“I must go and cover up my dress-coat”, he said, “and you had better put
on your hat and jacket. We shall have to be starting in half an hour.”

As he turned away she laid her hand on his arm.

“You haven’t even told me your name,” she said.

“No,” he answered; “but if you get safely back to Joe you can call me
Providence.”

“But how am I to send you the money?”

“Oh--well, I’ll write you a line in a day or two and give you my
address; I don’t know myself what it will be; I’m a wanderer on the face
of the earth.”

“But you must have my name if you mean to write to me.”

“Well, what is your name?”

“Ruby Glenn. And I think--I almost think you might send the letter right
to Joe’s--send it to the Hinksville station.”

“Very well.”

“You promise?”

“Of course I promise.”

He went back into his room, thinking how appropriate it was that she
should have an absurd name like Ruby. As he re-entered the room, where
the gas sickened in the daylight, it seemed to him that he was returning
to some forgotten land; he had passed, with the last few hours, into a
wholly new phase of consciousness. He put on his fur coat, turning up
the collar and crossing the lapels to hide his white tie. Then he put
his cigar-case in his pocket, turned out the gas, and, picking up his
hat and stick, walked back through the open doorway.

Ruby Glenn had obediently prepared herself for departure and was
standing before the mirror, patting her curls into place. Her eyes were
still red, but she had the happy look of a child that has outslept its
grief. On the floor he noticed the tattered fragments of the letter
which, a few hours earlier, he had seen her place before the mirror.

“Shall we go down now?” he asked.

“Very well,” she assented; then, with a quick movement, she stepped
close to him, and putting her hands on his shoulders lifted her face to
his.

“I believe you’re the best man I ever knew,” she said, “the very
best--except Joe.”

She drew back blushing deeply, and unlocked the door which led into
the passage-way. Woburn picked up her bag, which she had forgotten,
and followed her out of the room. They passed a frowzy chambermaid,
who stared at them with a yawn. Before the doors the row of boots still
waited; there was a faint new aroma of coffee mingling with the smell of
vanished dinners, and a fresh blast of heat had begun to tingle through
the radiators.

In the unventilated coffee-room they found a waiter who had the
melancholy air of being the last survivor of an exterminated race, and
who reluctantly brought them some tea made with water which had not
boiled, and a supply of stale rolls and staler butter. On this meagre
diet they fared in silence, Woburn occasionally glancing at his watch;
at length he rose, telling his companion to go and pay her bill while
he called a hansom. After all, there was no use in economizing his
remaining dollars.

In a few moments she joined him under the portico of the hotel. The
hansom stood waiting and he sprang in after her, calling to the driver
to take them to the Forty-second Street station.

When they reached the station he found a seat for her and went to buy
her ticket. There were several people ahead of him at the window, and
when he had bought the ticket he found that it was time to put her in
the train. She rose in answer to his glance, and together they walked
down the long platform in the murky chill of the roofed-in air. He
followed her into the railway carriage, making sure that she had her
bag, and that the ticket was safe inside it; then he held out his hand,
in its pearl-coloured evening glove: he felt that the people in the
other seats were staring at them.

“Good-bye,” he said.

“Good-bye,” she answered, flushing gratefully. “I’ll never
forget--never. And you _will_ write, won’t you? Promise!”

“Of course, of course,” he said, hastening from the carriage.

He retraced his way along the platform, passed through the dismal
waiting-room and stepped out into the early sunshine. On the sidewalk
outside the station he hesitated awhile; then he strolled slowly down
Forty-second Street and, skirting the melancholy flank of the Reservoir,
walked across Bryant Park. Finally he sat down on one of the benches
near the Sixth Avenue and lit a cigar. The signs of life were
multiplying around him; he watched the cars roll by with their
increasing freight of dingy toilers, the shop-girls hurrying to their
work, the children trudging schoolward, their small vague noses red with
cold, their satchels clasped in woollen-gloved hands. There is nothing
very imposing in the first stirring of a great city’s activities; it
is a slow reluctant process, like the waking of a heavy sleeper; but
to Woburn’s mood the sight of that obscure renewal of humble duties was
more moving than the spectacle of an army with banners.

He sat for a long time, smoking the last cigar in his case, and
murmuring to himself a line from Hamlet--the saddest, he thought, in the
play--

  _For every man hath business and desire_.

Suddenly an unpremeditated movement made him feel the pressure of Ruby
Glenn’s revolver in his pocket; it was like a devil’s touch on his
arm, and he sprang up hastily. In his other pocket there were just four
dollars and fifty cents; but that didn’t matter now. He had no thought
of flight.

For a few minutes he loitered vaguely about the park; then the cold
drove him on again, and with the rapidity born of a sudden resolve he
began to walk down the Fifth Avenue towards his lodgings. He brushed
past a maid-servant who was washing the vestibule and ran up stairs to
his room. A fire was burning in the grate and his books and photographs
greeted him cheerfully from the walls; the tranquil air of the whole
room seemed to take it for granted that he meant to have his bath and
breakfast and go down town as usual.

He threw off his coat and pulled the revolver out of his pocket; for
some moments he held it curiously in his hand, bending over to examine
it as Ruby Glenn had done; then he laid it in the top drawer of a small
cabinet, and locking the drawer threw the key into the fire.

After that he went quietly about the usual business of his toilet. In
taking off his dress-coat he noticed the Legion of Honor which Miss
Talcott had given him at the ball. He pulled it out of his buttonhole
and tossed it into the fire-place. When he had finished dressing he saw
with surprise that it was nearly ten o’clock. Ruby Glenn was already two
hours nearer home.

Woburn stood looking about the room of which he had thought to take
final leave the night before; among the ashes beneath the grate he
caught sight of a little white heap which symbolized to his fancy the
remains of his brief correspondence with Miss Talcott. He roused himself
from this unseasonable musing and with a final glance at the familiar
setting of his past, turned to face the future which the last hours had
prepared for him.

He went down stairs and stepped out of doors, hastening down the street
towards Broadway as though he were late for an appointment. Every now
and then he encountered an acquaintance, whom he greeted with a nod and
smile; he carried his head high, and shunned no man’s recognition.

At length he reached the doors of a tall granite building honey-combed
with windows. He mounted the steps of the portico, and passing through
the double doors of plate-glass, crossed a vestibule floored with mosaic
to another glass door on which was emblazoned the name of the firm.

This door he also opened, entering a large room with wainscotted
subdivisions, behind which appeared the stooping shoulders of a row of
clerks.

As Woburn crossed the threshold a gray-haired man emerged from an inner
office at the opposite end of the room.

At sight of Woburn he stopped short.

“Mr. Woburn!” he exclaimed; then he stepped nearer and added in a low
tone: “I was requested to tell you when you came that the members of the
firm are waiting; will you step into the private office?”



THE PORTRAIT


It was at Mrs. Mellish’s, one Sunday afternoon last spring. We were
talking over George Lillo’s portraits--a collection of them was being
shown at Durand-Ruel’s--and a pretty woman had emphatically declared:--

“Nothing on earth would induce me to sit to him!”

There was a chorus of interrogations.

“Oh, because--he makes people look so horrid; the way one looks on board
ship, or early in the morning, or when one’s hair is out of curl and one
knows it. I’d so much rather be done by Mr. Cumberton!”

Little Cumberton, the fashionable purveyor of rose-water pastels,
stroked his moustache to hide a conscious smile.

“Lillo is a genius--that we must all admit,” he said indulgently,
as though condoning a friend’s weakness; “but he has an unfortunate
temperament. He has been denied the gift--so precious to an artist--of
perceiving the ideal. He sees only the defects of his sitters; one might
almost fancy that he takes a morbid pleasure in exaggerating their weak
points, in painting them on their worst days; but I honestly believe he
can’t help himself. His peculiar limitations prevent his seeing anything
but the most prosaic side of human nature--

  “‘_A primrose by the river’s brim
  A yellow primrose is to him,
  And it is nothing more._’”

Cumberton looked round to surprise an order in the eye of the lady whose
sentiments he had so deftly interpreted, but poetry always made her
uncomfortable, and her nomadic attention had strayed to other topics.
His glance was tripped up by Mrs. Mellish.

“Limitations? But, my dear man, it’s because he hasn’t any limitations,
because he doesn’t wear the portrait-painter’s conventional blinders,
that we’re all so afraid of being painted by him. It’s not because he
sees only one aspect of his sitters, it’s because he selects the real,
the typical one, as instinctively as a detective collars a pick-pocket
in a crowd. If there’s nothing to paint--no real person--he paints
nothing; look at the sumptuous emptiness of his portrait of Mrs. Guy
Awdrey”--(“Why,” the pretty woman perplexedly interjected, “that’s the
only nice picture he ever did!”) “If there’s one positive trait in a
negative whole he brings it out in spite of himself; if it isn’t a nice
trait, so much the worse for the sitter; it isn’t Lillo’s fault: he’s no
more to blame than a mirror. Your other painters do the surface--he does
the depths; they paint the ripples on the pond, he drags the bottom. He
makes flesh seem as fortuitous as clothes. When I look at his portraits
of fine ladies in pearls and velvet I seem to see a little naked
cowering wisp of a soul sitting beside the big splendid body, like a
poor relation in the darkest corner of an opera-box. But look at his
pictures of really great people--how great _they_ are! There’s plenty of
ideal there. Take his Professor Clyde; how clearly the man’s history is
written in those broad steady strokes of the brush: the hard work, the
endless patience, the fearless imagination of the great _savant_! Or the
picture of Mr. Domfrey--the man who has felt beauty without having the
power to create it. The very brush-work expresses the difference between
the two; the crowding of nervous tentative lines, the subtler gradations
of color, somehow convey a suggestion of dilettantism. You feel what a
delicate instrument the man is, how every sense has been tuned to the
finest responsiveness.” Mrs. Mellish paused, blushing a little at the
echo of her own eloquence. “My advice is, don’t let George Lillo paint
you if you don’t want to be found out--or to find yourself out. That’s
why I’ve never let him do _me_; I’m waiting for the day of judgment,”
 she ended with a laugh.

Every one but the pretty woman, whose eyes betrayed a quivering
impatience to discuss clothes, had listened attentively to Mrs. Mellish.
Lillo’s presence in New York--he had come over from Paris for the first
time in twelve years, to arrange the exhibition of his pictures--gave to
the analysis of his methods as personal a flavor as though one had been
furtively dissecting his domestic relations. The analogy, indeed, is not
unapt; for in Lillo’s curiously detached existence it is difficult to
figure any closer tie than that which unites him to his pictures. In
this light, Mrs. Mellish’s flushed harangue seemed not unfitted to the
trivialities of the tea hour, and some one almost at once carried on
the argument by saying:--“But according to your theory--that the
significance of his work depends on the significance of the sitter--his
portrait of Vard ought to be a master-piece; and it’s his biggest
failure.”

Alonzo Vard’s suicide--he killed himself, strangely enough, the day
that Lillo’s pictures were first shown--had made his portrait the chief
feature of the exhibition. It had been painted ten or twelve years
earlier, when the terrible “Boss” was at the height of his power; and if
ever man presented a type to stimulate such insight as Lillo’s, that man
was Vard; yet the portrait was a failure. It was magnificently composed;
the technique was dazzling; but the face had been--well, expurgated.
It was Vard as Cumberton might have painted him--a common man trying
to look at ease in a good coat. The picture had never before been
exhibited, and there was a general outcry of disappointment. It wasn’t
only the critics and the artists who grumbled. Even the big public,
which had gaped and shuddered at Vard, revelling in his genial villany,
and enjoying in his death that succumbing to divine wrath which, as a
spectacle, is next best to its successful defiance--even the public felt
itself defrauded. What had the painter done with their hero? Where
was the big sneering domineering face that figured so convincingly in
political cartoons and patent-medicine advertisements, on cigar-boxes
and electioneering posters? They had admired the man for looking his
part so boldly; for showing the undisguised blackguard in every line of
his coarse body and cruel face; the pseudo-gentleman of Lillo’s picture
was a poor thing compared to the real Vard. It had been vaguely expected
that the great boss’s portrait would have the zest of an incriminating
document, the scandalous attraction of secret memoirs; and instead, it
was as insipid as an obituary. It was as though the artist had been in
league with his sitter, had pledged himself to oppose to the lust for
post-mortem “revelations” an impassable blank wall of negation. The
public was resentful, the critics were aggrieved. Even Mrs. Mellish had
to lay down her arms.

“Yes, the portrait of Vard _is_ a failure,” she admitted, “and I’ve
never known why. If he’d been an obscure elusive type of villain, one
could understand Lillo’s missing the mark for once; but with that face
from the pit--!”

She turned at the announcement of a name which our discussion had
drowned, and found herself shaking hands with Lillo.

The pretty woman started and put her hands to her curls; Cumberton
dropped a condescending eyelid (he never classed himself by recognizing
degrees in the profession), and Mrs. Mellish, cheerfully aware that she
had been overheard, said, as she made room for Lillo--

“I wish you’d explain it.”

Lillo smoothed his beard and waited for a cup of tea. Then, “Would there
be any failures,” he said, “if one could explain them?”

“Ah, in some cases I can imagine it’s impossible to seize the type--or
to say why one has missed it. Some people are like daguerreotypes; in
certain lights one can’t see them at all. But surely Vard was obvious
enough. What I want to know is, what became of him? What did you do with
him? How did you manage to shuffle him out of sight?”

“It was much easier than you think. I simply missed an opportunity--”

“That a sign-painter would have seen!”

“Very likely. In fighting shy of the obvious one may miss the
significant--”

“--And when I got back from Paris,” the pretty woman was heard to wail,
“I found all the women here were wearing the very models I’d brought
home with me!”

Mrs. Mellish, as became a vigilant hostess, got up and shuffled her
guests; and the question of Yard’s portrait was dropped.

I left the house with Lillo; and on the way down Fifth Avenue, after one
of his long silences, he suddenly asked:

“Is that what is generally said of my picture of Vard? I don’t mean in
the newspapers, but by the fellows who know?”

I said it was.

He drew a deep breath. “Well,” he said, “it’s good to know that when one
tries to fail one can make such a complete success of it.”

“Tries to fail?”

“Well, no; that’s not quite it, either; I didn’t want to make a failure
of Vard’s picture, but I did so deliberately, with my eyes open, all the
same. It was what one might call a lucid failure.”

“But why--?”

“The why of it is rather complicated. I’ll tell you some time--” He
hesitated. “Come and dine with me at the club by and by, and I’ll tell
you afterwards. It’s a nice morsel for a psychologist.”

At dinner he said little; but I didn’t mind that. I had known him for
years, and had always found something soothing and companionable in his
long abstentions from speech. His silence was never unsocial; it was
bland as a natural hush; one felt one’s self included in it, not left
out. He stroked his beard and gazed absently at me; and when we had
finished our coffee and liqueurs we strolled down to his studio.

At the studio--which was less draped, less posed, less consciously
“artistic” than those of the smaller men--he handed me a cigar, and fell
to smoking before the fire. When he began to talk it was of indifferent
matters, and I had dismissed the hope of hearing more of Vard’s
portrait, when my eye lit on a photograph of the picture. I walked
across the room to look at it, and Lillo presently followed with a
light.

“It certainly is a complete disguise,” he muttered over my shoulder;
then he turned away and stooped to a big portfolio propped against the
wall.

“Did you ever know Miss Vard?” he asked, with his head in the portfolio;
and without waiting for my answer he handed me a crayon sketch of a
girl’s profile.

I had never seen a crayon of Lillo’s, and I lost sight of the sitter’s
personality in the interest aroused by this new aspect of the master’s
complex genius. The few lines--faint, yet how decisive!--flowered out of
the rough paper with the lightness of opening petals. It was a mere hint
of a picture, but vivid as some word that wakens long reverberations in
the memory.

I felt Lillo at my shoulder again.

“You knew her, I suppose?”

I had to stop and think. Why, of course I’d known her: a silent handsome
girl, showy yet ineffective, whom I had seen without seeing the winter
that society had capitulated to Vard. Still looking at the crayon, I
tried to trace some connection between the Miss Vard I recalled and the
grave young seraph of Lillo’s sketch. Had the Vards bewitched him? By
what masterstroke of suggestion had he been beguiled into drawing the
terrible father as a barber’s block, the commonplace daughter as this
memorable creature?

“You don’t remember much about her? No, I suppose not. She was a
quiet girl and nobody noticed her much, even when--” he paused with a
smile--“you were all asking Vard to dine.”

I winced. Yes, it was true--we had all asked Vard to dine. It was some
comfort to think that fate had made him expiate our weakness.

Lillo put the sketch on the mantel-shelf and drew his arm-chair to the
fire.

“It’s cold to-night. Take another cigar, old man; and some whiskey?
There ought to be a bottle and some glasses in that cupboard behind
you... help yourself...”


II

About Vard’s portrait? (he began.) Well, I’ll tell you. It’s a queer
story, and most people wouldn’t see anything in it. My enemies might
say it was a roundabout way of explaining a failure; but you know better
than that. Mrs. Mellish was right. Between me and Vard there could be no
question of failure. The man was made for me--I felt that the first time
I clapped eyes on him. I could hardly keep from asking him to sit to me
on the spot; but somehow one couldn’t ask favors of the fellow. I
sat still and prayed he’d come to me, though; for I was looking for
something big for the next Salon. It was twelve years ago--the last
time I was out ere--and I was ravenous for an opportunity. I had the
feeling--do you writer-fellows have it too?--that there was something
tremendous in me if it could only be got out; and I felt Vard was the
Moses to strike the rock. There were vulgar reasons, too, that made
me hunger for a victim. I’d been grinding on obscurely for a good many
years, without gold or glory, and the first thing of mine that had made
a noise was my picture of Pepita, exhibited the year before. There’d
been a lot of talk about that, orders were beginning to come in, and I
wanted to follow it up with a rousing big thing at the next Salon. Then
the critics had been insinuating that I could do only Spanish things--I
suppose I _had_ overdone the castanet business; it’s a nursery-disease
we all go through--and I wanted to show that I had plenty more shot in
my locker. Don’t you get up every morning meaning to prove you’re equal
to Balzac or Thackeray? That’s the way I felt then; _only give me a
chance_, I wanted to shout out to them; and I saw at once that Vard was
my chance.

I had come over from Paris in the autumn to paint Mrs. Clingsborough,
and I met Vard and his daughter at one of the first dinners I went to.
After that I could think of nothing but that man’s head. What a type!
I raked up all the details of his scandalous history; and there were
enough to fill an encyclopaedia. The papers were full of him just then;
he was mud from head to foot; it was about the time of the big viaduct
steal, and irreproachable citizens were forming ineffectual leagues to
put him down. And all the time one kept meeting him at dinners--that was
the beauty of it! Once I remember seeing him next to the Bishop’s wife;
I’ve got a little sketch of that duet somewhere... Well, he was simply
magnificent, a born ruler; what a splendid condottiere he would have
made, in gold armor, with a griffin grinning on his casque! You remember
those drawings of Leonardo’s, where the knight’s face and the outline of
his helmet combine in one monstrous saurian profile? He always reminded
me of that...

But how was I to get at him?--One day it occurred to me to try talking
to Miss Vard. She was a monosyllabic person, who didn’t seem to see an
inch beyond the last remark one had made; but suddenly I found myself
blurting out, “I wonder if you know how extraordinarily paintable your
father is?” and you should have seen the change that came over her. Her
eyes lit up and she looked--well, as I’ve tried to make her look there.
(He glanced up at the sketch.) Yes, she said, _wasn’t_ her father
splendid, and didn’t I think him one of the handsomest men I’d ever
seen?

That rather staggered me, I confess; I couldn’t think her capable of
joking on such a subject, yet it seemed impossible that she should be
speaking seriously. But she was. I knew it by the way she looked at
Vard, who was sitting opposite, his wolfish profile thrown back,
the shaggy locks tossed off his narrow high white forehead. The girl
worshipped him.

She went on to say how glad she was that I saw him as she did. So many
artists admired only regular beauty, the stupid Greek type that was made
to be done in marble; but she’d always fancied from what she’d seen
of my work--she knew everything I’d done, it appeared--that I
looked deeper, cared more for the way in which faces are modelled
by temperament and circumstance; “and of course in that sense,” she
concluded, “my father’s face _is_ beautiful.”

This was even more staggering; but one couldn’t question her divine
sincerity. I’m afraid my one thought was to take advantage of it; and I
let her go on, perceiving that if I wanted to paint Vard all I had to do
was to listen.

She poured out her heart. It was a glorious thing for a girl, she said,
wasn’t it, to be associated with such a life as that? She felt it so
strongly, sometimes, that it oppressed her, made her shy and stupid. She
was so afraid people would expect her to live up to _him_. But that
was absurd, of course; brilliant men so seldom had clever children.
Still--did I know?--she would have been happier, much happier, if he
hadn’t been in public life; if he and she could have hidden themselves
away somewhere, with their books and music, and she could have had it
all to herself: his cleverness, his learning, his immense unbounded
goodness. For no one knew how good he was; no one but herself. Everybody
recognized his cleverness, his brilliant abilities; even his enemies had
to admit his extraordinary intellectual gifts, and hated him the worse,
of course, for the admission; but no one, no one could guess what he
was at home. She had heard of great men who were always giving gala
performances in public, but whose wives and daughters saw only the empty
theatre, with the footlights out and the scenery stacked in the wings;
but with him it was just the other way: wonderful as he was in public,
in society, she sometimes felt he wasn’t doing himself justice--he was
so much more wonderful at home. It was like carrying a guilty secret
about with her: his friends, his admirers, would never forgive her if
they found out that he kept all his best things for _her!_

I don’t quite know what I felt in listening to her. I was chiefly taken
up with leading her on to the point I had in view; but even through my
personal preoccupation I remember being struck by the fact that, though
she talked foolishly, she didn’t talk like a fool. She was not stupid;
she was not obtuse; one felt that her impassive surface was alive
with delicate points of perception; and this fact, coupled with her
crystalline frankness, flung me back on a startled revision of my
impressions of her father. He came out of the test more monstrous than
ever, as an ugly image reflected in clear water is made uglier by the
purity of the medium. Even then I felt a pang at the use to which fate
had put the mountain-pool of Miss Vard’s spirit, and an uneasy sense
that my own reflection there was not one to linger over. It was odd that
I should have scrupled to deceive, on one small point, a girl already
so hugely cheated; perhaps it was the completeness of her delusion that
gave it the sanctity of a religious belief. At any rate, a distinct
sense of discomfort tempered the satisfaction with which, a day or two
later, I heard from her that her father had consented to give me a few
sittings.

I’m afraid my scruples vanished when I got him before my easel. He was
immense, and he was unexplored. From my point of view he’d never
been done before--I was his Cortez. As he talked the wonder grew. His
daughter came with him, and I began to think she was right in saying
that he kept his best for her. It wasn’t that she drew him out, or
guided the conversation; but one had a sense of delicate vigilance,
hardly more perceptible than one of those atmospheric influences that
give the pulses a happier turn. She was a vivifying climate. I had meant
to turn the talk to public affairs, but it slipped toward books and art,
and I was faintly aware of its being kept there without undue pressure.
Before long I saw the value of the diversion. It was easy enough to get
at the political Vard: the other aspect was rarer and more instructive.
His daughter had described him as a scholar. He wasn’t that, of course,
in any intrinsic sense: like most men of his type he had gulped his
knowledge standing, as he had snatched his food from lunch-counters; the
wonder of it lay in his extraordinary power of assimilation. It was
the strangest instance of a mind to which erudition had given force and
fluency without culture; his learning had not educated his perceptions:
it was an implement serving to slash others rather than to polish
himself. I have said that at first sight he was immense; but as I
studied him he began to lessen under my scrutiny. His depth was a false
perspective painted on a wall.

It was there that my difficulty lay: I had prepared too big a canvas
for him. Intellectually his scope was considerable, but it was like
the digital reach of a mediocre pianist--it didn’t make him a great
musician. And morally he wasn’t bad enough; his corruption wasn’t
sufficiently imaginative to be interesting. It was not so much a means
to an end as a kind of virtuosity practised for its own sake, like a
highly-developed skill in cannoning billiard balls. After all, the point
of view is what gives distinction to either vice or virtue: a morality
with ground-glass windows is no duller than a narrow cynicism.

His daughter’s presence--she always came with him--gave unintentional
emphasis to these conclusions; for where she was richest he was naked.
She had a deep-rooted delicacy that drew color and perfume from the very
centre of her being: his sentiments, good or bad, were as detachable
as his cuffs. Thus her nearness, planned, as I guessed, with the tender
intention of displaying, elucidating him, of making him accessible in
detail to my dazzled perceptions--this pious design in fact defeated
itself. She made him appear at his best, but she cheapened that best by
her proximity. For the man was vulgar to the core; vulgar in spite of
his force and magnitude; thin, hollow, spectacular; a lath-and-plaster
bogey--

Did she suspect it? I think not--then. He was wrapped in her impervious
faith... The papers? Oh, their charges were set down to political
rivalry; and the only people she saw were his hangers-on, or the
fashionable set who had taken him up for their amusement. Besides,
she would never have found out in that way: at a direct accusation her
resentment would have flamed up and smothered her judgment. If the
truth came to her, it would come through knowing intimately some
one--different; through--how shall I put it?--an imperceptible shifting
of her centre of gravity. My besetting fear was that I couldn’t count on
her obtuseness. She wasn’t what is called clever; she left that to
him; but she was exquisitely good; and now and then she had intuitive
felicities that frightened me. Do I make you see her? We fellows can
explain better with the brush; I don’t know how to mix my words or lay
them on. She wasn’t clever; but her heart thought--that’s all I can
say...

If she’d been stupid it would have been easy enough: I could have
painted him as he was. Could have? I did--brushed the face in one day
from memory; it was the very man! I painted it out before she came:
I couldn’t bear to have her see it. I had the feeling that I held her
faith in him in my hands, carrying it like a brittle object through a
jostling mob; a hair’s-breadth swerve and it was in splinters.

When she wasn’t there I tried to reason myself out of these subtleties.
My business was to paint Vard as he was--if his daughter didn’t mind his
looks, why should I? The opportunity was magnificent--I knew that by
the way his face had leapt out of the canvas at my first touch. It would
have been a big thing. Before every sitting I swore to myself I’d do it;
then she came, and sat near him, and I--didn’t.

I knew that before long she’d notice I was shirking the face. Vard
himself took little interest in the portrait, but she watched me
closely, and one day when the sitting was over she stayed behind and
asked me when I meant to begin what she called “the likeness.” I guessed
from her tone that the embarrassment was all on my side, or that if she
felt any it was at having to touch a vulnerable point in my pride. Thus
far the only doubt that troubled her was a distrust of my ability. Well,
I put her off with any rot you please: told her she must trust me, must
let me wait for the inspiration; that some day the face would come;
I should see it suddenly--feel it under my brush... The poor child
believed me: you can make a woman believe almost anything she doesn’t
quite understand. She was abashed at her philistinism, and begged me not
to tell her father--he would make such fun of her!

After that--well, the sittings went on. Not many, of course; Vard was
too busy to give me much time. Still, I could have done him ten times
over. Never had I found my formula with such ease, such assurance; there
were no hesitations, no obstructions--the face was _there_, waiting for
me; at times it almost shaped itself on the canvas. Unfortunately Miss
Vard was there too ...

All this time the papers were busy with the viaduct scandal. The outcry
was getting louder. You remember the circumstances? One of Vard’s
associates--Bardwell, wasn’t it?--threatened disclosures. The rival
machine got hold of him, the Independents took him to their bosom, and
the press shrieked for an investigation. It was not the first storm Vard
had weathered, and his face wore just the right shade of cool vigilance;
he wasn’t the man to fall into the mistake of appearing too easy. His
demeanor would have been superb if it had been inspired by a sense of
his own strength; but it struck me rather as based on contempt for
his antagonists. Success is an inverted telescope through which one’s
enemies are apt to look too small and too remote. As for Miss Vard,
her serenity was undiminished; but I half-detected a defiance in her
unruffled sweetness, and during the last sittings I had the factitious
vivacity of a hostess who hears her best china crashing.

One day it _did_ crash: the head-lines of the morning papers shouted the
catastrophe at me:--“The Monster forced to disgorge--Warrant out against
Vard--Bardwell the Boss’s Boomerang”--you know the kind of thing.

When I had read the papers I threw them down and went out. As it
happened, Vard was to have given me a sitting that morning; but there
would have been a certain irony in waiting for him. I wished I had
finished the picture--I wished I’d never thought of painting it. I
wanted to shake off the whole business, to put it out of my mind, if I
could: I had the feeling--I don’t know if I can describe it--that there
was a kind of disloyalty to the poor girl in my even acknowledging
to myself that I knew what all the papers were howling from the
housetops....

I had walked for an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that Miss Vard
might, after all, come to the studio at the appointed hour. Why should
she? I could conceive of no reason; but the mere thought of what, if
she _did_ come, my absence would imply to her, sent me bolting back to
Twelfth Street. It was a presentiment, if you like, for she was there.

As she rose to meet me a newspaper slipped from her hand: I’d been fool
enough, when I went out, to leave the damned things lying all over the
place.

I muttered some apology for being late, and she said reassuringly:

“But my father’s not here yet.”

“Your father--?” I could have kicked myself for the way I bungled it!

“He went out very early this morning, and left word that he would meet
me here at the usual hour.”

She faced me, with an eye full of bright courage, across the newspaper
lying between us.

“He ought to be here in a moment now--he’s always so punctual. But my
watch is a little fast, I think.”

She held it out to me almost gaily, and I was just pretending to compare
it with mine, when there was a smart rap on the door and Vard stalked
in. There was always a civic majesty in his gait, an air of having just
stepped off his pedestal and of dissembling an oration in his umbrella;
and that day he surpassed himself. Miss Vard had turned pale at the
knock; but the mere sight of him replenished her veins, and if she now
avoided my eye, it was in mere pity for my discomfiture.

I was in fact the only one of the three who didn’t instantly “play up”;
but such virtuosity was inspiring, and by the time Vard had thrown off
his coat and dropped into a senatorial pose, I was ready to pitch into
my work. I swore I’d do his face then and there; do it as she saw it;
she sat close to him, and I had only to glance at her while I painted--

Vard himself was masterly: his talk rattled through my hesitations and
embarrassments like a brisk northwester sweeping the dry leaves from
its path. Even his daughter showed the sudden brilliance of a lamp from
which the shade has been removed. We were all surprisingly vivid--it
felt, somehow, as though we were being photographed by flash-light...

It was the best sitting we’d ever had--but unfortunately it didn’t last
more than ten minutes.

It was Vard’s secretary who interrupted us--a slinking chap called
Cornley, who burst in, as white as sweetbread, with the face of a
depositor who hears his bank has stopped payment. Miss Vard started up
as he entered, but caught herself together and dropped back into her
chair. Vard, who had taken out a cigarette, held the tip tranquilly to
his fusée.

“You’re here, thank God!” Cornley cried. “There’s no time to be lost,
Mr. Vard. I’ve got a carriage waiting round the corner in Thirteenth
Street--”

Vard looked at the tip of his cigarette.

“A carriage in Thirteenth Street? My good fellow, my own brougham is at
the door.”

“I know, I know--but _they_‘re there too, sir; or they will be, inside
of a minute. For God’s sake, Mr. Vard, don’t trifle!--There’s a way out
by Thirteenth Street, I tell you”--

“Bardwell’s myrmidons, eh?” said Vard. “Help me on with my overcoat,
Cornley, will you?”

Cornley’s teeth chattered.

“Mr. Vard, your best friends ... Miss Vard, won’t you speak to your
father?” He turned to me haggardly;--“We can get out by the back way?”

I nodded.

Vard stood towering--in some infernal way he seemed literally to rise
to the situation--one hand in the bosom of his coat, in the attitude of
patriotism in bronze. I glanced at his daughter: she hung on him with a
drowning look. Suddenly she straightened herself; there was something
of Vard in the way she faced her fears--a kind of primitive calm we
drawing-room folk don’t have. She stepped to him and laid her hand on
his arm. The pause hadn’t lasted ten seconds.

“Father--” she said.

Vard threw back his head and swept the studio with a sovereign eye.

“The back way, Mr. Vard, the back way,” Cornley whimpered. “For God’s
sake, sir, don’t lose a minute.”

Vard transfixed his abject henchman.

“I have never yet taken the back way,” he enunciated; and, with a
gesture matching the words, he turned to me and bowed.

“I regret the disturbance”--and he walked to the door. His daughter was
at his side, alert, transfigured.

“Stay here, my dear.”

“Never!”

They measured each other an instant; then he drew her arm in his. She
flung back one look at me--a paean of victory--and they passed out with
Cornley at their heels.

I wish I’d finished the face then; I believe I could have caught
something of the look she had tried to make me see in him. Unluckily I
was too excited to work that day or the next, and within the week the
whole business came out. If the indictment wasn’t a put-up job--and
on that I believe there were two opinions--all that followed was. You
remember the farcical trial, the packed jury, the compliant judge, the
triumphant acquittal?... It’s a spectacle that always carries
conviction to the voter: Vard was never more popular than after his
“exoneration”...

I didn’t see Miss Vard for weeks. It was she who came to me at length;
came to the studio alone, one afternoon at dusk. She had--what shall I
say?--a veiled manner; as though she had dropped a fine gauze between
us. I waited for her to speak.

She glanced about the room, admiring a hawthorn vase I had picked up at
auction. Then, after a pause, she said:

“You haven’t finished the picture?”

“Not quite,” I said.

She asked to see it, and I wheeled out the easel and threw the drapery
back.

“Oh,” she murmured, “you haven’t gone on with the face?”

I shook my head.

She looked down on her clasped hands and up at the picture; not once at
me.

“You--you’re going to finish it?”

“Of course,” I cried, throwing the revived purpose into my voice. By
God, I would finish it!

The merest tinge of relief stole over her face, faint as the first thin
chirp before daylight.

“Is it so very difficult?” she asked tentatively.

“Not insuperably, I hope.”

She sat silent, her eyes on the picture. At length, with an effort, she
brought out: “Shall you want more sittings?”

For a second I blundered between two conflicting conjectures; then the
truth came to me with a leap, and I cried out, “No, no more sittings!”

She looked up at me then for the first time; looked too soon, poor
child; for in the spreading light of reassurance that made her eyes
like a rainy dawn, I saw, with terrible distinctness, the rout of her
disbanded hopes. I knew that she knew ...

I finished the picture and sent it home within a week. I tried to make
it--what you see.--Too late, you say? Yes--for her; but not for me or
for the public. If she could be made to feel, for a day longer, for an
hour even, that her miserable secret _was_ a secret--why, she’d made it
seem worth while to me to chuck my own ambitions for that ...

       *        *        *        *        *

Lillo rose, and taking down the sketch stood looking at it in silence.

After a while I ventured, “And Miss Vard--?”

He opened the portfolio and put the sketch back, tying the strings with
deliberation. Then, turning to relight his cigar at the lamp, he said:
“She died last year, thank God.”





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Greater Inclination" ***

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